Carolina Architecture & Design ‘A Grown-Up House’

Feature Article

A Grown-Up House

When veteran magazine publishers David L. and Lisa Valk Long decided to retire early from Time Incorporated, both were eager to escape the confines of New York city life.

“We had this wonderful little apartment in Manhattan and a tiny weekend place in Pound Ridge,” says Lisa. “But after 23 years in New York, I wanted to live in what I called a grown-up house.”

During his 23 years with Time Inc., the magazine publishing subsidiary of Time Warner, Dave had held a series of executive positions at Sports Illustrated, Life and People magazines. Lisa had worked at Time Inc. for 22 years, distinguishing herself in 1986 as the first woman in company history to be named publisher, first for Life and later, for People and Time magazines.

During the final months of their corporate tenure—Dave  as president of media sales and marketing and Lisa as executive vice president of Time Inc.—the couple devoted their few scraps of spare time to preparing for their future as retirees.

For Dave, an avid golfer, a top priority was to seek out the very best home courses. In Florida, the couple chose Tequesta, 25 miles north of Palm Beach and home to Jupiter Hills Club, a prestigious private golf club with two championship courses designed by George and Tom Fazio.

For Lisa, retirement presented an opportunity to reconnect with cherished memories of her childhood home in Winston-Salem as well as summers spent at camp near Brevard and visiting family friends in Roaring Gap. “Western North Carolina appealed to me as a retirement destination because of the culture, the climate, the topography, and the fact that I’d spent many childhood summers in the area and loved the Blue Ridge and Great Smokey Mountains.”

For both Dave and Lisa, the pending relocation meant they would be able, for the first time, to live in homes large enough to accommodate their collection of American antiques and paintings. “Our places in New York had been charming, but small, so we’d not been able to live with the furniture I inherited from my grandmother and my parents,” says Long. “Dave began collecting paintings from the Hudson River School while we were in New York, and we were eager to bring the two collections together.”

The couple settled on Champion Hills in Hendersonville as the setting for the “grown-up house” they planned to build in North Carolina. “Champion Hills’ Tom Fazio course was a big draw for Dave,” says Long.

The building lot they selected features spectacular views and its own creek, meandering through the property. “We looked at a lot of property in Champion Hills,” recalls Long, “but we both agreed this lot was really special because it had a knoll, where the house would be built, surrounded by land falling off 360 degrees around it.”

The couple bought three lots in all, creating a 6.8-acre home site. “We bought the other two lots as a buffer against any building close by,” says Long. “The result is a very private spot with great breezes and the babble of a creek at the bottom of the hill behind the house.”

The Longs discovered architect Jim Samsel through an article in a Time Inc. publication.

“I read an article called “Authentically Asheville” in one of our publications—Southern Accents—and called the architecture editor to ask him what he knew about Jim Samsel, whose work was featured in the article,” says Long. “He said, ‘Jim Samsel not only can design you a great looking house, but it will be a house that works. It will be both functional and beautiful.’ I loved that.”

Based on Samsel’s recommendation, Long connected with interior designer Susan Nilsson. “I said to Susan, ‘If I were an interior designer, I wouldn’t want me as a client because I have all this furniture I inherited from my family, so there won’t be any sales commissions for you.’”

Nilsson recalls the conversation. “I assured Lisa, I had no problem using the furniture and art,” she says. “The are truly remarkable collections.”

After setting an hourly fee for her services, Nilsson went to work, beginning with a visit to the Longs’ New York apartment and their Pound Ridge retreat. Early in the process, the Longs supplied Nilsson with a three-page list of paintings and a six-page inventory of furnishings, including dimensions for each piece.

Samsel began working with Nilsson on floor plans while the Longs were still living in New York. “I’ve worked with Jim on and off for the past 25 years,” notes Nilsson. “So we were able to collaborate easily on this project.”

In programming the space, Samsel began with the basics. The Longs said they wanted “a traditional layout,” with a separate dining room, living room, library, kitchen and master bedroom on the main floor. They also wanted guest bedrooms and space that could be converted into an apartment, should the need arise. “Most of all, we wanted to be sure there was plenty of wall space for placement of furniture and art,” says Long.

To convey to Samsel the design style she had in mind, Long took him to Roaring Gap, where many of her parents’ friends owned summer homes. “I was a perennial houseguest in Roaring Gap when I was growing up,” she recalls.

“When we went to Roaring Gap to look at houses, Lisa showed me examples of the typical, early 20th century resort vernacular you see up and down the Appalachians all the way into New England,” recalls Samsel. “Some of it’s more shingle style, some of it’s Adirondack, but it’s basically that time period that was being reflected and the typology of those kinds of styles she was looking for.”

Back at his drawing board, Samsel began plotting spaces that would fulfill the Long’s program and fit on the building lot. Nilsson was involved from the beginning, furniture inventory in hand. “I needed to make sure all this furniture would fit in the house Jim was designing,” she recalls. “I cut out pieces of paper to represent the major pieces of furniture—all to scale—and was working with Jim’s plans, moving these paper cut-outs around to see how things could work.”

“Because there was such an extensive furniture collection, this particular house was somewhat more interior-oriented than most,” observes Samsel. “And unlike a lot of mountain houses, where the view controls so much of the design, the Long’s house actually harkens back to earlier mountain houses where, if you wanted to enjoy the view, you went outside on the terrace.”

As planning progressed, Samsel and Nilsson found themselves struggling to fit all the spaces the Longs wanted on the main floor, given the topography of the home site. “The house had to be fitted to the land in a very appropriate way as well as fulfill their interior program requirements,” Samsel explains. “And so it ended up being a geometry that was driven somewhat by internal and somewhat by external things.”

To solve the problem, Samsel recommended moving the master bedroom upstairs.

“We thought everybody should have their master bedroom on the ground floor,” says Long. “But we opted to have a separate dining room, a separate living room and a separate library, too, and that didn’t leave any room for a master bedroom.”

Samsel suggested placing guest bedrooms upstairs as well.

“I thought the guest bedrooms would be on the lower level,” says Long. “That’s what so many people do in mountain houses. But Jim said, quite rightly, ‘Because of the contours of your lot, the lower level rooms are going to look out into woods. They won’t get the light, and they’re always going to feel like basement rooms.’ So all the bedrooms went upstairs.

“Samsel also said we should put in an elevator, which I thought sounded extremely extravagant,” continues Long. “I said, ‘I don’t think I can afford an elevator,’ and Samsel said, ‘If you don’t want to put the elevator in now, at least put the shaft in because you’re going to have to do that to resell the house or when you get old.’ So we put it in.”

“What the situation was—and we end up with this on a number of mountain sites—the lot was large, but the buildable area was fairly constrained,” Samsel explains. “Like most people, Lisa said, ‘I want my main level to include the master suite,’ but there really wasn’t room, and it would have caused major site disruption, which they didn’t want either. Besides, putting an elevator in does not necessarily add to the total cost because you’re saving main level square footage and you’ve already got a foundation in to support what you’re building above your main level.

“Also, by having the master suite on the upper level, it gives you more privacy, as well as tremendous views and more daylight—all of which would have been challenging to achieve on that site on a lower level.”

Ultimately, the 2,200-square-foot space beneath the main floor was designated as potential space for a caregiver’s apartment. “At the time we built it, I literally planned to die in this house, so we thought someday we’d have to have the live-in nurse down there,” says Long. As finished, the lower level has two extra bedrooms, a full bath and a roughed-in kitchenette. “We don’t have lots of furnishings down there, but we have an exercise room, a fireproof vault and a huge storage space.”

In configuring the main floor space, Long initially envisioned a central hallway flanked by the living and dining rooms.

“I kept thinking about the house I grew up in on Club Park Road in Winston-Salem—which I loved, and that was my idea of a grown-up house,” Long recalls. “I had an image in my mind that I know was rooted in my childhood, and I worked with Jim for awhile, trying to get a hallway that went all the way through to the back of the house.

“Finally, Jim kind of turned me around and said, ‘You’ve got a different lot here.’ And I realized, ‘I’m just trying to recreate Mama and Daddy’s house on Club Park Road, and that’s dumb.’ I think I was sort of stuck on the image of my childhood home, and Jim helped me get beyond that, but still achieve the same sort of generous spaces.”

As plans for the interior spaces progressed, the architect and designer encouraged Long to reconsider initial specifications for plain sheetrock walls in the living room, substituting painted wooden paneling instead.

“I felt like we needed something to add more character,” says Nilsson. “When you’re working with paint on sheetrock, it’s not nearly as stunning as paint on wood paneling because you get highs and lows and shadows. So it adds more character to the room.”

“One day, Jim said, ‘You know, this living room needs to be more special than it is. I think you ought to panel it,’” recalls Long. “And I’m glad I got talked into it. The paneling helps make it a very special room.”

Another of Long’s favorite rooms is the kitchen. “My grandmother’s kitchen was like this, with a very old-fashioned look, and I loved it,” she says.

Samsel designed the kitchen cabinets, including a large free-standing island set on four turned legs. Cabinetmaker Tony Martinez was charged with executing the architect’s plans.

“Cabinets are pretty straightforward,” says Martinez. “It’s usually just a matter of building some boxes and making everything fit and look good. But as big as that island was, sitting up off the floor on legs, it was a challenge to figure out how to support everything without any sagging in the middle.”

“The island was the most challenging piece of the casework,” says Samsel. “We showed Tony what we wanted to achieve, and he came up with some suggestions on how it should be built. I was just thrilled that we were able to pull it off very close to our vision. We wouldn’t have been able to if it weren’t for his level of experience and craftsmanship.”

As pleased as Long was with the primary spaces requested in the original program specifications, she was even more delighted with the many details and “bonus spaces” Samsel integrated into the plan. “I confess to having been surprised a number of times as the house was being finished,” she says. “Fortunately they were delightful surprises. I’d come up during the winter to see the building, and I’d call Dave on my cell phone and say, ‘You’re not going to believe this. This is so beautiful!’”

Once construction on the 6,240 square-foot, shingle style house was complete and the antiques and art works were in their designated places, the results were, according to Samsel, “very amazing.”

“I’d seen photographs of most of the stuff, but they didn’t do the collections justice. Together, the furniture and art give you a profound feeling of who these folks are. And this is what reflects back to their history.”

“Lisa was, essentially, building this house for the furniture her grandmother had collected and for Dave’s collection of art,” says Nilsson. “I think we were all pleased and felt very rewarded for our hard work, once we saw the finished result.”

“Dave Long, who is totally irreverent, tells people we built this place as a shrine to Grandmamma Valk’s collection of American antiques and to Israel Sack, the New York dealer who took her under his wing, starting back in the 1930s, and educated her about their beauty and potential value,” says Long. “But the art and antiques feel like they belong in this house. They are a big reason it feels like home.”