Real projects. Real sites. Fifteen years of building in WNC’s mountain landscape.
A portfolio tells you more about a firm than its marketing does. It shows what decisions get made when everything is on the line — when the site pushes back, when the budget constrains, when the client’s program and the terrain are in tension — and how the design team navigates those pressures toward a building that works.
Form & Function’s residential portfolio spans 15 years of practice in Western North Carolina, across more than 30 completed projects that represent the full range of what residential architecture looks like in this region: steep-slope new builds, farmhouse renovations, modern mountain retreats, ADUs, multi-family development, and everything between. What the projects share is not a house style — it is a design approach that takes the site seriously, responds to how clients actually live, and produces buildings that belong to their specific places.
See the full residential portfolio for the complete list of completed projects, or read below for spotlights on selected recent work.
The Town Mountain Estate is one of the firm’s most comprehensive recent residential projects — a full custom home in one of Asheville’s most topographically demanding and contextually sensitive neighborhoods.
Town Mountain Road is one of the most desirable residential addresses in Asheville — ridge-top sites with long-range Blue Ridge views, mature hardwood forest, and a density and character that has made it attractive to buyers who want genuine mountain living within minutes of downtown. It is also one of the more demanding sites in the market: steep grades, limited construction access on narrow mountain roads, ridge protection ordinances, and the expectation of design quality that the neighborhood’s existing homes set.
The estate design prioritized three things: view capture from the primary living spaces, integration with the existing tree canopy rather than clearance of it, and a relationship between indoor and outdoor space that extends the home’s functional square footage across three seasons. The resulting building reads as part of the Town Mountain landscape from the approach — not imposed on the ridge but grown from it.
The Daydream Ridge project in the High Hickory neighborhood of Black Mountain is a study in site-responsive design. The lot’s combination of slope, tree canopy, and view orientation created a specific set of conditions that drove major design decisions before stylistic choices entered the conversation.
The site’s steepest grade runs roughly east to west, which meant that the conventional approach — positioning the home to minimize cut-and-fill — would have put the primary living spaces facing away from the best views. The design instead worked with the slope, stepping the home downhill in a way that placed the main living level at the precise elevation where a gap in the tree canopy opened to a long-range mountain view. That gap — maybe 40 feet wide in the tree line — became the organizing axis of the entire floor plan.
Every major design decision in the project — window placement, room orientation, deck positioning, driveway approach — was made in service of that view corridor. The result is a home that the High Hickory landscape produced as much as the design team did.
The Timeless Farmhouse in Mars Hill demonstrates what happens when contemporary design discipline is applied to a rural vernacular program — a working farmstead aesthetic that does not sacrifice the spatial quality and material richness of a serious custom home.
Madison County’s landscape is among the most purely rural in the WNC region — agricultural fields, creek bottoms, forested slopes, and a built environment that has developed from the Appalachian vernacular tradition of functional, durable, unpretentious construction. The challenge in the Timeless Farmhouse project was to create a home that read as belonging to that tradition — in scale, in material, in relationship to the land — while meeting the contemporary functional and aesthetic requirements of a custom home client who was not, in fact, a working farmer.
The design resolved this tension by taking the vernacular tradition seriously rather than applying it superficially. Board-and-batten siding in a standing seam metal roof combination that references agricultural outbuildings in the region. A floor plan organized around a central great room that draws from the dogtrot tradition of Appalachian vernacular construction. Material choices that are honest about what they are — wood that looks like wood, metal that looks like metal — rather than decorative applications over conventional construction.
The Highland Haven project in Thoms Estate presented a design challenge common to WNC ridgeline development: how to capture the mountain views that make the site valuable while maintaining meaningful privacy from neighboring properties that are close enough to be problematic if the design doesn’t account for them.
The standard solution — tall privacy fencing or dense screening plantings — works but produces a compound aesthetic that contradicts the open mountain character the site is supposed to deliver. The Highland Haven design took a different approach: using the building’s own form, the strategic positioning of solid wall sections versus glazed sections, and the orientation of outdoor living spaces to create privacy zones without enclosure.
The primary living spaces and outdoor decks face the view corridor — a direction where no neighboring homes are visible — while secondary facades that face neighboring properties are designed with limited window area and no outdoor living space. The result is a home that feels open and connected to the landscape in the directions where that connection matters, without requiring screening that would undermine the sense of openness.
Rather than ranking projects by some external measure of quality, this list represents ten projects across the firm’s residential portfolio that best demonstrate the range of sites, programs, and design approaches Form & Function has worked with in WNC. Each link goes to the project detail page.
Town Mountain Estate — Ridge-top custom home, Asheville. The firm’s most demanding site in terms of access, permitting, and view capture complexity.
Daydream Ridge — Modern mountain home, Black Mountain. Site-responsive design organized around a specific view corridor in the tree canopy.
Riceville Road — Short-term rental / private residence, Asheville. Architectural Digest recognized; demonstrates how design quality translates to rental performance.
Lofts at Biltmore — Multi-unit residential, Biltmore Village. Infill development in a historic context requiring careful attention to scale and materiality.
Timeless Farmhouse — Rural custom home, Mars Hill. Contemporary design applied to the Appalachian rural vernacular tradition.
Woodland Flow Home — Forested site, Sovereign Oaks, Asheville. Home designed around mature tree preservation and natural drainage patterns.
Timberline Revival — Addition and remodel, Bent Creek, West Asheville. Near-doubling of square footage on a wooded lot without tree removal.
EcoVista Haven — Sustainable design, Asheville. Most comprehensive integration of passive solar, natural materials, and earth-responsive design in the portfolio.
Ironwood Retreat — Mountain retreat, Black Mountain. Private retreat design with an emphasis on indoor-outdoor connection and natural material palette.
Mars Hill Barndominium — Rural residential, Mars Hill. Steel building system adapted for a high-quality residential program on a rural agricultural site.
The best residential architecture in Western North Carolina has a quality that goes beyond functional success or aesthetic appeal: it says something specific about the place it occupies and the people who live there. These are the homes that draw comment from neighbors, that guests remember years later, that owners describe not as somewhere they live but as somewhere they belong.
This quality is not a function of budget or square footage. It is a function of how specifically the design responded to its site and its client — how precisely the building position captures the light the site offers at the time of day the occupant most values it, how honestly the materials reflect the landscape they sit in, how clearly the floor plan expresses the priorities of the people who use it.
The Riceville Road residence at 1,600 square feet produces more response — more comment, more recognition, more return visits from guests — than comparably sized homes in the same market that were designed without the same specificity. The Daydream Ridge home is the house in the High Hickory neighborhood that people remember from a drive up the mountain. The Timeless Farmhouse reads as the platonic version of what a Mars Hill farmhouse should be, even though it was built last decade.
This is what good residential architecture does: it makes a place that could only exist where it exists, for the people who live in it. Meet the team that has been doing this work in WNC since 2010.
The transformation from a raw mountain site to a finished home is one of the most dramatic sequences in residential construction — and one that the final photography rarely fully captures. The story of a WNC custom home is partly the story of how the design team, the site, and the construction process negotiated with each other over the 18 to 30 months between the first site visit and the final walk-through.
On a steep site, the first phases of construction — clearing, grading, foundation installation — produce a landscape that looks nothing like what the design promised and everything like a construction site. The drama of the finished building is invisible in the raw cut slope and exposed footing forms. At this stage, the construction documents that translate the design into field-buildable instructions are doing their most important work — giving the contractor the information to build correctly through conditions where the design intent is not yet visually apparent.
The framing phase is where the design becomes recognizable for the first time — when the spatial relationships, room sizes, and building orientation that existed only in drawings and models become real, walkable space. For most clients, this is the most emotionally significant phase of the construction process. For the design team, it is the first opportunity to verify that the design decisions made during documentation are translating correctly into the built structure.
The finish phase — when the design’s material palette comes into view in the installed flooring, the completed wall finishes, the set cabinetry, the glazed windows revealing the views that the design was organized around — is when the project becomes a home. Explore the residential portfolio for completed project photography that represents the end of this sequence, and reach out to start the beginning of it for your own site.
Look for projects that share characteristics with your own: similar terrain, similar program size, similar design sensibility, similar budget range. Pay attention to how the design responds to the specific site conditions in each project — not just what the finished home looks like, but how it sits on the land, how it captures views, what materials it uses and why. If the portfolio shows evidence of the same kind of thinking your project requires, that is a stronger indicator of fit than shared stylistic preference.
The firm occasionally arranges for prospective clients to visit completed projects when the owner has agreed to host visits. This is not a standard service but is sometimes possible for the right project and the right match. Ask during an initial consultation whether any completed projects relevant to your program type are available for viewing.
No. The firm’s portfolio includes modern mountain, farmhouse, contemporary, Craftsman, rustic, and hybrid approaches because the design approach is site-responsive and client-specific rather than style-driven. The portfolio’s consistency comes from design quality and site responsiveness, not from a recognizable house style. If you are drawn to a particular aesthetic, bringing reference images and precedents to the first meeting is the most efficient way to communicate that direction.
The residential portfolio on the website represents projects completed and photographed through the most recent update cycle. The firm completes several new residential projects each year; projects that are currently under construction or recently completed may not yet appear in the portfolio. Reach out directly to ask about recent completions in a specific project type or location if the portfolio doesn’t include examples you’re looking for.
