Katy and Rick Jacobson are preparing to spend their retirement on one of America’s most exotic pieces of residential real estate—a prime lot inside of California’s Yosemite National Park.

The couple’s newly built three-level, 3,158-square-foot home takes up much of its 2,925-square-foot lot. Katy’s parents acquired the property, which came with a primitive single-story structure, in the 1950s for about $12,000.

Katy is a child of a conservation-minded couple who first met as students working summer jobs in Yellowstone National Park. She looks back with wonder at the family’s longtime vacation home: a cabin, circa 1940, where people often had to sleep outside. “We didn’t have indoor plumbing until I was 7 or 8,” she recalls. The family used the ideally situated property as a base for exploring Yosemite, known for its towering sequoias, dramatic mountain peaks and majestic waterfalls.

Katy, now 70, gave up her economic development job a few years ago in the Sacramento area, where the couple have their permanent home, and Rick, a 67-year-old attorney, is getting ready to retire from his full-time law practice. The Jacobsons decided they wanted to spend part of the year in Yosemite and built a $1.9 million, three-bedroom home with a double-height great room that provides expansive views of Yosemite’s natural splendor.

The Jacobsons’ house, finished in fall 2022, has a great room that opens to the outdoors.

“It’s really a wonderland up there in the winter,” says Katy, who equally treasures the secluded summertime swimming options in the park’s lakes and rivers.

Their lot belongs to an oddity of American property law. It’s known as an “inholding,” a privately owned pocket of land within the boundaries of a national park or other protected area. According to the National Park Service, more than 50 of the 63 main national parks in the U.S. have inholdings, which generally have been associated with historic mining claims, ranches and other private properties established before the parks were created.

Rick and Katy Jacobson at their Yosemite home earlier this month

The Jacobson property is in an unincorporated community called Wawona. The NPS says Wawona became a tourist destination in the 1860s, though Native Americans were already there before that. Yosemite was first designated a national park in 1890. In 1932, Yosemite was expanded to include the area known as Wawona, says the NPS. Later, private parcels were bought up and added to Yosemite’s holdings, and these days, Wawona is something of a checkerboard, says Rick, describing the official but quirky intermingling of private and public land.

In the 1980s, Katy’s parents relocated from their primary home in Fresno to the Yosemite lot and built a regular, if still modest, two-bedroom house for their retirement. About a decade ago, after Katy and Rick acquired full ownership from her two siblings, Katy began to think about tearing down that 850-square-foot structure and replacing it with an architect-designed home for her and her husband’s own retirement years.

Working with Seattle architects Prentiss Balance Wickline, they broke ground on the new house in spring 2021, finishing up in fall 2022. The centerpiece of the home is the great room, with a floor-to-ceiling array of windows and glass doors, and an open gallery above. The interior features beech cabinetry, and the house is clad in dark-stained cedar.

In the 1980s, Katy’s parents replaced the earlier cabin with this two-bedroom home.

Dan Wickline, who was the project’s principal architect, says he oriented the house to the southeast to emphasize mountain views and fill the home with natural light. “When you’re inside,” he says, “you have the feeling of being connected to Yosemite.”

Though Katy’s parents had planned a home there decades earlier and Katy was the director of housing development in West Sacramento, the couple were taken aback by the twists and turns of getting the house approved and finally built.

The nature of inholdings can create some complexity. In this case, Mariposa County, which includes a southwest section of the park, had to sign off on the designs, says Wickline. But his studio also had to deal with the park service on topics such as ensuring that parking and staging during construction wouldn’t intrude on park land, which comes right up to the border of the Jacobsons’ tiny lot. They ended up spending $10,000 to buy a stray parcel of private land nearby to be used for off-site parking and otherwise aid in construction.

The couple had trouble finding a contractor willing to deal with the inconvenience of routinely entering and exiting Yosemite—a remote tourist attraction with limited road access, 4 million visitors a year and notorious bottleneck congestion. Even after finding a contractor, getting to the property proved too much for some suppliers. “Furniture deliveries were often a no-show,” says Katy.

The deck has mountain views.

The couple chose cozy, functional furniture that can accommodate their three grown children, young grandchild, extended family and visiting friends. They also rent out the house for part of the year, getting more than $1,000 a night in the popular summer season, which has helped finance the cost, says Rick.

“Furnishing during the pandemic meant we didn’t have a lot of options,” says Katy. With rounds of visitors and the occasional renter in mind, Katy put durability at the top of her shopping list. “We didn’t choose anything that didn’t have performance fabric.”

As homeowners inside the park, the Jacobsons are entitled to enter without paying a fee, but they can’t skip ahead in lines that might stretch for miles in high season. The couple, who live a 4 ½ -hour drive away, are used to planning their arrivals and departures to bypass those crowds.

Even in high season, Wawona, which is above the heavily trafficked Yosemite Valley, can feel blissfully quiet. This was potentially something of a drawback for Rick, who says he once imagined his own retirement doing short-term rentals in cities like New York and London. Back in the 2010s, when Katy was dreaming up their retirement home, Rick needed some persuading, she says.

Since settling in, Rick, who intends to remain professionally active by developing a dispute-resolution practice from the home’s upstairs study, has embraced his backyard access to wilderness by taking up snowshoeing.

The couple hope to spend nearly this whole coming winter at the new house, at a time when many park services and Wawona offerings are reduced. What will they do if they want to go out to eat? “We have a nice kitchen,” says Rick.