Nourishment, Expression, Movement: Heidi Zimmer on Building Wild Rice Retreat on the Shores of Lake Superior

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This Week's Guest:

Heidi Zimmer — Founder, Wild Rice Retreat
Connect with Heidi: https://heidi-zimmer.com/
Explore Wild Rice Retreats: https://wildriceretreat.com/

Your Hosts:

Zach Busekrus — Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

Ben Wolff — Founder of Onera & Oasi
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-wolff/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iambenwolff/

Heidi Zimmer closed on her construction financing the day before the country shut down in March of 2020.

Then lumber tripled. She had to cut an entire building from the plan. And the business she'd underwritten, roughly seventy-five percent group retreats and twenty-five percent leisure, opened in 2021 and flipped almost exactly upside down.

Heidi has spent more than thirty years in real estate development, much of it building artist housing and creative spaces around the country. Wild Rice Retreat sits on a hundred and fourteen acres of dense forest on a seventy-foot sandstone cliff above Lake Superior in Bayfield, Wisconsin, about as far north as you can go in this country. The land was once home to a James Beard-nominated restaurant designed by the architect David Salmela. Heidi took one look at it and knew it needed to become a place for healing. She brought Salmela back and built a thirty-one-room retreat that blends Scandinavian and Native American traditions.

What makes Wild Rice so interesting is what Heidi refuses to do. Everyone tells her she needs a pickleball court, Pilates reformers and the latest gadget. She tunes all of it out. There's no menu: food is simply out from ten to noon and five to seven, because guests, especially moms, arrive with so much decision fatigue that not having to choose is the wellness. And every day includes a creativity class, because, as Heidi puts it, in the Native American tradition there's no word for artist. To be human is to be an artist.

In this episode, recorded live at the Independent Hotel Show in Miami with my co-host Ben, we get into her three pillars of nourishment, expression and movement. We get into the twenty-five million dollar expansion that adds seventeen owned homes to the rental pool, and the Nordic spa she's building with a glass-front sauna facing Lake Superior. We talk about why same-week bookings are way up, and why she thinks trees are the most underrated wellness modality there is.

Her father used to say there's no problem a good long walk in the woods can't solve. Heidi built a business on it.