An alpine landmark on the Parkway — and a client who came back to build their own home with us.
The Inn at Christmas Place is the most photographed building in Pigeon Forge: a Bavarian-alpine hotel where Christmas never ends. Hearthstone has supplied the heavy timber that gives the resort its bones and its silhouette — trusses, brackets, arrival canopies, and the timber trellis work that frames the pool courtyard.
Project
The Inn at Christmas Place
Location
Pigeon Forge, Tennessee
Discipline
Heavy Timber Hospitality
Details
Multi-phase · ongoing relationship · Heavy timber for a Bavarian-alpine resort, arrival canopies, trellises, and the Winter Wonder Lagoon pool courtyard
A themed resort lives or dies on whether the detail reads as real. Applied trim gives itself away in the first ten feet. The Inn's owners wanted true heavy timber — full-dimension members, honest joinery, finished on every face — so that the alpine language holds up under a guest standing directly beneath it.
Our shop cut the frames in Newport and staged them for a live property: a hotel that never closed while it grew. Bracket sets, king-post gables, exposed rafter tails, and the long trellis runs over the storefronts were pre-fit, marked, and raised in a sequence the general contractor could build around without shutting rooms.
The Winter Wonder Lagoon courtyard is where the timber does its quietest work. Trellises and shade structures ring the pool, giving the space scale and shadow at dusk without crowding the water. It is resort architecture, but it is framed like a lodge.
The relationship outlasted the project. After building with us commercially, the ownership family came back to Hearthstone to build their private residence — the highest compliment a commercial client can pay a timber shop.
"They built our hotel. Then we asked them to build our home."
— The Inn at Christmas Place ownership
