Why Asheville?

We knew we wanted to move from PA, but we still had to pick to where we wanted to move. Melanie wanted anywhere in the South, and I was just a bit more restrictive, limiting it to Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia.

We spent the month of May, 1997 visiting every medium and large city in those four states. Asheville won us over by a large amount because of the beauty of the mountains and the attitudes of the people.

Even though we wanted to build a house, and a concrete dome in particular, we spent quite a bit of time looking at existing houses to see if we could find what we wanted with less effort than building. We couldn't find anything that completely suited us, but we did find a perfect piece of land.

The views from the site were extraordinary, and we were naive enough at the time to not really understand that views come with elevation, and elevation creates many construction challenges. These unfolded over time, but at the beginning we were smitten with the views and the dream of building a house and moving to North Carolina.