Our Mountain Home: Fingerprints on a Mountaintop

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These stairs were hand-hewn.
These stairs were hand-hewn.
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The guest house/studio, made of metal lathe and Surewall, ended up through happenstance with a roof resembling a giant toadstool.
The guest house/studio, made of metal lathe and Surewall, ended up through happenstance with a roof resembling a giant toadstool.
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The south face of the authors' mountain home features a curved wall and lots of glass for passive solar heating.
The south face of the authors' mountain home features a curved wall and lots of glass for passive solar heating.
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The garden wall was built from pottery shards contributed by neighboring craftspeople.
The garden wall was built from pottery shards contributed by neighboring craftspeople.
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The carport also functions as a woodshed and—with the cupola on top—a home for bluebirds.
The carport also functions as a woodshed and—with the cupola on top—a home for bluebirds.

Reprinted by permission, from the June/July 1981 issue of American Craft, published by the American Craft Council.


Our first responsibility when we undertook to build a mountain home was to understand the mountain meadow where it would be located. We began to ruminate quietly upon the land, to study its personality, its idiosyncrasies, its will, its contours, its soil, its watershed, its juxtaposition to neighboring mountains, and especially its exposure to sky and weather. We needed to know the strengths and directions of its prevailing winds, to record storm patterns, and to plot the path of the sun as it warmed our soil.

Moving to Penland, North Carolina was easy for us. It was a little like coming home, since Penland lies in an extraordinary natural landscape and is the home of the Penland School of Crafts, which has long served as a crossroads of creative energy. This growing crafts community was where we wanted to be.

Our backgrounds are very different. One of us (Louise) has lived both in the suburbs and in a city, while the other (Don) has spent years in rural Scandinavia. But we’ve both been teachers: one in the classroom and workshop, the other through writing books. We wanted to translate theory into practice.

  • Published on Nov 1, 1981
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