The Cliffs at Glassy · Landrum, South Carolina
Not one blade
of grass
A hand-joined timber frame and a garden twenty-five years in the making.
That is the whole difference. Hand-joined posts and beams carry the ceilings here, rising into king-post trusses above the living room and settling into a coffered grid over the kitchen. It is not applied millwork dressing up a builder's box. It is the structure of the house, left honest and in plain view.
The residence sits on 1.90 acres inside the gates of the Cliffs at Glassy, built in 2001 in the Mountain Craftsman idiom that the Blue Ridge has been refining since the Arts and Crafts movement first came south. It reads dark against the trees, board-and-batten below and cedar shingle in the gable ends, under a steeply pitched cross-gabled roof with decorative timber trusses set into the peaks. A dry-stacked stone chimney rises the full height of the elevation like the trunk of something older than the house. Granite pushes up out of the ground on this site, and the architecture accommodated it rather than the reverse.
You arrive on flagstone. The entry gives way to wide-plank oak, and the plan unfolds without ceremony into the living room, where the trusses lift the ceiling and a stone fireplace climbs the full gable. Mountain views come in on both sides of it. To the right the dining area sits under its own cathedral ceiling. To the left a library wall of open shelving runs the hallway. Past all of it, an enclosed sun room turns to glass on three sides, holds a second stone fireplace and runs on its own heating and cooling, which is a small detail that changes everything about how the room gets used between November and March.
The kitchen is the room the house organizes itself around. The island is a single long run topped in poured concrete, with a prep sink and stools on the open side, and behind it a raised counter passes through toward the dining room so the cook is never working alone. Honed marble runs the perimeter and carries up the range wall in a single slab, and above it a custom hammered-metal hood climbs into the beams.
The cabinetry is cherry with glass-fronted uppers, and it holds double wall ovens, a panel-front refrigerator, a wine refrigerator and a built-in coffee system. Concrete against marble against cherry is an unusual combination, and it works because none of the three is pretending to be anything else.
The primary suite is on the main level and was taken down to the studs and rebuilt. A freestanding tub sits under a bank of windows with only woods behind them, in a room papered in Hunt Slonem's Hutch, which means several hundred hand-drawn rabbits watching you take a bath. Whether that reads as wit or as too much is a matter of taste, and the house has clearly made its choice.
The shower is the room's real argument. It is an oversized steam room, tiled floor to ceiling with a herringbone course overhead, laid over a river rock floor, with a rain head, a wall head, a handheld and frameless glass. A granite boulder stands in it, left where the mountain put it. Steam is set from a panel outside the door and the shower heads run from a phone, so you set the room before you walk into it and step into warm fog with your hand on cold granite.
Light moving across a timber ceiling, and a garden that changes as you walk through it. Two minutes, shot in 4K, covers what fifty frames cannot.
We let the mountain tell us what to do.
The garden at 6 Eagle Rock began as a Dabney Peeples plan. The Collins Group installed it and built the cairns. Dianne Nodine designed the front beds. Professional gardener Michael Styers has worked alongside the owner ever since, and he puts it another way, that the old-growth trees and shrubs are the bones in the garden. It has now been published four times across three magazines: Carolina Gardener, Cliffs Living, and twice in At Home.
There is no lawn. Not a blade of grass anywhere on the 1.90 acres, replaced by sweeps of mondo grass and liriope that move like water across the forest floor. Four stone cairns, each four feet tall and built by hand, stand in an outdoor room designed around a granite boulder. A blue gate leads into a walled secret garden that took two years to make.
Dogwoods come in with the spring. Japanese maples frame the view and seven Trident maples stand as a grove. A fernery of tall blue phlox and wildflowers runs off the end of the house, and camellias hold the structure through winter.
This is a house you can buy. The garden is something else. It is twenty-five years of a designed, published, four-season garden with named designers and a named artist, and there is no version of the next twenty-five years in which someone reproduces it. It can only be inherited.
| Original plan | Dabney Peeples, garden designer |
|---|---|
| Installation and cairns | The Collins Group |
| Front beds | Dianne Nodine |
| Gardener | Michael Styers |
| Blue gate | Berry Bate, metal artist |
| Published | Four features across three magazines Carolina Gardener, July and August 2012 Cliffs Living, Spring and Summer 2021 At Home, twice |
Featured September 17, 2026. The paper sent its own photographer up the mountain and led with the garden.
See the feature
The measurement is a CubiCasa survey dated 5 September 2026, two days before the listing was taken. It records 3,540 square feet in the main residence across two levels, plus a 479 square foot carriage suite above the garage. Those two figures add to 4,019, and they are kept separate on purpose: the carriage suite sits over the garage across a breezeway rather than under the main roof, so it is finished space in its own right rather than something folded into the house.
A 230 square foot wine cellar and storage sit below the main level and are excluded from the living area. The Greenville County tax card reads 2,744 square feet, which predates the current measurement. The CubiCasa PDF is attached to the listing and is available on request.
| Living room | 19'6 x 25'11 |
|---|---|
| Kitchen | 16'3 x 17'8 |
| Dining area | 16'6 x 12'9 |
| Sun room | 15'2 x 14'0 |
| Primary bedroom | 18'4 x 17'2 |
| Primary bath | 13'8 x 11'10 |
| Upper bedrooms | 14'0 x 18'3 and 13'2 x 17'3 |
| Wine cellar | 15'11 x 12'9 |
| Garage | 31'5 x 24'9, two bays |
| Carriage suite | 17'4 x 13'11, plus office 9'1 x 5'5 and half bath |
The parcel runs long and narrow off Eagle Rock Road, wider at the road and tapering to a point at the southeast corner. The house, the breezeway and the carriage building sit toward the northern half, with the garden filling the ground around and below them.
Granite outcrops surface across the site. Nothing was removed to make room for the house. Stone walls terrace the grade where it falls away, and flagstone paths carry through the planting from the drive to the fire pit clearing at the lower end.
| Cliffs at Glassy wellness center | 3 minutes |
|---|---|
| Cliffs at Glassy clubhouse | 5 minutes |
| Landrum | 15 minutes |
| Greer | 20 minutes |
| Downtown Greenville | 40 minutes |
A Cliffs membership opens the seven clubs and their golf, wellness, dining and trails. The Glassy clubhouse and the Tom Jackson course are around the corner. What the membership cannot open is the garden.
The residents' own line for it is the best summary: come for the views, stay for the people.
Glassy sits at the top of the Cliffs, in every sense. The gated community climbs Glassy Mountain in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, and a large share of it borders protected land, including the Greenville Watershed Preserve. Black bears, deer, bobcats and wild turkeys move through it year round, and the community is a Certified Audubon Sanctuary, with Audubon staff leading talks and walks on site.
The courseA Tom Jackson design that opened in 1993, the year Golf Digest named it the fourth most scenic golf course in America. Five sets of tees run from 4,700 to 6,800 yards, the first hole starts from an elevated tee box, and the round finishes on a par five members call one of the best closing holes they have played.
The mountaintopThe Glassy Chapel sits at the summit behind a two-story glass wall overlooking roughly 75 miles of South Carolina. It is open every day of the year, holds seasonal services from May through October, and hosts a monthly concert series that runs from bluegrass to classical, along with the Glassy Mountain Chorale. Nearby, the open-air Sunset Pavilion looks across a 180-degree sweep of the Blue Ridge and, after dark, the lights of Greenville and Spartanburg. Residents gather there weekly as the sun goes down.
OutdoorsMiles of walkable mountain roads, the 1.39-mile Nature Trail and direct access to the Chestnut Ridge Heritage Preserve Trail sit inside the gates, with eight state parks, national forests and preserves within reach. The Park at Glassy covers 17 acres in the heart of the community, with a one-mile paved path, wildflower meadows and picnic lawns, and it is the one place on the mountain where dogs can run off leash.
The clubWith a Cliffs membership, the clubhouse opens four dining settings, including a terrace over the course, and a bar with its own stacked stone fireplace. The wellness center adds an Olympic-size outdoor pool overlooking the valley, ClayTech tennis and pickleball courts, trainers and classes, and the membership extends to all seven Cliffs clubs and their courses.
The peopleFriday night mixers at the clubhouse, monthly concerts, a summer kids camp, and resident-run clubs for everything from gardening and bridge to bourbon. A lecture series covers native plants, beekeeping and the history of the Dark Corner.
Peace of mindThe gatehouse is staffed around the clock, and Glassy is the only Cliffs community with full-time EMT staff on site. The Glassy Mountain Fire Station is less than five minutes from the front gate.
For a fuller picture of club membership, dues and daily life on the mountain, read our guide to The Cliffs at Glassy.
Golf Digest's fourth most scenic course in America the year it opened.
About 75 miles of view, open every day of the year.
A 180-degree panorama of the Blue Ridge.
A one-mile path, wildflower meadows and the mountain's only off-leash lawn.
Olympic-size outdoor pool, ClayTech tennis and pickleball. Club members.
A 24-hour gatehouse and the only full-time onsite EMTs in the Cliffs.
Community details per The Cliffs Community Association at Glassy (glassyliving.com), October 2026. Club amenities are accessed by club membership.
Private showings by appointment. Ask for the CubiCasa measurement, the improvement record or the two published garden features and they will come back the same day.
Damian Hall
Damian Hall Group
Blackstream | Christie's International Real Estate
864.561.7942
dh@damianhallgroup.com
Before a word of this page was written, the house was audited against Zillow's Buzz Index, and what the audit found earned the opening line. You can run the same check on your own home right now, and you can read the whole plan a seller receives before their home goes live.