The president's own house — built the same way we build yours, one signature at a time.

Randy fell for the weathered charm of the old cabins around Dandridge when he moved to Tennessee in 1981. He canvassed the county for a site that already looked as though a pioneer might have built there — and settled on a 70-acre forested lakeside tract. Before choosing a builder, he interviewed the owners of the old homes he admired. Hearthstone's name came up again and again. He met the founder, joined the company as president in 1982, and bought the business in 1984.

The Big House is a Bob Timberlake home. Unlike our other log lines — hand-hewn flat on all four sides — Timberlake® timbers are hewn flat only on the sides and left irregular on the top and bottom, exactly as a pioneer would have finished them. The logs range from twelve to twenty-four inches tall and six to ten inches wide, sandblasted to look like weather did the work over two hundred years. A timber-framed dining room folds into the log shell, so guests see both disciplines under one roof.

Every detail was chased the same way. Limestone kitchen tile was tumbled with gravel to bruise the edges. Bathroom and foyer tile was cut from marble scrap at a local quarry and hand-chipped by Randy and his eight-year-old son. Three-inch-thick oak counters and wide-plank oak floors were salvaged from centuries-old trees a neighboring tavern was about to bulldoze after a fire. The family dining table — twenty feet of a single slab — came out of the same salvage.

In the kitchen, an antique cast-iron mill gear sits on a cedar stump from the property; that is the breakfast table. In the great room, a shallow Rumford fireplace of dry-stacked crab-orchard stone throws heat back into the room instead of up the flue. In the boys' bedroom, the cedar tree the children used to climb — cut when the site was cleared, then craned in through the open rafters and set into place before the roof went on — is the ladder to the loft. In the girls' room, a swing still hangs from the ceiling because Cassidy asked for one.

Randy's home is what our crews point to when a new client asks what we mean by hand-built. It is the reason the company still restores 200-year-old cabins on the side.