Not one blade
of grass

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.

There is a boulder
in the shower.

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. Temperature and steam run off a panel outside the door or off a phone, so you set the room before you walk into it and step into warm fog with your hand on cold granite.

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 twice, in Carolina Gardener and in Cliffs Living.

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. Three 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.

Forty peonies come in spring with the dogwoods. Dozens of Japanese maples frame the view. 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. A six-foot bronze rabbit named Chauncey stands at the front door, ears tilted, examining everyone who arrives.

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.