A doctor's ridgetop retreat — hand-hewn logs, stacked-stone chimney, and a porch built for evenings.
For Dr. Tom Thompson, we raised a log home that reads, from the fence line at dusk, as if it had been standing on the ridge for a century. Reclaimed and hand-hewn timbers, a full-height dry-stack chimney, and a porch deep enough to live on — sited to catch the last light off the pasture.
Project
Tom Thompson, MD
Location
East Tennessee
Discipline
Log Home · Hand-Hewn Reclaimed
Details
Hearthstone Log Home · Ridgetop log home · stone chimney · full wrap porch · standing-seam roof
The Thompson home is a ranch-form Hearthstone log home laid across a ridgetop clearing. Long roofline, twin gables, a stone chimney anchoring the composition — the massing is quiet on purpose, so the material does the talking.
The brief was explicit: model the home after the Lodge at the world-famous Swag — the Cataloochee ridgetop hideaway a mile above the Smokies in Western North Carolina. Dr. Thompson brought us photographs, the Swag's own history, and a clear ask — the same hand-hewn quiet, the same stacked-stone hearth, the same porch built to hold the weather out and the evening in. (Reference: theswag.com/about/history)
The walls are hand-hewn logs with tight chinking, weathered to the color of an old barn. Inside, the same logs continue: exposed purlins overhead, a stone hearth as the room's center of gravity, and windows framed to hold the field beyond the fence.
A wrap porch runs the front elevation, deep enough for rocking chairs and a long table. Cedar posts, a split-rail fence, and a standing-seam roof finish the picture. It is a log home built the Hearthstone way — dry-cored logs, timber-framed roof system, joinery cut in Newport — and detailed for a family that wanted a house they would never outgrow.
"Dr. Thompson brought us The Swag — the Lodge on the Cataloochee ridge, a mile above the Smokies — and asked for that same quiet on his own ridgetop. Hand-hewn walls, a stacked-stone hearth, and a porch built to hold the weather out and the evening in."
— Hearthstone · The Thompson Log Home · modeled after the Lodge at The Swag
