Elton and Mary-Margaret Vogel fell in love with their vacation home on Beech Mountain in Banner Elk, North Carolina, the moment they saw it. After a walk-through, Mary-Margaret’s first words were, “We’ve got to have this house.” They bought it the same day. Sitting on eight acres of solid rock, the house recesses into the side of a bluff on the most extreme site of the mountain. A thousand tons of rock was blasted to create the building site, and another 800 tons of structural stone was hauled in and stacked to create a rock landscape. The house appears to emerge out of the hillside, like a raptor’s perch. The drama outside is matched by that inside. Enter the front door, and at eye’s view is a 100-foot waterfall cascading behind a glass wall. Scan the floor in the foyer, and see a glass window revealing a 500-bottle wine cellar below. Look up, and witness the way the soaring ceilings and flood of natural light make a spectacle of the architectural spaces. Welcome to one of the lodges at Eagles Nest, a camp-like community of mountaintop recreation homes.
Read more In the Spring issue of La Vie Claire Magazine |