Welcome back to another Quill List property feature! The Nook, Swannanoa Airbnb
Today’s feature takes us to a gorgeous and unique retreat in Swannanoa North, Carolina. The Nook is situated in the mountains very close to Asheville. Come along as owner Mike Belleme tells us about his special and inspiring cabin in the woods.
Mike, tell us a bit about yourself.
I was born and raised in Western North Carolina about 30 minutes from Ashewille. Kit, my wife and collaborator on the cabins, moved to the area as a teenager. As a result, we both have deep roots in the region. I’ve spent my entire career (about 17 years) as a photographer. In my work I do documentary work, portraiture, and editorial photography for personal long-term projects as well as on assignment for publications. I travel mostly around the Southeastern US for work.
Kit works for a local non-profit organization called The Racial Justice Coalition. They do local advocacy work specifically focused on the black community and local efforts toward reparations. We live in a rural area east of Asheville where we garden, forage, make jams, teas, and tinctures, and all the other fun homesteading activities. Kit is very active in the Latin dance scene here in town.
You guys sound like the most fun and fascinating couple ever! How did your short-term rental journey begin?
We ended up buying a house around 2015. It just happened to have a little extra cabin on the property. We didn’t think a whole lot of it but figured it would be fun to have a little extra space for our out-of-town guests to stay.
After a while, we decided to fix it up and start renting it out on Airbnb. That was going pretty well and I always wanted to build a small structure because I’m into building and woodworking in particular, so we decided to put another tiny cabin on the lower part of our property which became ‘The Nook’.
Our ideas for The Nook were heavily influenced by our time living in a tree house for the three years before buying our house as well as my time as a photographer documenting a primitivist community living in the woods in Western NC. These experiences shifted my values significantly and steered my lifestyle into something more connected with the natural world in all facets of life. The tree house was way back in the woods. We actually had to hike a bit to get to it each day. That shift in mindset that comes from that short walk through the woods inspired a lot of the decisions in making the Nook and keeping the area fully wooded with a short trail up to the house.
Wow, this all makes me want to go straight to the woods for the rest of this interview. What was your design process for The Nook?
We started by reaching out to our friends, Rob Maddox and Karie Reinertson of Shelter Collective. Kit and I are very immersed in the arts community here in the region. We really leaned into those relationships at every stage. We allowed our creative community to take our vision and put their own spin on it.
Rob and Karie were our main collaborators in the design, but the process was very amorphous from beginning to end. We sourced wood by finding dead logs (black walnut, cherry, ash, mulberry, oak, and others) and milling them up. As I found materials, the plans adapted to those materials. We also worked with dozens of other artists who were able to add their own creativity to the space, like our primary builders, Alex Henderson and Columbia Bullion, and woodworker, Andy McFate, who helped me design most of the built-in furniture on the fly.
The outdoor bathtub was finished about a year after the rest of the cabin. It was designed by Alex Henderson, whom we collaborated with to build and engineer. That was my favorite part of the whole process.
We knew that we wanted the design to be much more than just functional. I started to realize partway through that there were themes and concepts emerging that were the same themes that I work with in photography. That’s when I really leaned into the storytelling aspect of the structure. I began to see it more as a conceptual art piece and an extension of my photography practice.
Are there any fun stories that happened along the way of the design-build journey you can share with us?
There are two stories in particular that are some of my favorite memories! We were able to immortalize them in an art piece by Haley Nocik, an Asheville-based artist whose whimsical yet lifelike felted wool animal sculptures and fantastical characters from her own imagination are delightful and an absolute pinnacle of craftsmanship. The diorama that she made for us is her interpretation of these two stories from the building process.
The bird’s nest…
As we were preparing to add insulation to the walls, I came across a bird’s nest inside the wall right about at the spot where we put the diorama. Though sad to evict the bird, I removed its nest. To my delight, I found that the bird had used some of our building materials to make its own home inside our home – curly wood shavings mixed in with leaves, a piece of snake skin, and bits of dried moss. This bird had made its own Nook inside ours.
As an homage to this bird, Haley featured a tufted titmouse gathering material on the forest floor. The material that makes up the nest seen in the upper right corner of the diorama and on the forest floor of the scene came from the original bird’s nest.
The bunny family…
The bunny family, curled up in the burrow below, have their own story. Friend and builder Jesse Barber and I were carrying some wood down the hill to the Nook when we heard a high-pitched squealing sound. Curious, we paused for a moment to listen to where the sound was coming from. Soon we saw a bunny rabbit hopping away out of the nearby brush, then a baby bunny flopping along behind, but the squealing sound persisted.
Following the sound, I peered through the thicket of honeysuckle. I saw a little bunny burrow with a black snake coiled inside. A second baby bunny was in the snake’s mouth, just the legs sticking out. The squeal was increasingly muddled, but it was still fighting for its life. The true naturalist thing to do would have been to leave the scene undisturbed, but even though I’m a snake lover, the adorable bunny’s squeals were too much to bear. So I picked up both the snake and the bunny and removed the bunny from the snake’s firm grip. I relocated the snake and let the bunny hop along.
Bunny dens are shallow little dugouts bedded with the down fur from the mother bunny. Since the babies had clearly flown the coop, I came back a few days later and took some of the bunny fur, and gave it to Haley to use as the bedding in the bunny den in the diorama. The Nook is part of a neighborhood, but most of our neighbors crawl, slither, or fly. The diorama invites you to get to know your neighbors of all kinds.
