Carolina Architecture & Design ‘Vision Realized’

Feature Article

Vision Realized

It took Earl and Christy Powell the better part of five years to realize their shared vision of an English-inspired country estate in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains—years spent painstakingly working with the architect, interior designers and master craftsmen to clarify and refine each of their ideas, room by room, detail by detail. The resulting home in Elk River Country Club is what Rick Foster, president of Elk River Realty, considers “one of the more significant homes in the High Country.”

Both Florida natives, the Powells first began spending time in the North Carolina mountains nearly three decades ago. “We discovered the area through Earl’s sister,” says Christy. “She and her husband had a home at Hound Ears, and Earl’s brother-in-law would invite him to play in the member-guest golf tournament.”

Before long, the Powells bought and renovated a home of their own at Hound Ears Club, a 750-acre gated community established more than 40 years ago near Boone and Blowing Rock, and began dividing their time between North Carolina and Miami, where Earl Powell’s private equity investment firm is based.

In the early 1980s, when horse-lover Christy Powell heard of a new equestrian facility being built in nearby Banner Elk, she became excited at the prospect of boarding her horses there during the spring and summer. “Harry and Spencer Robbins—the developers of Hound Ears—were building a new development called Elk River, and I determined it cost about the same to board a horse there as in Miami,” recalls Christy. “So we joined Elk River as associate members because of the equestrian facility.”

Within the 1,200-acre Elk River Country Club, the Elk River Saddle Club has nearly 40 acres of fenced pasture and paddock, a recently expanded 22-stall stable, two tack rooms, indoor and outdoor wash racks and a member’s lounge. Beyond the riding and jumping rings is a 100-acre preserve with miles of riding trails.

“The equestrian facility is beautiful,” notes Christy.

The Powells enjoy playing the Elk River golf course, North Carolina’s first Jack Nicklaus signature course that consistently ranks among the state’s top ten courses. “We like this course a lot,” says Earl. “And it’s a very nice club—a beautiful club.”

In the early 1980s, when the Powells first joined Elk River Country Club, total membership was capped at 350. After members purchased the club and, in 2000, voted to reduce the number of golfing memberships, the Powells decided to secure their place in the community by purchasing property and becoming equity members.

“When the equity members decided the cap would be 265, we were concerned that, as associate members, we could get bounced out,” says Christy. “We spent about a year, going back and forth and round and round, looking at every piece of Elk River property on the market, hoping we could find a place to build. We even considered buying a lot, not to build on, but just to qualify us for equity membership.”

Rick Foster helped the Powells with their search.

“They gave me a list of things that were important to them,” says Foster. “First, the property had to have panoramic views. Second, it needed to be spacious. Third, they wanted privacy. And finally, they wanted to be within golf cart distance of the club house.”

As their search for the perfect Elk River property continued, the Powells heard of a friend who wanted to sell three contiguous lots at the end of a cul-de-sac, halfway between the club and the stables. “Our friend had put these three lots together, thinking he was going to convince his wife to build a house there,” says Christy. “When he decided to sell, and we saw how perfect the location was for us, we thought, ‘This is super.’”

Before making their final purchase decision, the Powells wanted to take a closer look from a higher vantage point. “The lots were totally overgrown, so we had no idea what the views would look like,” recalls Christy Powell.

“I had a motorized platform brought in,” says Foster. “Earl and Christy climbed up on it, and it lifted them up above the trees. They were up there for a few minutes, looking at the views and pointing. When they came back down, Earl said, ‘Write it up.’”

With the setting for their home selected, the couple chose David Moses, principal of David Patrick Moses Architect, to create their architectural plans. “Of course, they had their programmatic spaces they wanted to have,” Moses recalls. “In fact, they came with a two-page list of rooms and the relationships of those rooms to other spaces.

“We had to design the house so it would accommodate the views and blend in with the natural surroundings with minimal land disturbance,” he continues. “We also had to meet the Elk River Country Club guidelines and restrictions, which call for natural materials—no brick. There’s no room for discussion there.” Consistent with community building covenants, Moses specified cedar shakes roofing and wooden and natural stone exterior finishes. The western red cedar and exterior door trim packages were supplied by Mountain Lumber Company of Boone-Banner Elk, Inc.

Along with spectacular views, the approximately ten-acre building site presented challenges. “It’s a large piece of property, but the location for the house is very small,” says Moses. “The house itself was going to sit on a ridge, but the way the grade drops away, we knew we would need retaining walls to access and back up the house.” Moses credits Enterline & Russell Builders with “making it all work.”

As plans for the home took shape, Earl worked closely with Moses.

“Earl loves a project,” says Christy, “and he has an ability to focus on details that would send me up the wall. We told the architect exactly what we needed, and he gave us exactly what we needed, but a lot of things needed refinement. So Earl worked over those plans with David for about a year and a half to get the features and the flow of the house exactly the way we wanted.”

“We worked through the design process very closely with Earl,” recalls Moses. “He had very specific ideas. We would do drawings, and he would say, ‘Can we try this or this?’

“They wanted some interesting ceilings and truss configurations with different shapes, heights and sizes,” Moses continues. “That was one of the main things Earl wanted to see. So I tried to make all the ceilings different, but tied them together so they were all related.

“Through it all, it appeared to me Earl was having fun working on this and giving specific input on the selection of so many details. We talked. I drew. And we kept refining until we got to the end of the preliminary design phase.”

Next, Moses drew detailed floor plans, site plans and elevations. “We showed how the house was going to look—all the exterior stuff—the stone details,” says Moses, who, with his firm’s chief project coordinator, Joel K. Shipley, went on to oversee construction. “We also showed some details on moldings we believed would work, and then the Powells worked with the craftsmen on more refining of the design details.”

The resulting plans were for 12,490 square feet of heated space, arranged on four levels. The main floor has the living room, dining room, kitchen, bar and breakfast room, Earl’s study and a home theater. The level above has the master bedroom, vanity area and bath, as well as Christy’s study. Immediately below the main floor is a game room and guest bedrooms. The bottom-most level has a wine cellar, decanting room and exercise room.

With architectural plans complete and construction ready to begin, the Powells turned to Dianne Davant & Associates for help with interior spaces, working with senior designers Dianne Davant and Margaret Handley.

“Christy had a very well organized notebook full of pictures,” recalls Handley. “She came to the project with a lot of great ideas, but she was flexible and open to change. That made it a lot easier.”

The notebook was a three-inch-thick ring binder filled with plastic sleeves to hold pictures torn from magazines, catalogs and newspapers. Tabbed dividers marked sections for the various rooms, as well as a garden section filled with landscaping ideas.

“I started the notebook when we started planning the house,” says Christy. “I knew the look I was going for and started tearing out pictures of rooms with that look, or rooms done in colors that I liked. If Earl commented on something he saw in a magazine and liked, I would include it in the notebook, too. As we started working on the interiors, I found having pictures to work from made it easier to explain our ideas.”

“From the notebook, we were able to get a clear understanding of the colors and the feeling and the look of each room before we started working on it,” says Handley. “Then it became a matter of pulling together all the ideas, creating a plan, narrowing down the details and finding specific pieces that worked.”

To create cabinetry and custom millwork, the Powells called on Joe Banner of Banner’s Cabinets. The Elk River house is only the most recent of several projects Banner has worked on with the Powells. “We met Joe Banner when we were updating the house at Hound Ears,” recalls Christy. “We were impressed with the work he did, and when we built our house in Miami, we asked him to do all our woodwork and cabinets.”

For the Elk River project, Banner identified 27 separate areas within the house that required custom millwork and cabinetry, in addition to trim for the arched windows and doors throughout the house. Banner Cabinets also custom-designed and fabricated most doors. “Every stitch of woodwork, every door, every piece of molding and every cabinet we did was customized for them,” says Banner.

Banner used four different varieties of wood for the project, most milled from logs and kiln dried at the company’s manufacturing facility in Newland. “The most prevalent were Canadian white maple and southern Appalachian cherry,” notes Banner. “There was a knotty white poplar we used in several rooms where they wanted to have a bit more rustic look. And for Christy’s study, she liked what we had done in her house in Florida with mahogany, so we used mahogany there.”

Working closely with the Powells and Banner was Eric Guinn, whose company, Classic Stone Works, supplied inlaid stone-on-stone and stone-on-wood flooring, countertops, backsplashes, tub decks, fireplace surrounds and other custom stone work throughout the house.

“When this project started, they had a picture of the end result in mind,” Guinn recalls, “but there were still lots of details to work out. For anything out of the ordinary, like a custom edge, we would do ten samples showing different variations so we could make sure they were getting exactly what they wanted.”

The Powell project was extraordinary, too, for its range of stone selections. “On a lot of large projects, we’ll use the same stone in several rooms, but the Powells had an extreme selection, with more of a variety of materials, veining and textures than we usually see,” recalls Guinn. As an example, Guinn cites the three guest bedroom baths, for which the Powells selected three distinctively different stones.

“In English country estates, it’s common to find design influences and mementoes from all over the world because the British were so well-traveled,” explains Christy. “We enjoy traveling and have lots of souvenirs, so we decided to use the three guest bedrooms to display some of our favorites.”

The Africa bedroom contains ceremonial jewelry and other artifacts framed in shadow boxes. The Asia room features paintings on silk depicting the four seasons. The Florida Keys room has a case filled with seashells and sea-themed carvings.

All three guest bedrooms rooms share the color palette established in the adjacent game room. “Even though each bedroom has a very distinctive theme, the color palettes for all three are centered around the same greens, burgundies and earth tones found in the game room,” says Handley. “That helps bring the rooms together.”

To design and furnish the home theater, the Powells called on Jeffrey Smith, president of First Impressions Theme Theatres, Inc. The company specializes in designing, furnishing and equipping theaters for clients around the world, first designing and constructing the entire theater in their Miami manufacturing facility, testing it, and then dissembling and crating it for transport to the client’s home for reassembly and installation. 

“For this project, we took the raw space—basically, an empty 22- by 23-foot plywood box with wires hanging out—and completely outfitted it as the perfect private cinema,” says Smith. “We saw the plans that David Patrick Moses created and had input from the interior designer about what was going on throughout the house. We understood they wanted a relatively low-key, regal feeling, and we created a space that has the flavor of the house, with a little more edgy, very theatrical feel. So while it complements the rest of the house, it’s a very distinctive experience to be in that room.”

Among the special touches for the Powell project, Smith commissioned artisans to hand-carve Corinthian capitals for the columns that line the walls. To finish the woodwork, Smith specified walnut and antique gold leaf. For the ten custom CineLounger seats, featuring full-motion power positioning with heat and massage functions, the Powells selected dyed leather upholstery in burgundy and tan, with distinctive carved lion’s head corbels. The two center front-row chairs are built exactly to Earl and Christy Powell’s measurements and preferences.

To equip the theater, and to install and configure electronics for the rest of the house, the Powells chose MHS Technologies. Known for many years as Mountain Heritage Systems, MHS supplied the theater’s Sony Qualia projector, mounting it in a soffit at the rear of the room, a 124-inch screen and a BTX drapery control for the fringed curtain. The 7.1-channel surround-sound system’s center channel speakers, enclosed on the proscenium, connect dialog to the action on-screen, supplemented by six front, side and rear speakers, hidden behind acoustically transparent panels strategically placed around the room.

Rounding out the theater equipment list are a DVDO iScan high definition video processor, a DirecTV TiVo satellite receiver, a DVD player and 100-DVD management system and a Sony 400-disc DVD changer.

In the theater and throughout the house, all electronic systems are controlled using touch-screen panels. “All the electronics in the house are integrated through an AMX home automation platform,” explains Josh Ware, a system engineer with MHS Technologies. “All the controls for the various systems house-wide—lighting, audio, video, satellite and cable, heating and air conditioning, Internet access, security—all those systems were done individually and then tied together into one customized interface.”

Using the wall-mounted and freestanding touch screen panels throughout the house, the Powells can select from among a variety of programmed settings, called “scenes,” for lighting, music, climate control, security and other systems. They can also access system controls remotely through the Internet.

“For instance, we can choose the housekeeping scene, where all the lights are really bright so you can see,” Christy says. “If we’re having people over, we can choose the house accents scene, which lights the hallways, powder rooms and other areas of the house where our guests would be. In the theater, we can dim the lights, open the curtains and start the show with a single button push.”

Since completing the house in spring 2005, the Powells have happily settled into a comfortable lifestyle centered around entertaining friends and family, golfing and horseback riding. “All along, we knew just what we wanted, and we were really lucky to have found such talented people to help us realize our vision,” says Christy.

“The space I created for Earl and Christy—it’s an all-time favorite project,” says Moses. “They just wanted some neat stuff—some really interesting spaces, and we accomplished that. I enjoyed working with them—with everybody. All of us were a good team.”

“The Powells wanted this house to be very special in every way,” adds Davant. “They were very sure of the look they wanted, with each room having its own distinct personality, and at the same time, having the house come together as a whole.

“There were challenges in finding exactly the right things, and it often took a lot of tweaking to get things 100 percent to their liking. In the end, the home turned out to be what Christy and Earl wanted and something all of us who worked with them on it can be proud of, too.”

“We’re extremely happy with this house,” says Earl. “We’re thrilled with it. We just love it!”

Photo captions:

1. The Powell home occupies three building lots at the end of a cul-de-sac in Elk River Country Club. Consistent with community building covenants, architect David Moses specified cedar shakes roofing and wooden and natural stone exterior finishes.

2. The living room reflects the Powells’ preference for a somewhat more formal interior design than the predominant “mountain casual” style used in many area homes. Christy Powell and Joe Banner designed the custom mantel after the style of Scottish neoclassical architect Robert Adam.

3. The dining room is the setting for frequent dinner parties featuring wines from Earl Powell’s special stocks. The cathedral ceiling features arched boxed timber trusses, a distinctive design theme introduced at the main entrance and used throughout the house.

4. Between the living room and breakfast room, the bar is ideal for entertaining large groups. The room’s coffered ceiling, door frames and cabinetry are made of Canadian white maple. The bar is topped with polished absolute black granite. 

5. For casual meals, the Powells and their guests may choose the breakfast room or the screened deck just beyond. Both feature spectacular mountain views. The home’s signature arched windows, framed in maple, extend around the breakfast room and into the adjoining kitchen.

6. The centerpiece for the master bedroom is a Louis XV sleigh bed of carved mahogany with cane and leather inserts. Burgundy accents complement the natural color of the wood. The custom rug design is based on the floral pattern in the upholstery fabric.

7. The master vanity area and closet feature custom cabinets made from southern Appalachian cherry. The floors are polished Crema Marfil marble inlaid with Rosa Zarci marble. On either side are the Powells’ bedroom and master bath.

8. From the partners’ desk in the library, Earl Powell enjoys a commanding view of mountain scenery. Directly across the room is a custom-built cabinet framing a flat-screened television and computer work space.

9. Adjacent to a decanting room, Earl Powell’s climate-controlled wine cellar has space to store 3,000 to 4,000 bottles.

10. Christy Powell’s love of horses is reflected in the game room’s equestrian-themed accents. The rich greens, burgundies and golds establish the color palette for the adjoining guest bedrooms. The bar cabinets repeat the grooved arches used to frame windows and doorways throughout the house. Walls are finished using a faux leather texture.

11. An alumnus of the University of Florida and a member of the university’s Board of Trustees, Earl Powell enjoys watching the Gators play on the game room’s main television screen, while catching additional Southeastern Conference action on the two smaller screens.

12. After dinner, the Powells and their guests often retire to the theater to enjoy movies and sports events. From their front-row seats, the hosts control all projection, sound and lighting systems from a touch-screen panel.

13. Each of the ten custom-made theater seats is precisely positioned to give the Powells and their guests a direct sight line to the center of the screen, along with optimally balanced surround sound. Seat dimensions, back pitch, cushion density and other design variables for the two front row center seats are custom-fitted for Earl and Christy Powell.

14a. The primary electronic controls for the music, lighting, climate control and security systems for the Powell house reside in two equipment racks in a closet near the game room. A single equipment rack occupies a closet in the entry, next to the home theater.

14b. All electronic systems are integrated into a single home automation platform from MHS Technologies. Using wall-mounted and free-standing panels throughout the house, the Powells can control all functions with the touch of a screen. All system controls can also be accessed remotely through the Internet.

15. Controlled from a touch-screen panel, the television in the bedroom descends into its custom-designed bookcase cabinet when not in use.