Carolina Architecture & Design ‘Grey Gables: A Modern Farmhouse’

Feature Article

Grey Gables: A Modern Farmhouse

Like many young married couples of the 1960s, Libby and Jim Miller moved frequently as Mr. Miller established his business career and they started a family. “We moved about eight times during our first six years of marriage,” recalls Mrs. Miller.

As they settled into each new place, Mrs. Miller would write home to the North Carolina mountains where her parents operated Camp Greystone, a Christian camp for girls that Mrs. Miller’s grandfather started in 1920. “Every time we moved, I would draw our floor plans and send them to my mother,” recalls Mrs. Miller. “She used to sketch out things, so I suppose I picked it up from her.”

The Millers finally put down permanent roots in 1967, when they relocated to North Carolina to help operate the camp. “The camp is like a calling,” says Mrs. Miller. “When my mother needed our help, my husband knew how important it was to me and he agreed immediately to give up his business and move here.”

The Millers settled into a four-room cottage on the camp property, planning to build a new home within five years. Instead, as their family grew, the Millers built a series of additions that would ultimately transform the 1920s mill house into a sprawling, multi-level contemporary home.

“The house grew like Topsy as the way we lived evolved,” says Mrs. Miller.

By the mid-90s, the Millers were ready to turn camp operations over to their eldest son Jim. His wife, a pediatrician, would serve as Camp Greystone’s health director, while the Miller’s daughter Katie would continue overseeing business operations.

With the camp directorship, the Millers offered their contemporary house to their son and his family. “We felt the one actively directing the camp needed to live in closest proximity,” Mrs. Miller explains. Then, drawing on the drafting skills she developed as a young bride, Mrs. Miller began sketching plans for a new home for herself and her husband. The house was to be built on property overlooking the camp.

“I knew how we lived, and I knew the floor plan I wanted,” she says, adding, “I was especially looking forward to living in a house that was well-planned and built all at once.”

With her sketches in hand, Mrs. Miller met with Asheville architect Robert S. Griffin, beginning a year-long collaboration between the two. “All along, I had planned to get a good architect to finalize my plans and fill in the details,” she says. “I had a marvelous time for a year while Robert and I worked together on planning the house.”

Early in their consultations, Griffin asked for a detailed inventory of all furniture and accessories the Millers planned to bring to their new house. “The interior design should always start with the location of all the furniture,” he says. “The Millers have lovely family pieces and paintings they’ve collected through the years. Besides being meaningful to them, they were a treat to work with for us as we created places for them to be showcased without looking showcased.”

“I had sketched where I wanted the furniture to be,” says Mrs. Miller, “but with his wonderful sense of proportion and his eye for detail, Robert was able to create something that was so much more sophisticated and refined than anything I had imagined.”

Griffin says the plans he drew called for a classic Federal-style farmhouse on the outside, with a contemporary floor plan on the inside. “The Millers wanted the home to fit unobtrusively into the environment,” Griffin explains. “They wanted a house that didn’t draw a whole lot of attention to itself. At the same time, they had grown accustomed to living in a contemporary home, and they wanted the interior to be much more open than a traditional plan, with lots of light and views of the mountainside.”

“Our idea was to have the house look like it may have been here for a long time,” says Mrs. Miller. “We also knew we wanted the great room concept from our contemporary house to be part of the new house.”

Among the Miller’s other requirements for the 3,000-square-foot main floor were a master bedroom, two dressing rooms with baths, plus ample space for their many books and for Mr. Miller’s stereo system. On the 1,500-square-foot upper floor, they wanted two guest bedrooms, two home offices, a gymnasium, and plenty of storage space. Over the garage, they wanted an apartment.

Building on the farmhouse theme, Griffin designed the detached garage to resemble a barn and set it at an angle in relation to the main house. “Old farms often grow with outbuildings at odd angles,” notes Griffin. The 1,000-square-foot garage has a 756-square-foot apartment where the Miller’s younger son Stuart lives.

The Millers especially enjoy entertaining friends and family, with dozens of guests during the summer—some staying overnight and others staying longer—and children and grandchildren there almost daily, year-round. On the main floor, they envisioned a great room, dining area and kitchen versatile enough to accommodate quiet winter evenings by the fire, Saturday morning pancake breakfasts for their seven grandchildren, and sit-down dinners for 40 or more guests.

To make their entertaining easier and more pleasant, Griffin added a prep kitchen adjacent to the main kitchen. “When it’s just the family or a half-dozen friends, the main kitchen is very livable and functional as the center of the house,” says Griffin. “But when the Millers are entertaining large crowds, the prep kitchen makes a lot of sense. Most people don’t realize how noisy a kitchen can be and how inconvenient it is to have guests underfoot when there’s real work to be done. With two kitchens, the Millers can have the big, open kitchen filled with guests, and the food can come out of the prep kitchen already cooled and looking fabulous.”

With the basic floor plans in place, building contractor Mark R. Searcy began his work on the project. “The concept of the house was still coming together when we started building it,” Searcy says. “The Millers were pushing to get the house moving, and a lot of details were left to work out while we were under construction.”

For Searcy and his crew, the Miller house presented a challenging combination of simplicity and complexity. “The Millers wanted the house to look like it belonged there, so our goal was to make it look simple on the outside,” recalls Searcy. “But inside, all the finish trims had to be perfectly synchronized. You had to do your homework and measure that third time.”

Outside, Searcy used cypress siding, pre-stained and sealed for maximum durability. The tin roof panels are also factory tinted. “The roof we installed is intended for commercial construction, so a lot of the spare fittings you can order with most premium residential roof systems weren’t available,” Searcy says. “We had to do some real planning ahead to make our special-fit trims work around those dormers.”

Among the interior amenities, Searcy installed heating mats under the ceramic tile floors in the bathroom to minimize the discomfort of cold tile on bare feet. The plumbing connects every faucet directly to the water source, eliminating the need for water to flow through the entire system before reaching its destination. “Each fixture has a line that goes straight to the source, so there’s no delay in getting hot water anywhere in the house,” Searcy explains. “It also means if there’s ever a plumbing problem, you can cut off that one fixture instead of needing to cut off water to the entire house.”

Searcy used #2 grade maple flooring to add warmth and character. “Nowadays we have these massive mills that can sort through and give you a #1 grade stock that matches perfectly and has no knots,” Searcy says. “But that gives us these clear, almost sterile floors that look more like manmade material than natural wood. With the #2 grade, one piece can be very dark brown and the next one white. That gives us a lot of contrast and with the nice knots and different colorations, it gives you a completely different feel.”

With such a large volume of living space on the main floor, Griffin specified matching pine wall paneling, cabinetry, trim, and coffered ceilings to unify the living, dining, and kitchen areas. “For the main living area, Mrs. Miller wanted a stained wood finish that wasn’t dark, and she especially liked the look of English pine, which grows more slowly and has tighter grain than the American yellow pine we were using,” recalls Griffin. Rick Jackson of Jackson Painting worked with Griffin to achieve the desired finish.

To mimic the look of English pine, Jackson’s crew began by applying a near-white toner mixed into a fast-evaporating solvent. “When you’re trying to make one species of wood to look like another, you want to start with a substrate that looks as much as possible like the species you’re trying to recreate,” says Jackson. “Our first step was to use the light toner to neutralize the yellow in the pine.” With the yellow toned down, the paint crew applied a light tan toner to match the natural color of unfinished English pine.

Next, the crew applied mineral spirits to fill the more porous grain of the wood before staining. “American pine is not as consistently porous as English pine, so it’s difficult to control stain penetration,” explains Jackson. To make the surface absorb the stain more uniformly, the crew used rags to apply the mineral spirits, brushed on a custom-mixed oil stain, and then used rags to wipe off the excess stain. “We could only work on a single board at a time because the mineral spirits evaporate so quickly,” says Jackson. “But in the end, we had the look we wanted.”

The crew sealed the stained wood with flat polyurethane and then filled nail holes with putty, mixed on the spot for an exact color match. “Using the putty after the first coat of polyurethane keeps the putty from smearing,” notes Jackson. After sanding, the crew applied a finish coat of flat polyurethane.

Upstairs, in Mr. Miller’s study, Jackson’s crew used a similar process to give poplar paneling the look of cherry. “The heartwood of poplar is green, so we had to neutralize that first, just as we did the yellow in the pine,” says Jackson. The darker cherry finish required two applications of stain.

Throughout the interior of the house, and on exterior columns and trim, Griffin used beading as a recurring design motif. “I’ve always been a fan of beading,” says Griffin. “It’s great on an outside corner, wonderful between paneling, and it solves all kinds of design problems. We used it as a very strong theme throughout the house in a way that was repetitive without being overdone. It helps pull the house together.”

The Millers moved into the house in 1995, just before Searcy finished construction. The following year, Mrs. Miller asked Meredith Vogler of Millstone Nursery to create a landscaping plan for five to seven acres surrounding the house.

“Because it was a combination of a dwelling and a barn, I didn’t want to go in with a formal layout,” says Vogler. “Still, I didn’t want it to look untamed. It was a bit of a challenge to come up with something that was organized but not formal.”

To enhance the views from inside the house, Vogler designed a lawn bordered by blooming plants that would provide year-round color. “They didn’t have a huge view, so I wanted a design for the backyard that would draw the eye to the very farthest lengths of the view that was there,” Vogler says. Borrowing from golf course design, she created a central area of lawn to be clipped regularly, surrounded by longer grass areas similar to a golf course’s rough. The lawn’s outer border is relatively untamed. “This design gave us a long expanse of yard without the high maintenance of a lawn,” she explains.

In choosing the flowering plants, Vogler chose a combination of native plants and hybrids to complement the home’s interior color palette. “Mrs. Miller wanted to enjoy cut flowers from her garden, and the colors needed to work with the interior,” Vogler says. “In the summer, they use off-white linen slipcovers on all the furniture, so we had a more colorful palette to choose from. But in the fall, when the slipcovers come off, I used blooms in warm butter yellows and other tones that wouldn’t clash with the colors inside.”

Vogler’s landscaping design also supported the Millers’ goal of blending the house unobtrusively into the environment. “We had access to some fairly large American boxwoods that had been rooted and grown at the camp, and by using those, the house took on the appearance of something that had been there for years,” says Vogler. “We also varied the sizes of the trees we planted to make the setting more natural looking. As a result, nothing looked spanking new.”

Vogler suggested crushed native stone for the terraces and driveway. “The native rock is brown instead of blue or silver-gray like granite,” she notes. “When you approach the house by car, it’s more like driving up a dry streambed than a driveway.”

On the footpath leading from the house down the mountain to the camp, Vogler used bark chips bordered by ferns, hosta, and several wildflower ground covers. “Rather than following the most direct route, the path meanders,” Vogler says. “It creates more of a sense of surprise.”

Vogler used round shapes for the terraces and gardens close to the house to help integrate the house with the angled barn. “The circular herb garden and oval terrace offset the angle and allowed me to unify the space much better,” she says.

“The Millers have a real zest for life, and they really appreciate the ground,” adds Vogler. “You have to remember, they specialize in outdoor recreation at the camp her grandfather started. So the outdoors has been important to her since she was a child.”

“It’s so wonderful to see three generations of a family living together,” says Griffin. “The Miller’s multi-generation family lifestyle, built around operating the camp, is reminiscent of how generations used to live and work together on the family farm. So the farmhouse exterior is most appropriate.

“When you have that much family around, you need a different kind of house on the inside,” he continues. “This is a home designed for the children and grandchildren to be able to come to every day—not just on holidays. And unlike most of the houses I design, which will probably be sold sooner or later, the Miller’s house will most likely be passed down within the family. It’s a house built for the generations.”