Interior designer Dianne Davant has helped countless residents of the Southern Highlands create their ideal homes. All the while she carried a design in her head for her own special place. She and her new husband built that home in 2004 in Banner Elk, N.C. Today she says, “It’s been better than my dreams. I’m 98 percent happy with it; and that’s pretty darn good.”

The home of Dianne Davant and H. Lee Moffitt, located in the Diamond Creek Golf Club area of Banner Elk, N.C., features 7,500 square feet of living space on three levels.

Dianne Davant and H. Lee Moffitt both had long-established individual homes when they married in 2002. Their solution to merging households: Create a new place.
“I’d always had in my mind a house I would design,” Davant says. “I knew how I wanted it.”

A native of Blowing Rock, N.C. who has always had her main home there, she founded Banner Elk’s Dianne Davant & Associates interior design firm in 1979. In 1996, she opened a branch office in Stuart, Fla.

“Being a single girl, my house was very feminine,” she says. “It was an old Victorian. None of my furniture, except my antiques, was the right look for the new home.

Davant created pure drama with this curved stone archway leading from the great room, which is enhanced with a double-sided fireplace, to the entrance foyer.

Moffitt, a lawyer-lobbyist and former speaker of the house in the Florida legislature, is a native of Tampa, but had kept a home in the North Carolina mountains for years.

And while Davant’s house had a distincitvely female attitude, her husband’s was at the opposite end of the design spectrum.

“Lee had a masculine home,” she notes.

Finding The Perfect Spot

The couple’s first step toward creating a home together was finding a place to build it. They chose Diamond Creek Golf Club in Banner Elk because both enjoy golf, but also like their privacy and time spent with family.

According to Davant, Diamond Creek is “all about golf” and doesn’t have a lot of other activities going on.

“We looked at lots,” she says, “and chose the flattest and easiest to build on.”
A two-time survivor of cancer and founder of the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Tampa, Moffitt is a take-charge guy in many ways. For the house, however, he left the design mostly up to his wife.

The home’s poplar siding and bold rustic entrance set the tone for comfort inside.

“Lee had very few requirements,” she says. “He wanted his own bath and closet space and he wanted everything to be functional and comfortable.”

He also planned the electronic system that runs the heating, cooling and other electronics throughout the house, except in the guest rooms. Davant had not wanted guests to be bothered by the electronics, but now wishes she had extended the system throughout.

Davant, who studied design at Salem College in Winston-Salem, N.C., and graduated from Appalachian State, drew a plan for the house, turned it over to architect David Patrick Moses in Banner Elk for structural review, and the building began.

	The door into the lower level wine cellar is as much art as door; rugs, such as the one shown, were bought before the house was built, but they worked in the couple’s new dwelling.
The game table in the great room has a magnificent pastoral view.

The Dream Takes Shape

The Davant-Moffitt home has 7,500 square feet on three levels. The lower level contains a wine cellar and a den-exercise room.

The front of the house is at ground level, but the lot drops off at back to allow for a deck that wraps around the rear of the structure’s second level. Davant chose poplar bark siding for the exterior of the home, which is oriented so she and Moffitt can watch the sun set.

“We have a gorgeous view,” she says.

The main living level is designed around a center great room that includes a double-sided fireplace.

The sitting area in the master suite is a rich combination of neutral tones touched with vibrant accents and, like the rest of the home, is orientated so that the couple can view the sunset.

“When you walk into the foyer,” Davant explains, “you can see through the fireplace into the living room.”

All other rooms on this level are extensions of the great room, including guest rooms, the kitchen with its own sitting area and the main dining area. Of special note: A back stairway from the upper level gives private access to the butler’s pantry and the kitchen.

Nine-foot-wide exterior pocket doors retract into the wall so the kitchen-dining area can be totally opened to the outside covered deck. The advantage: Even when she’s busy entertaining, Davant can be part of the festivities.
“I can be putzing in the kitchen,” she points out, “and still talk with guests. The area has beautiful flow.”

A Blend of Beauties

The design is planned so that nature is brought as close to the house as possible. Too close, in one instance, when Moffitt got a nice photo of a black bear as he climbed up to the deck for a meal at the bird feeder. Other wildlife visitors include red foxes and wild turkeys who are regular visitors on the grounds.

Huge windows on the back of the house afford stimulating views of the outside while they provide a bit of whimsy in the design of small diamond-shaped windows that reflect the community’s name.

The second-floor deck once had a black bear as a visitor; the bear was in search of bird seed and Moffitt captured the visitor on film.

There are more exqusite touches: The ceiling of the great room, for instance, extends two stories so guests can look up to the third level balcony, a space that includes Moffitt’s office, a library and a sitting area where the couple can snuggle into a chair-and-a-half.

Located off the balcony, the master suite includes a sitting area plus the couple’s separate closets and baths. And though the home has super-sized dimensions, nothing is wasted.

“We live,” Davant explains, “in every room in the house.”

The third level also includes the grandchildren’s suite with bedroom and playroom for Kylie, 10, Luke, six, and Jack, five months.

“I call their room the saffron room,” Davant confides, “because they are more precious than gold.”

The youngsters are the offspring of her three daughters. Moffitt also has a daughter.

Color It Vibrant

Luxury is the theme of this handsome bedroom with its lush fabrics and regal canopied bed.

For her new home, Davant chose jewel tones for the interior.

“There’s muted sage and very traditional mountain colors,” she points out. “In addition to being traditional, they also went well with the Oriental rugs we bought before we built the house.”

Other things also fit. Her antique grandfather clock and a secretary blended well into the new home, as did some of her husband’s leather pieces. Still, most furnishings were chosen specifically for this home. which features touches that make it unique to the couple.

As the house project began, a mutual friend called to say La Dome, a once popular restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, was being torn down and inquired whether Dianne might want the wormy chestnut wood from the building.

The answer was yes.

Davant rescued the wood and had it trucked to her building site. An admittedly reluctant contractor eventually made use of most of it in the home’s interior, at such spots as the dining room ceiling and guest powder room.

“That wood came home to North Carolina,” Davant muses. Today the wood is a conversation piece. In fact, many of the couple’s guests recall La Dome fondly and enoy lively talk as a result of the relocated chestnut.

Luxury is the theme of this handsome bedroom with its lush fabrics and regal canopied bed.

Their Personal Stamp

Two less obvious touches on the property reflect special times for the couple. A heart-shaped rock that rests in the center of the deck fireplace came from a glacier in British Columbia. “Lee and I took a helicopter trip to the top of the glacier,” recalls Davant, “and I said, ’Let’s take a rock back.’”

A bench placed in their back yard is the exact bench on which Davant sat when Moffitt proposed to her during an outing to a national park. It was a gift from friends.

“They didn’t steal it,” she is quick to explain. In fact, the friends arranged to get a replacement bench for the park.

But here, in the couple’s own dream home, it simply serves as a tribute to sentiment and the merging of two special lives.