Hearthstone at Work

A quick pass through the site — portfolio, a project, the plans. Take the same walk at your own pace.

01Welcome

Start with the website. Then call us.

Spend time here. The pages, the plans, the projects — they'll give you a feel for how we build and generate the questions worth asking.

When you're ready, pick up the phone or send an email with a little background on what you have in mind. Our Project Managers answer the call directly. If you reach a menu, that's only to route accounting and vendor questions to the right desk — client calls come straight to us.

The Project Manager who answers becomes your one contact from that first call through the day your home is raised, and long after. Not a salesperson who hands you off, not a queue. One person, cradle to grave, with a team behind them.

You will not be handed off. Your Project Manager is your advocate — start to finish, and forever after.

02Site Visit & Shop Tour

We walk your land. You walk our shop.

Before design begins in earnest, two visits do more than any conversation. We come to your property to understand the slope, the sun, the access for tractor-trailers full of heavy timber, and the way a house wants to sit on that particular piece of ground.

And you come to Newport. Visiting the shop is often the most exciting part of the process — for you and for your Project Manager. Seeing what we can do, without a word spoken, tells the story better than any brochure.

03Design

From an idea to a drawing.

Most projects begin with an exterior — a shape you've seen, driven past, or carried in your head for years. From there we move together toward a floor plan: second floor or not, walk-out basement, bedrooms, the details that make a house yours.

You can arrive at the drawing table two ways. Through Hearthstone directly, working with our in-house drafting team and our library of Moss Creek plans. Or through an architect — one you already work with, or Allen Halcomb of Moss Creek Designs in Knoxville, who has drawn many of the plans featured on this site.

Either path, our Project Manager stays at the center of it, helping shake out what really catches your eye.

The plans featured on this site are Allen Halcomb's. If you'd like an architect and don't have one, we're glad to make the introduction.

Explore Design & Planning→

Every joint, resolved before a saw touches wood.

Timber joinery modeled on screen in Newport — every mortise and peg.

043D Modeling

Every joint, resolved before a saw touches wood.

Once the design is settled, our team builds the entire structure as a solid model on the computer — every timber, every mortise, every peg. An architect can drop that model into their conceptual design and finish the drawings around real geometry.

It is the modern half of an old craft. Nothing is guessed. Everything is proven on screen before it becomes a ton of oak or fir on the shop floor.

CNC cutting in Newport — then hands setting the timbers on the deck.

05Manufacturing

European machines. American hands.

We were among the first in the country to put heavy-timber CNC machines to work, in the mid-1990s. Three decades later, we've likely run more timber through those machines than anyone in North America.

The letter A in CAD/CAM stands for assisted. The people still have to know what they're doing — and craftsmanship of the highest order is what you'll see on a shop tour. Even builders with forty years in the trade walk out amazed.

Never in our history has more craftsmanship, nor more collaboration between disciplines, gone into a Hearthstone frame than it does today.

A bent lifted into place on the ridge — crane, straps, and hands.

06Delivery & Raising

The timbers arrive. The frame goes up.

Your foundation and subfloor are in place, ready to receive the frame. Our trucks arrive, our crew arrives, and over a matter of days the structure rises — pre-cut, pre-fit, and assembled with the same joinery a timber framer would have recognized two centuries ago.

In most projects we install the timbers and hand the shell back to your general contractor. In some, we go further — through the weather-tight envelope, or all the way to lock-and-key. How far past raising we go depends on your builder's preference and our capacity.

07Builder Handoff

Your builder takes it home.

Once the frame is up, your builder finishes the house. We stay on call — before purchase, during construction, and long after. Your builder is welcome in Newport, and we encourage the visit.

We collaborate with builders every week: live video from the site, model reviews, problem-solving in real time. Whatever the project needs, our people team up with your people until the doors lock and the lights come on.

How we work with you, from first call to raising day.