The Team
The Comstocks are a family like many others believing in God, family and country. Tight-knit and travel well together, they are each other's best friends. And by welcoming others to the team, they know this family will be growing in the very near future.
Jake
The Dreamer
Now in his 3rd career, Jake is a restless dreamer who doesn't sit still for long. Designing and overseeing the entire project he says, "This is a culmination of my life's experiences and dreams and I can't wait to share all the details in my head that will make it so very special."
Amanda
The Backbone
The glue that holds this ship together, Amanda brings the yin, the fashionability and luxury to balance Jake's natural inclination to go rustic. In her core she's a host at heart and states, "I can't wait to share this place, this view, stream and forest with everyone we know."
Vallie
The Creative
Loving to share her kindness, Vallie has an innate ability to connect and create. It only makes sense she provide the creative touches that pull everything together. She sincerely feels "a stranger is a friend I haven't met."
Cade
The Doer
Preferring to work outdoors and be filthy every day, Cade spends a lot of his time moving this project forward and recently said, "The worst day here on the mountain is still better than the best day working inside."
Grow Your Vision
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the owner & developer
Having grown up here in the Smokies, it could be easy to take these mountains for granted and grow complacent about what makes them special. I love these mountains, streams, vistas and valleys. Over my lifetime I have watched the tourism industry in the Gatlinburg area change; I can distinctly remember rounding a corner near our family cabin and feeling a deep down pain at the sight before me. It was a stripped mountainside covered with new matching cabins. Forever called "the ant hill" within our family, I have hoped some day I could be a part of a more proper travel solution, more conscientious of the beauty around us.
The road getting here has been paved with hard work, consistency, persistence, passion, patience and experience in multiple seemingly unrelated careers and yet, I am now well suited for this privilege at this very moment in my life. Fortunate to be successful in business development, I have felt restless and unsatisfied for quite sometime now. I have finally released the dreamer inside me. With a creative mind and an adequate amount of energy, this project offers me a solid opportunity to go where I have never been but always wanted to go. Circumstances did not allow me to pursue my youthful dreams in architecture but here I am doing just that and so much more.
Not a developer by trade or training, I am learning as I go and asking questions of everyone I think can share wisdom. My drive comes from an ambition to create a very special place and help the world around me on the magnificent purity all around us. In our mountainside forest, we hope to create a friendly little community on a quiet mountaintop adjacent the best community in the world, Pittman Center, Tennessee. And it's a short drive from everything that makes the Smokies so exciting. It's one thing to build some cottages; it's another to put all of the finer details ttogether for one remarkable package, where the sum is greater than its parts.
Overwhelmed and underprepared, it's onward and upward to create a real place of solitude and restoration hidden beneath the canopy of these big trees and the mountains of the southern Appalachians. Bring it!
the project
Purchased in late 2021, this 260 acre mountainside rests just a couple miles from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 7 miles from all that awaits in Gatlinburg and 12 miles from the fun of Pigeon Forge and Dollywood. Almost entirely covered by mature forest, this abandoned farm hasn't been touched since 1950s or 60s and offers a look at how land here should appear, as undisturbed as possible. Running the length of the property (more than a mile), its year-round crystal-clear stream includes multiple small waterfalls and a cascade of some 40 feet. The old logging roads will provide the bed for most of our future trails and roads to three main ridges and the top of the mountain. And excavation to build these roads will be a real challenge for the crew we consider our team.
Expected to take up to 3 years, we hope to start some other projects including building a pioneer cabin, and off-grid house, a timber framed greenhouse and restore the small farm in the cove.
Presently we're calling our style Vintage Vacation Eclectic, somewhat reminiscent of vacation homes from the past drawn from people's own experiences, budgets and new design ideas like the Arts and Crafts Movement, English Cottages and Swiss Chalets and a few others. No boundaries except cost. Inspired by Emerts Cove and Elkmont, we're hoping to invoke the small community feel and vibe that was present a century ago while making significant effort to be cozy and green (eco-friendly). My goal is for friends to feel like they're at "Elkmont on the Mountain" and I can't wait to share it with you:-)
-Jake
