Our Home, Courtesy of Messrs. Smith and Murray

Our "special project" while on home leave was to buy a house. We've been thinking about it for a few years now, and with the housing market in the U.S. declining, we thought this summer would be an ideal time to buy.

After some -- but not much! -- debate, we decided to look at Asheville, NC. We were in Asheville last Christmas and fell in love with the town. It has so much that we like: lots of interesting people, a small town feel, a vibrant arts & music scene, and proximity to some of the most beautiful national parks in the U.S.


We started looking at houses on the Internet in January. By May we felt we had a pretty good idea of what would be available in the market. Jennifer interviewed our agent, June, over the phone from Bangkok. "We want to start looking at houses on a Monday and make an offer on something by Friday," Jennifer told her. "Is that possible?" June responded with what we would soon learn was her usual (and well-founded!) confidence: "If you haven't found a house you love within three days, then I'm not doing my job."

So that's what we did. We showed up in Asheville at nine-thirty on a Monday morning. We saw seven houses that day and seven houses the next. We decided on a house -- number 13! -- on Wednesday, put together an offer for delivery on Wednesday night, and by three o'clock on Thursday afternoon we had a signed contract with the sellers. Closing on the house took another month, but thanks to our crack team from Beverly-Hanks and Associates, everything worked perfectly. We closed on the house four days before we left the States to come back to Bangkok.


Here's our new home: 129 Pearson Drive, Asheville, NC.


It was designed and built in 1907 by a man named Richard Sharp Smith. When George Vanderbilt II, one of the richest men ever to have lived, decided he wanted a country estate, he built the Biltmore House. Biltmore, a 175,000-square-foot mansion modelled after the châteaus of the Loire Valley, is the largest privately-owned home in the U.S. Richard Morris Hunt designed Biltmore for Vanderbilt, and brought a man from England to serve as the supervising architect for the construction. That man was Richard Sharp Smith.

When Hunt died, Smith became Vanderbilt's personal architect. Smith built a number of homes in Asheville, including ours. The original blueprints show the name "G.R. Murray, Esq." We don't know who Murray was yet, but we're working on it.

The house itself is on the smaller side, about 1900 square feet (not including the basement). Behind the house is a guest cottage with an additional 480 square feet.



Both houses have been meticulously preserved and restored. Almost everything, from the cedar shake siding and hardwood floors to the blown glass windows, is in pristine condition. The house sits in the Montford neighborhood, one of the largest National Register Historic Districts in the southeastern U.S. Our neighbors include two famous bed-and-breakfast inns, the Lion & the Rose and the Black Walnut.

The main house features two fireplaces, one in the main room and one in the den. Ceramic tiles surround the firepit in each.


The main room also has built-in oak bookcases, original to the year 1907.


The kitchen is long and narrow, with beautiful tiles and beadboard walls.


The office, set up here as a bedroom, was once part of the front porch. The bathroom in the rear is not original, but the installation was done with wonderful sensitivity to the history of the house.



There are two bedrooms and two baths upstairs. Like the downstairs bathroom, the guest bath features a clawfoot tub. The master bedroom features additional closets that were built into the room -- again, done with great style!


The master bathroom was once a sleeping porch. It has been enclosed but still shows the original cedar shake siding from the exterior of the house.















The guest cottage has its own fireplace, kitchen and bathroom -- with another clawfoot tub! The ceiling was raised in the center to create a wonderful feeling of spaciousness in what is really a tiny little home.



This house really is just the perfect place for us. It's fifteen minutes' walk from the center of downtown Asheville and fifteen minutes' drive from the national parks of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We even have a swing in the front yard!


It will be a few years before we can move in, but we're so happy we've decided to buy this now. So from now on, when people ask us where we’re from, we'll be proud to tell them: "Asheville!"