Photos By Douglas Miller

Styled as a French Country Chateau, this magnificent mountaintop home began as sort of a puzzle. But Greenville, S.C. architect Bruce Eason provided a winning solution when he drew up plans for this palace. Today, the home at The Cliffs at Glassy is a haven for young and old alike, a place where the impressive design is superbly complemented by exquisite décor and concentration on even the smallest detail.

Martha and Bill Canata sat down with graph paper and roughed out specifications for rooms in their dream home in Landrum, S.C.

The elegantly furnished living room with its 6-foot mirror over the mantel has a 14-foot ceiling; ceilings in the home are staggered from 10 feet to 17 feet, adding to the visual interest.

Once they noted the square footage for every room – some, like the dining room, designed around existing furniture – they went to architect Bruce Eason of New South Design in Greenville, S.C. and handed him the snippets of paper.

“I gave Bruce all the pieces,” Martha recalls, “and said, ‘make this a house.’”

Eason accepted the challenge – one he compares with trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube – and developed a game plan. But with one caveat: When he revealed his drawings to the Canatas, he told them he fit in all the desired rooms, but the square footage they planned had to be expanded.

“Why’s that?” they asked, confident that their strict room measurements were adequate and totaled correctly.

“Well,” Eason said, “how are you going to get upstairs? How are you going to get from room to room?”

The Canatas laugh as they admit that, when they planned the rooms, they failed to remember the essentials: hallways, stairs and closets.

Creating The Dream
A black sign hangs near the entrance to their home. It reads “The BilMar,” a combination of Bill and Martha’s names and a play on Asheville’s Biltmore House. Like Vanderbilt’s impressive home, it also took four years for the Canata home to take shape, from finding the lot and sketching designs to locating the architect and the builder, Morgan-Keefe, the construction phase and finally, moving in in March 2006.

Windows and lighted sconces step up the wall alongside a spiral staircase leading to guest accommodations; a child’s antique table, chairs and loveseat add charm to the area under the stairs.

The process began when Bill neared retirement as a marketing executive with Pfizer Inc. in New Jersey. Together, he and Martha began to research where they wanted to build a retirement home.

“We’d look through magazines and request literature,” he recalls. “We eliminated about 75 percent just by looking at the brochures.” For the other 25 percent, they hit the road, visiting developments in the Carolinas, Tennessee, Florida and as far away as California.

The Canatas both grew up and met in Chattanooga, Tenn., and yearned to return to the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. At one point, they visited their son and his family, then living in Asheville but since relocated to Wilmington, N.C. (Their daughter’s family lives in New Jersey.) While in Asheville, they heard about The Cliffs at Glassy, planned a quick visit and found the ideal spot.

One of the things that impressed them most about the community is that developer Jim Anthony took one of the prime lots to build a chapel. Another plus: The community caters to a wide variety of interests, not just golf. While Bill loves the game – he even has a framed shot of himself on the links with famed golfer Sam Snead and other shots of himself at Scotland’s legendary St. Andrews – he didn’t want a community that revolved solely around golf.

When they surveyed lot 10 at The Cliffs, they knew they were standing on the site of their future home. The three and a quarter-acre location offers pristine mountain views, with an approximate 230-degree radius of jutting peaks and valleys in the distance. And, one of Martha’s high school friends from Chattanooga lives in nearby Greer, S.C. On a clear day, Martha can spot her house in the distance or see it really well through the telescope at her bedroom window.

Before committing to building, however, Bill got a dose of cold feet. Since they had lived more than 30 years in the New Jersey area, with quick access to New York City and immediate conveniences, he wondered if they’d enjoy life on a mountain where “it takes 20 minutes to get a loaf of bread.”

To find out, they bought a home on the other side of The Cliffs and lived there half time for three years, spending the remainder in New Jersey.

“We got used to it. If it took 20 minutes to get a loaf of bread, we bought two loaves when we went,” quips Bill. “We decided to get serious and build something.”

Solving the Puzzle

The chandelier over the dining room table is one of several antique lighting pieces in the home; it came from a house in Savannah, Ga.

Eason was surprised when the Canatas handed him snippets of room dimensions to include in his house plans, though he appreciated the couple’s thought process and preparation. From that point, it took one full year of planning and two years of building before BilMar became a reality.

“They were the ideal clients,” says Eason. “They knew everything they wanted in a house.”

While it may seem like a gamble to design a home in puzzle-esque fashion, it paid off handsomely for the Canatas. There’s a remarkable flow and cohesiveness through the nearly 8,000-square-foot plan, all of it tied together by the interesting architectural patterns designed by Eason and the elegant interior design and creative touches achieved by Martha, with input from Patty Disque of Disque Interiors in Madison, N.J., who traveled to The Cliffs twice during the project.

Before visitors step inside the house, there’s plenty to admire outside. Gorgeous landscaping, highlighted by bronze statues and two waterfalls pooling into small ponds, accentuates this grand home. One statue features five small boys walking along a fence. Eason recalls a crewmember commenting on the statue while the house was being built and Martha jokingly telling him those were her five grandsons – that she’d had them bronzed before they got too big.

Since the house has a high roofline, crews dug down nearly eight feet and positioned the house to make it more subtle from the entrance road. It appears to curve a bit, hugging the ridgeline, to give family and visitors the best views possible.

The exterior is warm and inviting, with a combination of brick, stucco and stone. Shutters and windowpanes are highlighted in a French blue paint with copper finials, vents, and clay chimney pots.

Bill Canata’s study with 17-foot ceilings provides a gallery space for wildlife art collected during travels in Africa.

“What I was attempting to do was make the house as authentic as possible in the French country chateau style,” says Eason. “To me as an architect, the detailing is what makes this house so interesting.” An Old World look is one of Beason’s specialties and, although he creates many styles, this is one he particularly enjoys.

The Canatas have filled the home with an abundance of conversation pieces. One of the first is the front door. Martha designed the door to fit a bronze, lion’s head knocker. The handcrafted door features a beveled glass inset with an intricate iron design over the glass.

“I drew this design,” says Martha, with a grin. “I can claim this door.”

They hired a New Jersey craftsman to make the door, bought the beveled glass in Greer, S.C., and contracted a Chattanooga man to create the wrought iron with hinges that swing back to allow easy cleaning of the glass.

Variety Adds Interest
Surprisingly, some of the most appealing features inside the house are the staggered ceilings. They create great visual interest and seem to tie all the rooms together with a dramatic flair. For instance, the foyer ceiling is 12 feet high. The height lowers to 10 feet in the hallway, jumps back up to 14 feet in the living room and soars to 17 feet in Bill’s study. The variety produces a stunning effect, and the 17-foot study ceiling accentuates Bill’s collections: wildlife art from his travels in Africa and Tarheel basketball memorabilia from UNC-Chapel Hill where he studied.

“Dropping the ceiling to 10 feet in the hallway exaggerates the height in the living room,” says Eason. “The staggered design makes rooms more dramatic or intimate.”
In addition, there’s great variety in flooring and colors: hardwoods, stone, tile, and luxurious patterned carpeting, along with antique Oriental rugs against blends of pastel paints – soft blues, greens, and yellows on the walls, and hand-painted tiles in a half-bath and formal pantry.

The happy sounds of a bubbling waterfall greet visitors to the Canata home.

The house includes a huge assortment of antique lighting, as well as antique furniture. An impressive chandelier, which once graced a home in Savannah, Ga., commands attention over the dining table while another chandelier, which the Canatas found in England, hangs in the foyer. In the living room, monkeys hold up lighted sconces, while a six-foot-tall mirror is situated over the fireplace and its hand-carved limestone mantel. Like the front door, Martha sketched the design for the mantel, which was sculpted in Mexico.

Though she claims no artistic expertise, her designs reflect a natural talent in this woman, who began her career as a third grade teacher, then traded in report cards to raise her son and daughter. Her style is exquisite. Each object in this home seems perfectly selected, many coming from Architectural Warehouse in downtown Landrum and Postcard from Paris, an antique store in Greenville, where she’s bought a bounty of items including a decorative antique fire screen that’s mounted above the kitchen stove. Furniture, fabric, artwork and figurines all gracefully blend into each other without clashing in any way. The result is elegant, traditional, comfortable and inviting.

Guest Quarters
A spiral staircase, housed in a castle-styled turret, leads to the upstairs guest accommodations. At the base of the staircase, Martha has arranged a china tea set atop an antique child’s table surrounded by four tiny chairs. A child-sized loveseat sits nearby, covered in the same blue floral upholstery of authentic French fabric.

While the master bedroom sits on the main floor, four guest rooms occupy the upstairs. All have their own baths, and there are two half baths on the main floor. Guestrooms are staggered around a common area, complete with a small kitchenette, TV and game table. A sitting room off one bedroom provides additional sleeping with a pullout sofa. And, for even more convenience, a washer and dryer are located upstairs for guests. Another bedroom area includes a bathroom and shower that will accommodate a wheelchair. But how do wheelchair-bound guests get upstairs?

By using the elevator, of course.

Delighting the Grandkids

The mixing of textures can be found throughout the Canata home, including in this relaxation area featuring leather and fabric furnishings, a display of varied art styles and one of the home’s several Oriental carpets.

Martha’s office is located off the guest quarters where, at first glance, it seems she has a wall bookshelf. Looking closer, one sees those books are really part of wallpaper covering a door. There’s a secret here that’s well known to the Canatas’ six grandchildren: five boys and one girl who range in age from one to 11. Behind that door is a large room over the three-car garage that they originally tapped as a storage closet.

The Canatas changed that plan when Bill said, “Where will the grandkids go to let down their guard and be free to make a mess?”

They came up with the FROG – their daughter-in-law’s name for the play space they created for the kids. FROG stands for “Family Room Over the Garage.” It’s filled with shelves of children’s books, a TV, videos, Pac Man, a ping-pong table, rows of stuffed teddy bears, and more secrets behind two traditional-looking toy chests on the far wall.

The secret: These chests hold beds instead of toys. Martha takes the lid off one of the chests and rolls it toward her. The chest front serves as the bed footboard. There are cutouts in the wall, where the two twin beds are stored. Pull them out and they’re ready for sleeping.

Movies are also a big family event in this house. When the grandkids come to visit, the Canatas take them into their own private movie theatre. The room features an antique bar that’s been modified to hold a large screen TV, two rows of connecting red leather reclining chairs and a large popcorn machine in the corner. Around the walls are movie posters featuring “The Gladiator,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Natural,” “High Noon,” “The Mask of Zorro,” and “The Magnificzent Seven.” As is apparent from the misspelling of “magnificent,” these are no ordinary posters. When Bill retired from Pfizer, the company presented him with these custom-made posters in which he is depicted as the star; even Martha’s face appears as well on “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Meant For Play Time

A bronze statue of playful children walking a fence stands near home’s entrance; it is one of several bronzes used in the landscaping.

Outside, the kids can splash in the ponds and soak up spectacular views from the patios and deck. There’s a shaded patio under the deck that Bill says is perfect for the kids to do arts and crafts since it’s an easy place to clean up. A hot tub, set on one end of the upper patio adjacent to an outdoor fireplace, is steps from the master bedroom.

When the kids and grandkids are all there, Martha has a special name for their luxury abode. Instead of referring to it as “BilMar” then, she simply calls it “Camp Canata.”

Camping never looked as good as it does here, surrounded by spectacular views in a house of breathtaking beauty.