Carolina Architecture & Design ‘Everything a Second Home Should Be’

Feature Article

Everything a Second Home Should Be

Pursuing a longstanding dream of building a mountain golfing retreat, the couple’s search for a challenging course in a beautiful setting ended with their first visit to Wade Hampton Golf Club in Cashiers. “All his life, my husband had wanted a summer house in western North Carolina,” says the owner. “When he saw the course, he said, ‘This is it.’”

Besides being home to one of the state’s top-ranking golf courses, the Cashiers community is in close proximity to a number of rivers, lakes and spectacular waterfalls, including White Water Falls, the tallest waterfall in the eastern United States. Set in a valley at North Carolina’s southwestern tip, Cashiers is surrounded by Yellow Mountain, Rock Mountain, Chimney Top and Whiteside, at the scenic heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

After buying a two-acre building lot and joining the golf club, the couple hired a designer-builder and began discussing what they needed and wanted their new mountain vacation house to be. Two years and many blueprint drafts later, their plans were complete and construction was set to begin. Then, the developer called, saying he was concerned the house the couple meant to build was too large for their building lot. 

“He said, ‘You’re not really going to build that house on that lot,’” recalls the owner. “My husband said, ‘We’re going to start construction next week. We’ll be right over to look for a larger lot.’ So we went to see some lots that had only recently become available in a new section. The minute we saw this one, we said, ‘This is where we want to build our house.’”

The five-acre lot the couple purchased on the spot offered the room they needed for their larger-than-anticipated home—now with plans for a kennel building in addition to the main structure. Besides being more than twice as large as the original lot, the property borders on 20,000 acres of national forest. “It’s really rough and overgrown with rhododendron,” says the owner. “There are no hiking trails, but we really enjoy the natural views and the added privacy.”

As the couple’s original vision of a cozy vacation cottage for themselves and their children grew more expansive, the room count rose accordingly. Besides needing their own rooms, their two teenaged sons who still lived at home were quickly approaching the age when they would need room at the house to entertain friends of their own. The couple’s two grown sons and their families would need guestrooms with baths when they came to visit. And when the husband imagined entertaining his golfing buddies, he quickly realized two foursomes would be at least twice as much fun as one. 

The final room tally—including nine bedrooms and ten bathrooms—seemed incompatible with their original concept of the home as an intimate retreat. “I didn’t want all those bedrooms in the house. But if we wanted to entertain that many people, we needed the room,” recalls the owner. “For awhile, we went back and forth between wanting a small house and wanting a large one. But once my husband decided he wanted enough bedrooms for two foursomes, we were no longer talking about a small house.”

After much deliberation, the couple and their residential designer and builder, Tim Greene, arrived at a solution that would combine the intimate cottage atmosphere they wanted with ample room for at least eight overnight guests. “We compromised by dividing the rooms between the main house and a guest wing with bedrooms and a kitchenette over the carport,” explains the owner. “That way, we ended up with the normal-sized house we wanted as well as plenty of room and plenty of privacy for overnight guests. It has worked out well.”

On the main floor, the house has a spacious living room and dining area, a well-appointed kitchen with its own dining area and fireplace and a master bedroom suite. Upstairs are two bedrooms and a media room equipped with a home theater. Below the main floor, there’s an exercise room, a wine cellar, a grooming area for the owner’s dogs and a nine-hole practice putting green finished with artificial bent grass.

The guest wing has four bedrooms, arranged and furnished to work separately as individual bedrooms or in pairs as two bedroom-sitting room suites. Each of the paired suites has a king-sized bed in one room and a full-sized bed, made up as a daybed, in the adjoining room. “You can sit on the daybed like a sofa and use the second bedroom as a sitting room,” explains the owner.

When their two grown sons visit with their families, the adults sleep in the king-sized beds and the children sleep on the daybeds. The couple’s two younger sons use the guest wing for entertaining their friends. “As they’ve gotten older, the boys have wanted to bring friends along when we visit, and they have enjoyed the guesthouse as much as anybody,” says their mother.

Adjacent to the house is a kennel building with four indoor-outdoor runs for the owner’s German shepherd dogs.

For Tim Greene, the project was one of many he has completed in the Wade Hampton golfing community. “We’ve done most of the houses there,” says Greene.

Originally a residential designer, Greene says he began building as a way to execute his own ideas exactly as he conceived them. Currently, Greene’s firm designs and builds six to eight large homes each year while continuing to design additional plans to be constructed by other builders.

In drafting plans for the couple’s home, Greene collaborated closely with them to incorporate their ideas and preferences—a few of which Greene had never before encountered.

“When we were planning the interiors,” recalls Greene, “the client said, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat to live inside a canoe?’ What he envisioned was a ceiling framed and finished to resemble the interior of an old-time wooden canoe.”

Charged with designing his first-ever canoe-like interior, Greene began sketching rounded, radiused structures to represent a bow and stern. These ultimately became a circular covered front entrance and a screened rear porch at either end of one section of the main house. A second section intersects the first, forming a cross-shaped floor plan.

In specifying materials, Greene suggested using recovered antique wood on the home’s interior. A supplier he’d worked with on other projects, Wallace Harper of Southern Heartwood, had recently purchased nearly 200,000 square feet of heart pine from a Hershey’s Chocolate warehouse built in Pennsylvania in 1891. Greene knew the re-milled antique stock would lend special character and depth to the ceilings, woodwork and flooring.

“You can’t get new wood like this any more,” says Harper. “The trees it came from were virgin timber—hundreds of years old when they were harvested after the Civil War and shipped north for the industrial revolution. New kiln-dried wood doesn’t have the tight grain or the rich burgundy color you see in the aged wood. If you can find it at all, the new heart pine has more of an orange color. It’s like an imitation of the real thing.”

In addition to the stock re-milled by Harper, Greene had a local wood shop craft custom plantation shutters for the home from antique heart pine. “The light that comes through those shutters, even when they’re closed, is ruby red,” says Greene. “The reclaimed pine has a warmth and a patina that’s totally different from new growth. We use a lot of it.”

For the home’s exterior and fireplaces, the couple wanted stone. “We really liked the work we’d seen by the local stone masons, and we very much wanted to make stonework a part of our new home,” says the owner. To soften the predominantly gray tones of the local stone, the owners had brown-colored stone brought in from Tennessee. “We looked at lots of different examples and were able to pick out exactly how much gray and how much brown we wanted,” the owner says. Exterior cedar shakes in natural brown tones further soften the gray of the native stone.

Greene’s design for the home featured arched windows, a personal signature he introduces into many of his projects. “We use that flattish arch in a lot of structures,” says Greene, “and it seemed appropriate for this house. It was more complicated than usual because some of the arches were also radiused. We’re lucky to have stone masons who have the skill and artistry to build something that difficult.”

Based on his experience with mountain homes, Greene placed skylights in several strategic locations. “A mountain house can be dark because of all the trees,” he explains. “I used skylights—sometimes several of them ganged together—to help illuminate some of the interior spaces.”

The roomy, commercially-equipped kitchen reflects the couple’s shared enjoyment of cooking and casual entertaining. Greene designed the room to accommodate two or more chefs at once. The kitchen is within earshot of the living room, so family members and friends can continue conversations while preparing meals. “It’s a fairly open plan,” says Greene, “but it’s modified so the kitchen can easily be closed off when the owners prefer.”

Throughout the three years spent designing and building the home, the owners worked with Ruth King, an antiques dealer who helped them furnish their primary residence, to collect furnishings and accessories for the house. “I found most everything that’s old,” says King.

On her two or three annual buying trips to Europe, King looked for oak pieces to complement the home’s informal interiors, using detailed floor plans from Tim Greene to compare furniture measurements with room dimensions. She also looked for majolica pieces in the client’s favorite tan and brown shades, as well as Staffordshire dogs, drawing on her 14 years of working with the owners as customers.

“Ruth King does her research before she goes, and she knows what I like,” says the owner. “The minute we had the house plans finalized, we gave them to her, so she knew what size piece of furniture would fit into each space. She didn’t buy everything at once. She kept looking all three years until she found pieces that were exactly right. Nine times out of ten, I agreed with her choices.”

“We made our selections in England and had them shipped back to our showroom in Tennessee,” says King. “The owners would pick the pieces they wanted—I gave them first choice—and I would pack them up and store them.”

King’s acquisitions and custom pieces are used throughout the house. At the front entrance are two mastiffs carved from Cotswold stone. King found them in England and, knowing her customers’ liking for dogs, purchased them. The two teak benches at the front entrance were also made in England. After importing them, King left them in her own yard so they would weather naturally before being placed in the sheltered entry. “We got the benches early enough for them to turn a nice gray,” says King.

Among King’s favorite acquisitions for the house are an 18th century mahogany cupboard and an 18th century chest on chest, also in mahogany, in the bedroom. “The cupboard in the bedroom is a magnificent piece,” says King, adding that the owner uses it to store table linens.

King had the dining and breakfast room tables and chairs custom-made by a well-established company in Hereford. At the owner’s request, all the dining and breakfast room chairs have arms. “He wanted all armchairs that would fit under the table,” she says. “He likes to cook dinner for his guests, and he wanted them to be comfortable when they lingered at the table.”

For a narrow hallway, King commissioned the same company to build a 12-foot-long, eight-foot-high oak breakfront. “The breakfront holds all sorts of books and pictures of children and dogs that give it a nice, homey atmosphere,” says King.

When the home was ready for the treasures accumulated for the past three years and moving day finally arrived, King had her truck packed. “It was the most organized thing you’ve ever seen,” recalls the owner. “She had all the pieces loaded on the truck in the order she wanted them carried into the house. After three years of collecting, she came in, and in one day, placed every piece where it belonged.”

While the owner says she made it a point “not to put anything in the house that was so dear it could not be replaced,” the care with which she chose furnishings and accessories is apparent.

“I’ve been in a lot of houses, and I’ve bought a lot of furniture for them,” says King. “This one is one of my favorites. The owners have gone all out to make sure their family and friends will be comfortable there. It truly is everything a second home should be.”

Photo Captions

Page 44, photo A. Residential designer Tim Greene incorporated his signature arches into windows and the circular entry, inspired by the owner’s desire to make the home’s interior resemble the inside of an antique canoe.

Page 45, photo B. To the right of the main house, the guest wing provides the owners plenty of room for entertaining overnight guests. They also use the carport underneath the guest bedrooms for large outdoor parties.

Page 46, photo C. The circular screened porch at the rear of the house reiterates the circular entryway at the front of the house. The designer used the circular structures to represent the bow and stern of a canoe.

Page 46, photo E. Mistaking it for a home, census takers left a form at the kennel for the owner’s four German shepherd dogs. A generator in the kennel would provide about a week’s worth of electricity for the main house, if there were a power failure.

Page 47, photo D. The landscaper used locust posts to form a rustic entrance to a stepping-stone walkway to the rear of the house. The owner asked for “plain old daisies and cornflowers” to be used as accents in the natural landscaping. 

Page 48, photo F. Antique heart pine and English antiques set a warm, informal tone for the living room. The dining room table and chairs were custom made in England. A local craftsman made wrought iron light fixtures and a fire screen decorated with sassafras leaves for the home.

Page 49, photo G. The couple collected paintings of waterfalls and river scenes typical of the Cashiers area to use throughout the house. In choosing upholstery fabrics, the owner looked for texture rather than color and pattern.

Page 50, photo H. The owners had all the custom-crafted upholstered dining room chairs made with arms to encourage guests to linger at the table for after-dinner conversations. The table is made of distressed oak.

Page 51, photo I. Ruth King had the back removed from this late 19th century Welsh dresser so the texture of the wall behind it would show through.

Page 52-53, photo J. The kitchen table and ladder-backed chairs were custom-made in England. The traditional chair and table designs are in keeping with the authentic English antiques used throughout the house.

Page 52, photo K. The well-appointed kitchen has plenty of room for the couple to enjoy cooking together. The stone fireplace makes informal meals especially cozy.

Page 54, photo L. The fireplace on the porch, suggested by the designer, is a popular attraction for the couple and their guests, making evening gatherings more comfortable by cutting the chill of the mountain air.

Page 55, photo M. The owners purchased the twig table and chairs for the porch. The family usually eats breakfast there while enjoying the lush mountain scenery.

Page 56, photo N. The elaborately carved bed in the master bedroom is one of the few new pieces purchased for the house. The oak blanket chest is an antique. The plantation shutters, made from antique heart pine, give sunlight streaming into the room a rosy glow.