/ By Brendan Blowers
A custom-built home begins as an idea. It starts with a spark of inspiration or a treasured memory. A feeling occurs at a particular place and time that makes someone wish there was a way to extend it indefinitely.
For Stacey Gibson, the seed for this home was planted years ago, when she was pregnant with the first of her four children and watching an Oprah episode where interior designer Nate Berkus said: Your home should tell the story of who you are and be a collection of what you love. “I’ve always thought of that show,” Gibson says. “It’s so true.”
While vacationing in Beaulieu-sur-Mer between Nice and Monaco, Gibson walked up a winding road towards a mountain where a friend of a woman she had met at the market owned a stone home built in the middle of an ancient olive grove. “It was one of the most serene places I had ever been in my life,” she says. Gibson even took photos for reference.
She thought of the possibilities for a piece of land she and her husband had purchased; 30 acres of densely wooded property with a view of Table Rock at one end and an opposing ridge at the other. Interestingly, the previous owner had resisted selling to logging companies and the property retained its centuries-old feel.
Gabriel Builders promised they were up for the challenge of building a French Provençal estate, handling everything from concept to construction through finished interiors, which Gabriel’s LH Design Studio would tackle.
Building a French Provencal estate in Travelers Rest
Richie Martin, vice president of construction, stepped in as designer and manager for the project. He spent nights looking at homes for sale in southern France. “Our goal was to make this house look like it was several hundred years old,” Martin says. “I wanted to make it as authentic as we could.”
From the front motor court, where vehicles pull into a chip and seal driveway under the crunch of pea gravel, a forced perspective makes the home appear even bigger than its 12,000 square feet. It sits on the crest of a hill, like the entrance to a medieval village.
Gibson likes Hotel Domestique and thought the home should be built like a boutique hotel. Even the kids’ bedrooms open to the outdoors with easy access to a French-inspired landscape designed by J. Dabney Peeples, and significant installations by Dabney Collins.
The exterior blends two types of stone. Texas limestone makes up the main entrance, which is flanked on the left and right by a more rustic stone called Doggett Mountain. Martin views the home as a homestead and carriage house connected by what looks like a section that was added later. Atop it all is a handmade terracotta tile roof by Ludowici.
Inside, plaster walls curve artfully towards 12-foot ceilings and most rooms connect via an archway. “I brought in the arches to pull the walls down, so you don’t feel like you’re in a big corridor,” Martin says.
A substantial amount of reclaimed timber was utilized and Martin’s favorite part, what he calls the “eye candy,” is the home’s eighteen gas lamps. The Heirloom Companies crafted many of the interior and exterior fixtures and upfitted others reclaimed from France; several are a couple of hundred years old and were rewired for the home. They also fabricated a massive peaked outdoor dining pavilion. It is the centerpiece for Peeples’ inspired French country landscape; the terraced stone and handcrafted water features seem as though plucked from Provence, though everything was made to order and placed to maximize the Upcountry’s sightlines.
As plaster was applied by hand and the house began to take shape, Gibson began collecting art for the home. She went to Blue Spiral 1 in downtown Asheville to commission several pieces for hallways and a grand living area, and she engaged gallerist and art consultant Bracken Stansbury of Art & Light Gallery in Greenville’s West Village for original pieces for the corridors on the lower level.
A large colorful work by Cuban artist Rey Alfonso hangs in the corridor as it opens into a common area. “We needed a rather large piece for the downstairs living space that would bring color and connect with the artwork already placed without competing,” says Stansbury, who took Gibson to Alfonso’s studio at Oyé in Greenville’s North Main neighborhood to learn about his background and process in person. “For a collector to get that rare experience is special,” she says.
Just outside a home theater is a collage by George Peterson of Circle Factory made from old skateboards. The Gibson family has a long history of supporting the skate community through a foundation that builds skateparks in underprivileged areas around the world.
There’s also a large, commissioned Taylor Adams mixed media and thread abstract over the living room couch. Gibson recalls Adams explaining her process and describing what each string means. She related immediately to a line of thread representing a moment in time, mapping the story of a particular feeling inspired by encountered landscapes.
Beyond art, the home’s Provençal design also provided opportunities to incorporate period antiques. The front door is a relic from France, discovered at Architectural Warehouse in Atlanta. Gabriel’s team insulated it and updated the glass.
Crafting a Generational Home
When Gibson returned with a broken stained-glass window from the same source, Martin recommended it go above their bed. Gibson commissioned Jim “Murf” Murphy, a New York-based stained-glass conservator, to fix the piece for the bedroom and create four more to be installed throughout the house, where splashes of color were desired. The estate’s grandeur is felt most wherever windows allow light to spill in.
There are also two French cast-iron firebacks: one in the living room fireplace, the other over the kitchen range. “I wanted it to look like a working French kitchen,” Gibson says.
Designed to appear renovated over time, rather than the new construction it is, the home also embraces modern technology, such as the installation of a Savant automation system. It offers the Gibsons one-touch control of light, music, temperature and security at the property.
One challenge the Gabriel team encountered during construction was how to achieve adequate water pressure for an estate hundreds of feet above the nearest water line. The solution proved commercial. “We had to put in a massive water pump,” says Martin, “like you would find in a high-rise hotel.”
Gibson envisions the home will be generational. After spending much of the pandemic quarantined here, she had plenty of time to daydream about her children one day returning to the property with their spouses for holiday dinners around the long dining table. “I like homes to have meaning,” she says. This one checks all the boxes.
/ Photography by Firewater Photography
