Bungalow Dream House in the Blue Ridge Highlands

Since childhood, Frank Brown has loved history and old things. He was raised here in the picturesque town of Abingdon (settled in 1778) in southwestern Virginia. After school, he stayed on to open his real-estate and construction business, specializing in bungalows and early-20th-century houses. After opening a second office, in nearby Asheville, Brown became a regular exhibitor at the annual Arts & Crafts Conference at the Omni Grove Park Inn.

With his wife, Kathleen, Frank visited Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Farms, in New Jersey, and they began to collect Stickley furniture, Heintz art metal, vintage brass lighting, and more, stowing everything away for their future dream house. Eventually they found four acres atop a slight rise in the gently rolling hills and hayfields outside of Abingdon. For Frank, sweeping views eastward to the Blue Ridge Mountains brought back fond boyhood memories of fishing trips, and watching wild ponies on Whitetop Mountain with his grandfather. Frank spent a year and a half drawing plans for the house, which would be affordable but include the Arts & Crafts details he loves: clipped gables, overhanging eaves with brackets, fir woodwork inside. He calculated where the sun rose and set, from solstices to equinoxes, siting the house so that sunlight would play in every one of 53 windows at some time during the year.

A woodworker since childhood, Frank carried his knowledge into construction. He found Southern yellow pine for the framing as it is stronger and heavier than standard spruce lumber. In the manner of 20th-century bungalows, he designed a roof with two and a half-foot overhangs and exposed rafter tails. Upper eaves are clad in hand-dipped shakes of Western red cedar, secured with galvanized, ring-shank nails. The tongue-and-groove siding was fashioned from thermally modified poplar, cooked in a steam bath to 495 degrees F., making it more water and decay resistant and less likely to expand and contract during installation. (This process was developed in Finland.) Douglas fir windows and doors were custom milled at Loewen’s, in Canada. Windows are covered with heavy-gauge extruded aluminum cladding, which retains its shape and lasts longer than rolled aluminum. The windows were the most expensive part of the project.

Back in 1992, Frank had come across a fallen, 400-year-old white oak slated to become firewood. He purchased the tree and sliced the 14-foot trunk into 2 x 2 x 13-foot lengths, which he then had milled into 2 inch-thick slabs. The lumber was stacked, dried, and placed in storage. Twenty-five years later, Frank would use the white oak throughout his new house. The Tudor-style entry door is made from two book-matched pair, three inches thick, bolted together. Countertops and stair treads are also made from the oak.

At a lumberyard going out of business, Frank Brown discovered a warehouse full of West Coast Douglas fir. He bought enough for such interior finishes as box beams, board-and-batten wainscots, plate rails, and solid doors. He fashioned a drying rack and worked on the lumber every day for three months, sanding, staining, and waxing each piece to achieve a mellow finish that accentuates the wood grain and growth rings.

White-oak logs were located for flooring, cut to expose the medullary rays rather than rift sawn, and stacked in a chicken house converted into a kiln, where they were dried for six weeks. The lumber was milled into 5-inch planks and allowed to acclimate for a week to the moisture and temperature inside, before installation. Floors were sanded and finished with three coats of a water-based stain. Brown avoided polyurethane.

Not everything went smoothly. The brick fireplace wall, for example, was poorly laid with wide joints and sloppy mortar; Frank had at it with a sledge hammer and then hired a more experienced mason.

In this new house, a largely open floor plan helps bring nature inside. A period colonnade separates the front hall or foyer from the great room. Large, cased openings lead to the dining room and kitchen. The box-beam ceiling is vaulted and windows are expansive, filling the public rooms with light while affording views.

Twenty-five years of collecting paid off when it came time to furnish the house. Bartered against a real-estate commission, an antique Stickley dining table and chairs center the open dining room. The oak sideboard was found in Frank’s cousin’s antiques shop right in town. A comfortable, reissued Stickley settee and pair of armchairs sit in front of the fireplace. A vintage Stickley bookcase, purchased at the Grove Park Inn antiques show, is now filled with 1920s magazines and books celebrating the Arts & Crafts era—including Hubbard’s Little Journeys books and the “Foxfire” series, comprising 14 volumes documenting oral histories of life in the Appalachian Mountains.