Robertson-Vaughn Construction - Custom Home Article

As sources of design inspiration go, the local architecture of Monteagle, Tenn., is hard to beat. This mountain town is home to the Assembly, a lovingly preserved Victorian-era village of gingerbread cottages that once served as a summer resort for artists and families from Nashville and Chattanooga. And just over the Tennessee-Georgia border in Sewanee, Tn., lies the University of the South’s dramatic Gothic-style campus, filled with distinctive, century-old buildings crafted of local sandstone.

Architect Tom Bauer’s client for a Monteagle vacation home, a couple with three teenage children, happened to be familiar with both influences. The wife attended the University of the

South, and as a child she summered at the Assembly. Bauer had already designed the renovation of their Modern, full-time residence in Nashville, and, happy as they were with it, they wanted their weekend home to be completely different. Rather than go all-Victorian or all-Gothic, Bauer decided to use both styles as historic models for the 5,400-square-foot house. “I wanted the project to have similarities to the Assembly houses and Sewanee but not to replicate them,” he says.

He started with the front elevation. Two shingle-clad, standing-seam-metal-roofed towers topped with old-fashioned steel finials give a picturesque nod to the Victorians. The long, covered front porch borrows from the Assembly as well. And the split-face concrete block foundation evokes the color and texture of the sandstone at Sewanee. But even the façade presents a few clues that this isn’t your typical faithful reproduction. The windows are large—3 by 10 feet—and mostly single pane. Also, there’s none of the fanciful trim that curls and swoops around the Assembly’s front porches. One of Bauer’s design heroes is Modernist architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen, and the two obviously share a love of clean, sharp lines and minimalist detailing.

Inside, ig root’s clear that Bauer’s inspiration switched from the manmade to the natural. Ten-foot-high glass doors and windows open up the entire rear to sweeping mountain views—it’s

impossible not to feel connected with the outside environment from every room. Project manager Chris Vaughn of builder Robertson-Vaughn Construction estimates that the house contains more than 30 exterior doors, all of them composed mostly of glass.

While the abundance of glass certainly helps make the view an integral part of the interior, an unorthodox, three-part floor plan also works to this end. The client’s 5-acre site in the gated community of Clifftops lies on a bluff facing the Cumberland Mountains. “Usually the houses at Clifftops sit on the highest point of land on their sites,” Bauer says. “But if we had done that here, the house would have had a view of the interstate.” Instead, the clients agreed to build on a lower portion of their property, one that extends further toward the mountains. Bauer then designed the home’s central section—a combined living room, kitchen, and dining room, partially separated from one another by columns and cabinetry—to project out as far as possible, right up to the edge of the bluff. The master bedroom wing on the east side and the guest/children’s wing on the west are pulled back to allow the central space an unobstructed 180-degree mountain view. An expansive back terrace (complete with outdoor fireplace and commercial-style grill) looks down over a 100-foot drop into a rocky, pine-tree-filled gorge. “We had to put up a temporary fence back there during construction, as a safety precaution,” says Vaughn. Because his crew didn’t have much leverage room in the back, they used a crane to transport some of the bulkier building materials—like the sandstone covering the chimney—to the rear of the house.

Siting the house so precariously may have made it more difficult to build (a 10 on a 1-to-10 degree-of-difficulty scale, according to Vaughn), but it made the inside experience that much more spectacular. Bauer designed butted glass corners for the living room walls as well as the master bedroom and south-facing guest bedroom, so that their views of the rolling, tree-covered east and west are completely unblocked. The interstate highway, moreover, lies safely out of sight.

In addition to connecting occupants to the outdoors, the floor plan also provides a level of privacy that’s rare in a house this open. “The owners really wanted to have a sense of individual retreat,” Bauer says. “The wife is an artist, and she often invites groups of artists down here on the weekends. They’ve also hosted school board meetings here.” He designed a simple painting studio for her above the garage and a downstairs rec room for the kids. Pocket doors connecting the two bedroom wings to the main living space enable each wing to be easily closed off for additional privacy. Bathrooms provide a measure of separation between the guest bedrooms. And every bedroom has at least two exits to the outdoors and access to a deck or porch. The view from each room is slightly different, balancing out the repetition of materials throughout the house.

That consistency of materials is something Bauer tries to achieve in all his work. “I think that using the same few materials rather than many different ones gives the house a sense of continuity,” he says. The cost-effective silver-dipped light bulbs that dot the top of each living room column can be found in the same locations in the master bedroom. Locally quarried sandstone clads the living room chimney, the kitchen and dining room countertops, and the master bathtub and shower surrounds. Bauer also believesin bestowing a sense of order on a space through precise alignment. All the windows and doors in this painstakingly designed house, for example, line up perfectly with one another. They're the exact same heights and widths, and where there's one, there is usually another mirroring it on the opposite wall. "It's something most people don't consciously notice," he says. "But I think that orderliness is a large part of why we feel comfortable in a place."