In Deephaven, Even a Night of Mini Golf Needs a City Council Vote

The Cottagewood Store has been selling ice cream to Deephaven kids since 1895, which makes it easy to assume the place runs on charm alone. It doesn't. Buried in the Deephaven City Council's July packet, right between a fundraiser request from St. Therese School and a quote for two new HVAC units at City Hall, sits this line: approve Cottagewood Store special event for mini putt-putt. A pop-up round of mini golf at a 130-year-old general store needed a formal council vote before it could happen.

That single agenda item says more about how this pocket of Deephaven actually works than any description of its lake views or its century-old porch. The store's whimsy is real. So is the paperwork underneath it. If you live in Cottagewood, or anywhere near it, the second half of that sentence is worth understanding, because it explains why the place has survived this long without ever feeling like a business.

The Item Between the Fundraiser and the Furnace Quote

Deephaven's council is a mayor and four members, and the July 20 packet shows how much of the city's actual business is small, local, and recurring. In the same meeting where members approved the mini putt-putt event at Cottagewood, they also signed off on:

• A special event permit for the St. Therese School fundraiser
• Payment request No. 1 on the 2026 Street Improvement Project
• A furnace replacement for a city-owned building
• The city's Special Event Policy itself, the framework that governs requests like the ones above

A nonprofit-run pop-up golf night sits on the same list as a furnace quote because, technically, it is the same kind of request. The Cottagewood Store isn't a private business that can decide on its own to close a lawn for an evening and set up putters. It's owned and operated by the nonprofit Cottagewood Community Foundation, which means anything that changes normal use of the property, even for one night, has to clear the same special-event process any other organization in Deephaven would use.

That's not bureaucracy for its own sake. It's what community ownership actually requires.

Why the Store Needs Permission to Change Anything

The reason the Foundation exists at all traces back to a cold night in February 1995. The Cottagewood Store had closed and gone up for sale, and neighbors worried about what would happen to the building if an outside buyer took it over. A meeting was called. Roughly 135 people showed up and pledged what they could to buy the store themselves. Fox 9 covered the story as one of the more improbable rescues on the lake, and the names of those original supporters are stamped into bricks on the store's front terrace today, a detail easy to miss unless you're standing right on top of them.

That rescue led to the 1998 founding of the Cottagewood Community Foundation, a 501(c)(3) now backed by more than 200 member families. The Foundation owns the building, hires the summer staff (mostly local kids getting a first job), and runs the calendar of events that makes the store feel like the center of the neighborhood rather than a shop that happens to sell ice cream.

Because the property belongs to the neighborhood collectively rather than to a single owner, every change to how it's used, including something as small as a mini golf pop-up, has to go through the same municipal process as any other shared civic asset. The paperwork isn't a sign the store has lost its independence. It's the mechanism that keeps the store from ever depending on one person's decision again.

What's Already Happened This Season, and What's Still Ahead

By late August, a good chunk of the Cottagewood calendar is already behind it. The store reopened this spring for what its own website calls its 130th year on Lake Minnetonka. Deephaven marked its 125th birthday, the Quasquicentennial Celebration, on June 7 at Thorpe Park in partnership with the city and the Cottagewood Foundation, complete with live bands, a beer garden, and a kids' petting zoo. Later that month, the Minnetonka Yacht Club hosted its own Cottagewood Grill Night on June 24, with food catered by Cast and Cru, the group behind Dukes. National Night Out came and went in early August, giving neighbors and local law enforcement a low-key evening together.

Here's roughly where the season stands now:

The Foundation also runs a Lawn Sale and a country-themed fundraiser called Cottagewood Goes Country, with a food truck and the Nautical Bowls vendor on site, somewhere in the year's rotation, alongside the weekly Friday Grill Nights that continue right up until the store closes for the season.

The Halloween sendoff is the marker most Cottagewood residents actually watch for. The store's own events page calls it the final day of the season, matching the Oct. 31 closing date the store has kept in past years. Everything between now and then runs on the same volunteer labor and city sign-off that's kept the place open since 1998.

The Same Council Also Rewrote the Marina Rules This Year

The mini golf approval wasn't an isolated flash of city involvement in neighborhood life. The same batch of 2026 council business included an amendment to Deephaven's marina ordinance, clarifying residency requirements for marina slip holders, defining the boating season, and setting a process for reassigning slips that open up mid-season. For residents whose lake access runs through a shared marina rather than private frontage, this is the kind of change that actually affects a summer. If you read our earlier piece on Excelsior's dock rules, the pattern here will look familiar. Lake Minnetonka access, whether it's a slip, a dock, or a beach, tends to run through more layers of shared governance than it first appears.

The council also finalized a building height ordinance this year, capping flat roofs at 25 feet on lots under 14,000 square feet, after waiving the first reading on March 2, 2026. And in the same stretch of meetings, staff noted that the Beach Patrol had reopened Sandy Beach in the Cottagewood neighborhood for the season, a small operational update that matters a great deal if that beach is where your kids spend July afternoons.

None of these items made headlines. All of them shape what a normal week in Cottagewood actually looks like.

Why the Paperwork Is the Point

Deephaven covers a little over two square miles and is home to fewer than 4,000 people. There's no commercial strip to absorb the pressure of shared amenities, which means the beach, the marina slips, the roofline of your neighbor's addition, and yes, a night of mini golf at the general store, all draw from the same small pool of shared civic decision-making. A city this size doesn't have the luxury of an anonymous permitting department handling requests in bulk. A mayor and four council members, meeting in person and sometimes voting 3-0 when a member or two is away, work through a school fundraiser, a furnace quote, and a mini golf night in the same sitting, because in a place this compact, that's what governing actually looks like.

The Cottagewood Store's charm isn't in spite of that process. It's downstream of it. The reason a neighbor-owned general store can survive 130 years, a near-sale, and a full nonprofit restructuring is that every change to how it's used gets decided in public, on the record, by people who live a few blocks away. That's a slower way to run a mini golf night. It's also the reason there's still a mini golf night to run.

If you're already counting down to the Halloween sendoff, you know the rhythm. If you're new to Cottagewood and wondering why a city council meeting keeps coming up in conversation about ice cream, now you know why.

For anyone who wants a neighbor's read on what's actually happening around Lake Minnetonka, from Deephaven's council packets to the rest of the west metro, Ulrich Real Estate Group is always glad to talk shop. No pitch required.