Gary and Kathie Gamble made the move from Montana to the mountains of North Carolina to be closer to family. They knew they wanted to build a custom home, rather than moving into one that they had no hand in designing. Their research and design ideas led them to Sundog Homes.

“Trust and confidence,” according to Gary Gamble. He said they “Needed to [work with] a company that I could totally trust in two specific areas … financial trustworthiness and quality (not shortcuts). We achieved both.”

• They brought us their own building plan, designed by the same architecture firm that had designed their Montana home. That meant we worked with the architect through the entire build.
• The Gambles wanted a waterscape feature that started in the front yard and surrounded the house, almost like a moat. We had to build the home around it, as well as the ponds and waterfalls it flowed into.
• The owners also wanted a guest suite above their garage, accessible via an elevator.

Building a 6,000-square-foot mountain-top home above a lake with an attached guest suite for out-of-town visitors.

The lot on which the Gambles’ house was built required a lot of land planning and pre-construction work before it was ready for their large home. As with all Sundog Homes, we performed a homesite evaluation to ensure that the land was suitable for building on, or to correct any problems that made the land less than ideal.

Since the home sits above Lake Glenville, Sundog built a boulder sea wall to protect the shoreline from breakwater. Our team had to custom design an underground water drainage system for the home, as well.

Gamble said that Sundog’s “everyday on-site management of a very sophisticated building plan was superb throughout and their follow-up was outstanding”. We even met with the architect for site visits before, during, and after the construction of the home to make sure everything was on track, and everyone was happy.

In the end, they were very pleased with how their new lake mountain home turned out, and even more satisfied with the collaboration between Sundog Homes and the architect. Gary Gamble told us that he had found that “Most people who build in the mountains end up not liking their builder by the time the process is finally completed. We had just the opposite experience and would hire them again.”