New Sundborn Ranch is a place we’d heard about for years before we ever got to stand in it. A Swedish homestead on 410 wooded acres in a hollow outside Viroqua, built as a tribute to the painter Carl Larsson, photographed enough over the decades that it has turned up in national magazines. It isn’t a wedding venue and doesn’t market itself as one, which is exactly why almost nobody gets married there.

Sam and Nate live in Chicago. The way they ended up in a hollow in Vernon County is that one of Sam’s professors happens to be a son of the family that owns the ranch. They’d been talking about wanting something small, and he told them to come use his family’s place in Wisconsin. That’s the whole origin story, and it’s a good one.

About twenty people came, from all over. They carried chairs out into the field beside the pond and got married there. Quiet, calm, unhurried. It was a multicultural wedding with two families meeting each other properly for the first time, a niece running loops around the house and the grounds, and the kind of pace that only really happens when nobody is managing a crowd.

Photographs from Sam and Nate’s intimate August wedding at New Sundborn Ranch outside Viroqua, Wisconsin, and their dinner afterward in the back garden at the Driftless Cafe.

The house is the reason people photograph this property. Carl Larsson painted his own family’s home in Sundborn, Sweden, until it became one of the most recognizable interiors in the world, all painted woodwork and clear colors and built-in furniture. This one is built in that spirit rather than as a copy. Beds tucked into the walls, color everywhere you look, the sort of place that reads as a children’s playland right up until you notice how carefully every piece of it was made. Ray could have spent the entire day just photographing rooms, and had to keep reminding himself there was a wedding on.

After the ceremony everyone moved inside the building with the living roof for drinks, into a room just about exactly the right size for twenty people. Then Loran Nordgren came out and sang for them. He was ninety-six. A few songs, unannounced, the kind of voice that had real training somewhere along the way, given to two people he’d only recently met. It wasn’t something he got to do often by then. It was over in about seven minutes.

He barely knew them, and he’d given them the run of his place anyway. He died this past March, at ninety-seven. We’re glad we were in the room for those seven minutes.

Then everyone drove into Viroqua for dinner at the Driftless Cafe, which is where this gets personal for us. We’ve eaten there more times than we can count, we know Luke well, and we photographed the restaurant back in 2013, before Luke and Ruthie Zahm bought it and made it into the thing it is now. Luke hosts Wisconsin Foodie on PBS and has been a James Beard nominee, and the menu changes nightly depending on what the farms around here brought in, often not finalized until the afternoon. There are more than two hundred certified organic farms in Vernon County. That’s the reason a restaurant like this exists in a town of four thousand people.

The back garden turned out to be the whole answer for a group this size. There’s a wood-fired oven out there, and a permanent structure with a clear roof over it, so you’re outdoors and covered at the same time, with wood walls closing the space in and good light coming through the ceiling right up until it goes. Ruthie was out there hosting, laughing with everyone, and the spread they put out for the appetizer hour was genuinely one of the best we’ve seen at a wedding of any size. Dinner came out in course after course of shared plates, which is a fine thing to photograph and a better thing to sit down to.

Sam and Nate have been together eight years. Nate grew up in Chicago and describes himself as a perpetual optimist who will always try to land a joke, even when it would be better to keep his mouth shut. He says the thing he can’t live without, after Sam, is travel; the year before the wedding the two of them rode horses across Mongolia, no phones and no internet and nothing to do but be together somewhere beautiful. There’s also a dog and a cat at home, Skipper and Einstein, who got a mention in his answers alongside his actual family. Asked what mattered most to him about the wedding day, he said Sam gets to decide that, and the only thing he needed was for her to be happy and feel special.

Ray shot this one solo, the way we tend to with a group this small. They laughed their way through the entire evening. It felt less like working a wedding and more like being invited to one, which is the highest compliment we know how to pay a day.

Congratulations, Sam and Nate.

Getting married at the Driftless Cafe

A few things people have asked us since.

Can you have a wedding at the Driftless Cafe?
Not a ceremony in the usual sense, no. What it does extremely well is the meal, whether that’s the reception for a small wedding, a rehearsal dinner, or a welcome dinner the night before. They handle private events and catering, and quote each one individually rather than publishing packages. The back garden is the space to ask about.

How many people does the back garden hold?
They don’t publish a number, and we’d rather point you at them than guess. Our honest read from standing in it is that it suits a group in the twenties comfortably and would still work somewhat larger. Call and ask, because the answer depends on how they set it.

What’s the food actually like?
The menu changes nightly and is sourced from organic farms within about a hundred miles, most of them much closer. For a wedding this means you’re agreeing to a philosophy more than a fixed menu, and you’ll be working with them on what makes sense for your date. If a locked-in menu chosen a year ahead is what makes you comfortable, this isn’t the right fit. If eating whatever is best that week sounds good, few places in Wisconsin do it better.

When are they open?
Wednesday through Saturday, lunch and dinner, closed Sunday and Monday. That shapes what days a wedding dinner here is possible, so start the conversation with your date in hand.

Where do guests stay?
The Hotel Fortney is around the corner on Main Street, a Queen Anne building from 1899 that the Wrobel family (who Kelly knew in college) spent years restoring and reopened in 2023. Fourteen rooms, some of them bunk rooms built for groups, plus a sauna and a lounge downstairs that serves Driftless Cafe pizza. For a wedding of twenty people, booking the Fortney and eating at the Driftless Cafe means nobody drives anywhere after dinner.

If you’re planning something small in this part of the state, send us a note. This is our home ground.