We unexpectedly found our current home and garden on a cool, rainy day in May 1998. I had pretty much given up finding a place and was beginning to make noises about living under a bridge, or leaving for another country, when our realtor insisted on taking us to one more place she’d heard about. The older neighborhood was off Alcoa Highway, and I had long said I’d never live off that speedway. But as we drove up into the forested hills and down the long private driveway, our car was enshrouded by fog drifting through from the nearby Tennessee River. Soon—like Brigadoon—house and woodland emerged from the clearing mist. Immense swathes of rocky ledge beneath towering trees revealed a sublime setting of water, woods and rocks unlike any other.

The house had not sold because it was unique and somewhat dated in its Mid-Century appearance, but its construction was superb. It would afford Kenneth the opportunity—for the first time ever—to restore a structure where every surface was level and plumb, and every corner and juncture square. Theresa would need to pay close attention to the site—embedded with stone, water and shade—and take on an entirely new set of lessons in tending a landscape towards what has come to be known as ecological gardening in a natural woodland.

On that first visit, as on most days here, we could hear bird song from every direction, the splash of a waterfall nearby, the distant rumbling of a train on the other side of the river, the occasional fog horn of barges, and the honking of geese traveling above. The landscape felt alive but also peaceful and quiet—even more so from inside the substantial walls of the house and looking out from its many full-length windows. When we came back a second time that evening to check on the property again, the skies had cleared and we were greeted by the subtle smells of wildflowers and native plants, and a rosy, resplendent sky extending all around the western edge of the cove and above the crowns of the trees. Clearly, we were meant to settle in and care for this place.

The house of nearly 4,000 square feet was built by Southern Cast Stone in the early 1970s for the family of one of its management team and it is an exceptional abode. Walls are all concrete block, stacked vertically and steel-reinforced, with ample insulation. Steel I-beams run the structure’s 70-foot long north-south axis and support the four cantilevered balconies. Floors and roof are span-deck concrete—8” hollow core plank and 6” roof channel—material typically used in commercial buildings and parking garages. The design grid is entirely based on multiples of 3 and 4 and draws elements from Mid-Century Modern, deck house construction, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian homes.

Four dozen full-length, double-pane insulated windows and six sets of sliding glass doors look out on to surrounding pathways, gardens, heritage trees and boulders of a historic marble quarry that sent marble by barge on the nearby Tennessee River to construct the National Gallery (1937-1941) when it was the world’s largest marble structure. Signs are still evident in the landscape of the oxen path and iron pins that pulled the marble blocks down to the Tennessee River and on to barges.

The house’s simple rectangular shape—very much tongue-in-cheek, we call it “Early Motel”; its siting deep in a marble quarry vein and placed squarely over a creek bed; and its shallow 3/12 roof slope—all combine to make it and its placement one-of-a-kind. On the interior, there is a substantial amount of fine carpentry of different wood species—including exotics, cedar, oak, walnut, persimmon and, especially, irreplaceable American chestnut.

We are fortunate to have the original blueprints, courtesy of Wendy Warren, granddaughter of Millard Robert Warren, and they indicate that our house was designed by M. R. W. with principals and workers at Southern Cast Stone who knew what they were doing. Some say that the house was originally intended as a model for producing more homes on a larger scale, but the expense of this first model demonstrated that the cost was far too great for a private residence in a competitive market. We are grateful to them all for how well they built and, especially, managed to capture and manipulate light in this solid, substantial structure. The very deep roof overhangs reduce glare and heat at the same time as they render light and shadows like that in Japanese architecture.

Recent renovations in 2013-2016 gradually added custom tile floors and some natural ventilation in the main living space on the upper floor, and opened up the north end wall in lieu of adding on a screen porch. The original wood ceiling—replaced by a too-thin stippled drywall ceiling after a small smoke fire in the early 1980s—has been restored with cypress in exterior soffits as well as ceilings. All electrical and lighting has been updated and much of it replaced. A drainage project to handle water from a hill above has added several retention ponds on higher levels and catch basins for funneling water to the three main culverts that run under the foundation.