A Blueprint for Creativity

Well, we’re 95% high-end residential, and just a small percentage commercial. In 20 years, we’ve designed a school and a clubhouse. Beyond that, it’s almost exclusively high-end residential homes in Western North Carolina.

I have found that in the commercial world, they’re more deadline-driven, and there’s always an element of profitability for the owner. Whereas in the residential realm, our clients are trying to design legacy properties that will last a few generations. The deadlines aren’t as important. What’s most important is doing something really special, getting it right. And that’s what’s so rewarding about it.

I want to design things where the care that was given to the project is evident to everybody who experiences these spaces across the generations. It really just boils down to that. One of the most appealing things about the world of architecture is that you can leave something behind. You know you’re not going to live forever, but it’s going to live on beyond your lifetime, so you can invest yourself in it and make it special. Obviously, the owners want to pass it down to their children and grandchildren. But I want it, too. And I want everyone in this firm to be really proud of the things that they do and know they’re going to be around for a while.

Absolutely. As a young designer, I was more interested in just creating something beautiful on the outside. And then as the client started to influence the design of the floor plan, we had to solve a problem. Sure, it looked good the way we conceived it originally, but as they inserted their influence, the plan usually got better—and the form had to change to envelop it.  Often, the exterior elevations that grew from owner-influenced changes ended up being kind of magical.

So I stopped going into projects with a preconceived form. Instead, I started letting the plans and the context of the site and other things influence the plan. And lo and behold, originality evolved from that. New forms started to evolve, and they became so much more interesting. It kept things from looking the same. Now I go into projects without any image in my mind’s eye, and I just sort of let them evolve. And usually something great comes out of it, something original.

Yeah. We’re doing most of our projects in Highlands and Cashiers, North Carolina, which is where the firm was born. It’s just a gorgeous place to live. It seems like on every ridge, somebody has their own special view or their own special water feature or just a pretty spot in the woods. And all of those things have been the focal point of houses and influenced our designs. We try to help them connect to this special place. Whether it’s a lot of light and glass, a screened porch, or a patio, we’re trying to make people feel that there’s not much separating their interior spaces from the exterior, which is why they’re there.

A couple come to mind. There’s a development called Lonesome Valley, which was our first truly custom home. And it’s just a beautiful spot. We had clients who had taken a chance on us because we didn’t have any major custom homes in our portfolio. We had done a couple of small projects that we showed them, and we said, we could do this if you give us a chance.  But I think they could see that even in those small projects, a lot of care had been given. It turned out to be a great plan. It’s a very efficient house that took advantage of the views. There’s nothing gratuitous about it. It’s not a look-at-me kind of house. It’s a contextual house. Something else that stood out is that we stretched the guidelines a little bit. They have some rules there that try to limit the glass because they don’t want things to be too modern. But we found ways to introduce a lot of glass to update the old farmhouse prototype and lift it into a contemporary space. And things just took off from there.

The other two that stand out are a couple of houses we did on Queen Mountain and in Cashiers. They were both renovations, so there’s an originality ensured by that. It forces you to do things that you wouldn’t normally do. You might start off with a chimney that’s here in this space, and I probably never would have put a chimney there, but we’re going to work with it. And so it pushes you into creative spaces and solutions that are original.

On top of that, these were clients that were willing to spend a lot more money, so budget wasn’t much of a factor. And that’s always great when you’re bringing in rich materials and a lot of steel and glass that just make a project sparkle and shine. We were able to use higher levels of finish and nicer products than we had had access to before, and that made it fun and exciting. And now, three years later, they’re wanting to do a guest barn and these beautiful gardens. This piece of property is just becoming a more and more special place.

We did some speculative cottages at a new development between Highlands and Cashiers, and now we’ve been asked to do a boutique hotel. It’s really exciting, because you can kind of get in a rut. No matter how exciting all these great houses are, it’s still the same building type, and there’s only so many ways to do things. So when a new kind of building type comes along, it will come with new pressures that I’m not used to, with tighter deadlines and budgets. But at the same time, it’s a wonderful job because this is an owner who is also looking after his legacy. He lives in this community, and he’s not planning to build hotel after hotel after hotel. So it’s kind of a perfect commercial project for us.

Yes, and I just call them doodles. I think it’s the only way to design creatively. You have to disconnect yourself from the digital world. Because you don’t have to command a machine to draw a line or anything else, it frees your mind up. So with a pencil or a pen in your hand, you can make broad, loose gestures without knowing where you’re going.

That’s the most fun part of this whole job. You take in all of the scope requirements, the spaces that need to be designed, the context of the site, and you just start making that first little bubble on what is usually just a survey of the property. You start trying to think through things logically, How do I approach the house as a pedestrian or as someone in a car? How is this property or this building going to present itself to someone who’s just arriving? And so you think in broad terms like that. You don’t start thinking about specifics of the project so much. You’re just trying to get those basic moves right. I can do that much more effectively with a pen my hand, and I say a pen because I don’t intend to erase any lines. I want it to be a little bit of a scrambled mess. As I draw and create these squares and bubbles, what inevitably ends up happening is there’s an accidental bubble over there, and I say, well you know, that actually might be a good place to put whatever. Then what happens is I start seeing things in my mind’s eye as I’m drawing. Sometimes, on the same page, I’ll just do a quick little perspective doodle. If these masses are landing next to each other and have these adjacencies, what’s that going to look like when I’m coming toward them? I start to sketch it out very quickly. And that begets another idea, and that begets another, and I don’t think it can happen without a pen in your hand.

That’s exactly right. There’s a constant stream of 3D images flashing through my head as I start to draw these things. I start articulating them with a pen, and it doesn’t always come out just like I’m visualizing it. Then I have to start shifting things around.

One of the one of the advantages of going to architecture school is that you’re exposed to a lot of great design work through the professors you’re learning from. I have a Rolodex of great projects in my mind, so sometimes I’ll see things start to emerge in sketches, and it reminds me of a house designed by someone else. It’s always a process of dipping into your recollections of other projects.

That’s right. I mean, you have precedents to build upon. And when you see a terrific project that someone else has done, the first thing I ask myself is, why do I like that so much? What’s so great about it? Is it scale and proportion? Is it material? I’m not trying to recreate it, but there are certainly lessons to be learned, and you can apply those lessons to your own projects.

The materials that we like to use, and that fortunately we’re in a position to use, are what I would describe as authentic materials. Whether it’s true six-inch stone on a house, or a really high-quality hardwood floor, or beautiful tile, or the windows, the steel and glass, there’s a beauty to those. Even things like slate or cedar shake roofing. I tell everyone, you put cedar shake on an average home and it immediately lifts its curb appeal because it’s an authentic, rich material. Even when we add color to the exterior, we often use a semi-solid, semi-transparent stain because we want the grain of the cedar to read through and influence that richness And it always does.

It’s hard to describe just how much of a difference great materials make. Even to a layman who hasn’t studied architecture, when you encounter a project with quality materials, people just recognize it.  You can touch it and see it, and it has a way of lifting the project to a higher finish level without people understanding necessarily why.

Right. So when we select stone, it’s usually native. I can think of a few homes where they’ve imported their stone from Texas or Wisconsin, and it seldom works. There are some colors that are of a region, that are complimentary of their surroundings. You know, there’s a reason that houses in Tucson, Arizona, look different than ones in Highlands, North Carolina, and it’s because they look like they belong there.

When I think of really interesting palettes to work with, I think of  Caribbean homes with the bright colors and the stark contrast between lights and darks. Any punched opening in a light and bright house just has an extra punch to it. We’re in a rain forest here, so the dark colors contribute and compliment the surroundings. But I think the Caribbean would be really, really fun to work with and push us into a different direction. I’ve always been an advocate for inviting an architect who has experience in a certain building type in a certain area to do something in a completely different kind of environment, because I think something original is gonna come out of it. I’d be curious to see how 20 years of designing in the mountains might influence something that we would design in the Caribbean.

It happens more frequently than you might think, usually through our interior designers, because owners come from all parts of the country. Different regions, just by default, have different perspectives. But that’s where it gets exciting, to see them adapt what they’ve been doing in Illinois to what they’re going to do in North Carolina. It’s one of the reasons we never tried to have an in-house interior designer, because I feel like there’s opportunities for unique collaborations with people who are accustomed to working in other parts of the country. I like meeting new talent, and seeing their approach ultimately makes things more interesting. I want a portfolio of work that is varied and unique, as opposed to just looking like the same thing over and over, and working with different people helps with that.

That’s a good way to put it. The project revealing itself is really how the process works. There’s the idea of a grand vision in the beginning. At least for me, that doesn’t exist. The more I can remove those blinders and preconceived notions going into a project, the better, so I can pay attention to the clients and site influences. Original solutions tend to evolve when you go in with that open mindset.

Right. Ultimately, the architect is the orchestrator. On our nicest homes, there are a lot of influencers. Whether it’s your millwork designer, your interior designer, or your kitchen designer, the team seems to grow, and they all influence the project. But somebody has to set an overall tone or vision for the house, and that’s us, that’s the architect.

Sometimes I’ll put my thoughts down in a written narrative and circulate that to everyone. If you come up with that document, it’s so valuable because it keeps us on track. With every design or every selection, there are a thousand choices to be made — and there are several right choices to make. You’ve got to hone it down so that it all makes sense when it’s completed. The worst thing is when you walk into a house and say it looks like it just couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. So somebody has to decide what it wants to be, and that’s us.

I can name two professors, Dale Durfee at Georgia Tech and Kevin Alter at University of Texas. People learn different ways. I learned the most from people who would sit down beside you with a pen in their hand, and you could see them think with their pen. I started saying, okay, I see how this process works. And I started understanding how you go from bold strokes to more and more refinement. I studied their work, and I listened to them a lot. In terms of work, I guess I look back to Edwin Lutyens, a British Arts and Crafts architect in the early 1900s. Huge influence, just magic coming out of that guy.

I’m really curious to see what happens after the boutique hotel. I was in the commercial world for about 10 years before getting residential work, but I got away from it because I spent a lot of time drawing some great stuff that never got built. Now I’m starting to realize, this hospitality world is not too complex compared to a mixed-use project. The majority of the hospitality project is room design. Then the remaining part is, how do you welcome someone into the lobby? How’s it situated on the site? I think they’re hoping that we’re going to influence this project, warm it up a little bit, and see where this goes. So again, it’s that sort of erasing some of these preconceived things that something fresh comes out of.

The best advice I could give a young designer is to hold on to a high standard. A good example of that is when we first started our firm. An exciting project for us then was converting a porch into a sunroom. Well, our standard was that it’s going to be the best sunroom they’ve ever seen. You just have to hold your standards high and add that extra layer of detail that makes everyone who hires you feel like you put forth a little extra thought for their project. Because everybody wants a unique place of their own.

Don’t ever just go through the motions. Try to give people something special. Now, sometimes a client will wreck that standard, and you can’t win all those battles. But for the most part, people will embrace your energy and your creativity. When you bring energy and excitement to everything you touch, people like to work with you. And that’s the best advice I could give.