Twenty years of trust, one spec home, and a lakefront frame that sold itself.

Dave had worked with Hearthstone for over twenty years — long enough that the first home our crews raised for him was his own parents'. When a wooded lakefront lot on the Nantahala Plateau came open, he made a decision he had never made before: he would build a timber frame on spec, with his own capital, and let the frame do the selling.

He drew the plans as conventional stud-frame walls with timber accents. Standing on the site, he changed his mind. The steep, wooded lot and the reflection of the water called for a full timber frame — planed, chamfered, and finished with an Early American stain that lets the white pine glow lantern-gold against a dry-stack fieldstone hearth. Chris Wood, our VP of Sales, redrew the frame accordingly.

The signature move is a 27-foot queen-post truss over the living room, opening onto a wall of glass that pulls the lake straight into the house. Local craftsmen supplied poplar-bark accents, mountain-laurel railings, and black-locust deck posts — every material within a short drive of the site.

Squeezing a 30-ton crane onto a third-acre lakefront lot took a shorter truck and some careful choreography. The raising went in clean. Dave finished the house in 2004 and put it on the market. The next owners walked in, looked up at the truss, and — as the story now goes in Cashiers — simply said, 'This was it.'