Twenty-two acres. A view of the mountains that changed with the light, that was different at six in the morning from how it was at noon from how it was at three in the afternoon from how it was at dusk
when the light went sideways through the valley and everything turned that particular color of late gold that North Carolina mountains do in autumn.
I oriented the house toward the view.
Every major room faced the mountains. The kitchen and living room had floor-to-ceiling windows that I specified at the beginning and refused to compromise on regardless of what the budget conversations required because the windows were not a feature, they were the reason. A house on that ridge with
small windows would be a house that had failed to understand why it was on that ridge.
The stone fireplace was local fieldstone. The beams were reclaimed white oak from a barn that had come down in a storm in Madison County and I drove out to the wreckage myself with a contractor named Pete who had been with Holt Ridge for three years and who understood without being told that
