Architectural Details: Step Inside a Luxurious Log Cabin Mountain Home

This stone and shake mountain house in North Carolina serves as a family retreat for golf, hiking, and entertaining during these months. The house’s high elevation provides cool breezes and long vistas of distant rocky peaks.

The skin of the house is composed of large sheets of tree bark that have been steamed into flat sheets. The texture and color of this bark complements the rugged indigenous mountain rock, adding more texture to the façade. The porch columns and railings of the home’s porch are made from locust trees. The bark has been preserved to further enhance the rustic look as does the house’s cedar shake roof.

In an effort to create an all-wood look for the interior, reclaimed wood planks and massive hand-hewn beams from old barns were used extensively on the walls and ceilings. Even the staircase railing makes use of log timbers.

The home’s many fireplaces are lined with granite instead of firebrick and have monolithic slabs of stone above the firebox openings. All the floors are made of wide plank heart-of-pine with cracks and imperfections carefully preserved for their charm.

No trip to the mountains would be complete without the family’s dogs. So, in the pantry, concealed under a counter of rough cut wood, the home incorporates a specially designated area for the dog’s beds.

Stepping out of the house to the rear deck and porch one is immediately struck by the beauty of the mountain views. The covered porch is built of locust logs and is the focus of evening dinners by the stone fireplace.

Hewn logs are woven into a decorative lattice detail that runs from top of column to top of column. Sitting on this porch at night, one can hear the sound of tree frogs calling their mates while the hoots and calls of owls fill the air.