High Country, Coastal Heart

Designer Melanie Martin’s Mountain Refuge on Lake Glenville

Photography by Aaron H Photography

On Lake Glenville just outside Cashiers, North Carolina, the water lies still and pale as Melanie Martin’s stone-and-timber house opens to the spring air. Doors slide back, windows retract, and mountain air threaded with pine and lake water drifts through the rooms while an Alabama flag lifts and settles on the porch. 

Along the Gulf Coast, Martin is known in Orange Beach, Alabama, for edited, livable luxury and for rooms that  feel collected rather than delivered off a showroom floor.  “I never want anything to feel like it just comes out of a  furniture store,” she tells me. “I want it to feel created.” 

The six-acre property stretches along the shoreline with a  main house and two guest houses, all meant as a gathering  place for children and grandchildren. When she first walks into the house, the setting is spectacular, but the interiors  are dated and turned away from the water. A generous  rock-and-stone porch wrapping the main level hints at its potential, so she keeps that and, with contractor Tommy Barnes, opens ceilings, reorients the stairs, and replaces  the back wall with glass and retracting doors. 

The renewed heart of the home is a kitchen that feels like  a warm modern lodge. Pale wood floors run through the  open cooking and dining area, and a wood-wrapped ceiling with simple beams pulls the eye toward the lake. A  clean-lined island sits at the center like a piece of furniture, while above it, porcupine pendants become instant conversation pieces, their spiky, feathered shades casting  delicate shadows across the stone countertop. 

Generous windows with warm wood frames keep every task in conversation with the landscape. From the range or sink, the view is straight out to the porch and water. A full glass door and a bifold pass-through window open to a stone-topped bar outside; when the panels fold back, the wall nearly disappears, and meals and lakefront cocktails move easily between kitchen and porch.

From this luminous core, the house settles into its hillside. A wood-paneled stair hall offers a warm pause between levels, its sculptural light fixture and simple pottery leading the eye to the garden and stone terrace. Below, stone arches frame the lower porch, where a generous bed swing faces the water and rustic chairs cluster under a ceiling of soft light.

Everywhere, the architecture is tuned to the outdoors. A once-modest jacuzzi becomes a generous hot tub, partly indoors and partly out, so on a cool April evening, you can sit in the steam with mountain air on your face and the house blocking the wind behind you.

On the main level, outdoor living becomes an open-air great room. A long, weathered dining table runs the length of the stone floor, surrounded by woven chairs that invite lingering. A custom-made leather chandelier washes the table in a soft amber glow, and beyond it, a stone fireplace anchors deep-woven sofas and club chairs around solid coffee tables. Heavy timber beams and trusses rise to a vaulted ceiling, framing slices of sky and lake, while a circular, wooden beaded chandelier with candle-style bulbs adds a gentle architectural glow. Just beyond the railing, the American and Alabama flags catch the breeze, grounding this mountain refuge in coastal memory.

Upstairs, the primary suite is intentionally quiet and light. A softly upholstered bed, pale wood ceiling, and layers of linen and wool keep the room calm, with windows and doors oriented to trees and water. The adjoining bath is finished in Calcutta marble, its cool veining set against warm brass fixtures and pale cabinetry for a restrained, spa-like glow.

On the lower level, a double-queen bedroom opens directly to the porch, making it easy for guests who want to step out with a cup of coffee and watch the water. The guest houses echo the main home in a lighter key, each with generous bedrooms and close ties to porches, paths, and shoreline.

Martin’s grandchildren have already claimed the property as theirs—running along the stone walks, circling back through the courtyard, padding through the house in bare feet. That, she says, is the truest measure of success here: not just that the rooms are beautiful, but that they are used, loved, and fully lived in.

For anyone dividing life between coastal and mountain addresses, this Lake Glenville refuge offers a clear blueprint, showing how a disciplined design language can stretch from Orange Beach to the High Country and yield a retreat that is calm, intentional, and deeply personal—where the landscape leads and every space feels, in Martin’s favorite word, created.

ACCOLADES

melaniemartininteriors.com