Recent History

A Tennessee couple’s appreciation for the heritage of their land prompts them to build a new mountaintop home that looks like it’s stood for generations.

- Lore Postman

“We wanted to build a house that would look like it’s always been up on that hill,” explained Tom, whose family settled the property in 1794. The couple briefly considered building a turn-of-the-century farmhouse or a house clad in stone. Both styles are common in the surrounding countryside, but neither seemed right for their site.

Then the couple visited “The Swag,” a mountaintop resort in western North Carolina featuring homes built with logs reclaimed from historic structures and supplemented with timber framing, stone and featheredge boards. “As soon as we saw these homes, we knew it was the perfect style to work here.”

On sheets of graph paper, the couple sketched out a log rectangle about the size a family might have built 150 years ago. They flanked the rectangle with additions on either end. Those would be built with timber frame supports and covered outside with the featheredge siding, stone and brick they admired at The Swag.