Holston Hills
One neighborhood, built across four decades
A 1920s suburb on the high ground east of Knoxville, above the Holston River. Everything I build is inside it, and that is on purpose.
How it got here
Holston Hills was one of Knoxville’s first automobile suburbs, planned in the 1920s alongside Sequoyah Hills on the far side of town. The golf course came with it — eighteen holes laid out by Donald Ross, open since 1927, and still one of the least altered courses he left anywhere.
The houses took their time. Survey maps count two dozen here in 1936, fifty-four by 1940, and more than two hundred by 1953, when the neighborhood was taken into the city. It was never built all at once by one company, which is exactly why no two blocks match.
You come in past the stone pillars on Chilhowee Drive — white and pink Tennessee marble under slate roofs, drawn by Barber and McMurry to suit the houses behind them.
What is actually standing here
Drive one loop and you pass through most of the twentieth century:
- Deep interior profiles were characteristic in the 1920s houses, including southern colonial and Gothic brick.
- Stone and pink marble through the thirties and forties, the same Tennessee marble as the entrance pillars.
- Minimal Traditional from either side of the war, plainer and smaller, along streets like Pinnacle Drive and Holston Drive.
- Mid-century modern, which the state’s own survey calls a fine collection with several notable houses in it. Alfred and Jane Clauss drew one here in 1945. Bruce McCarty — later the master architect of the 1982 World’s Fair — built one you can see straight through from the front yard.
- Brick colonials and ranch houses from the fifties and sixties, filling in the last lots.
Four decades of building means four decades of millwork. A casing profile from 1934 is not the one from 1958, and neither is on a shelf at the lumberyard.
I can and will match any existing carpentry in your home. There are, however, near-extinct varieties of wood in some homes in Holston Hills. American Chestnut, old growth Southern Yellow Pine, and some types of cedar shake are a few examples. Dependent on your project, we’ll explore what’s possible to make your home more to your liking. I’ll be close by through the entire process, and we’ll make something worth remembering for years to come!
I am ten minutes away. Not an hour.
About the dogwoods
Knoxville’s first Dogwood Trail was laid out in Sequoyah Hills in 1955. The second, a year later, was this neighborhood — and it still runs every April, past the same stone pillars and under trees that were young when the houses were new.
The “Dogwood” in the shop’s name comes from this trail.
If your house is in the neighborhood
Call me and tell me what you are working on. I would like to see it!