Real Estate & Lifestyle Posts in WNC

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 22, 2026

A house in Waynesville turns 150 this summer, and instead of a plaque and a handshake, Haywood County is giving it a two-day festival. Blue Ridge Heritage Weekend returns to the Shelton House campus at 49 Shelton St. on Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 8-9, and this year it doubles as a birthday party for the building itself.

The Shelton House has been home to the Museum of North Carolina Craft and History for decades, sitting a few minutes off US-23/74 and about 35 minutes west of Asheville on I-40. Admission is free, the event happens rain or shine, and after eight years the festival has grown into one of the better craft gatherings in the region.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 22, 2026

There is a hiking trail on this Waynesville property that does something almost no private trail in the country gets to do. You walk it far enough and the private land simply ends, and you are standing in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

That trail belongs to Elk & Embers, a 108-acre retreat sitting at roughly 4,000 feet in Haywood County. It opened in April 2025 with a mix of safari tents, cabins, and a treehouse, rates starting near $425, and almost no signage announcing it exists. AFAR reviewed it recently under a headline that got the whole thing right in one line: the national park starts in your backyard.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 22, 2026

A tempeh Reuben served on Lexington Avenue in downtown Asheville has collected close to 1,750 reviews and a 4.6-star average, and one of the people who left a review noted it was their first vegan meal ever. Another called it maybe the best vegan Reuben they had eaten anywhere.

That sandwich, from Rosetta's Kitchen, anchors a new national roundup naming the top five vegan restaurants in Asheville. The list was built from Google ratings, with Tripadvisor and Yelp feedback layered in, and every restaurant that made it clears 4.5 stars across a meaningful pile of reviews. No single-visit hype, no one-off write-ups.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 22, 2026

Pickleball courts in these mountains fill up before eight in the morning, and anyone who has driven past a park in Franklin, Sylva or Waynesville on a summer weekday has seen it. Retirees, teenagers, people on a lunch break, all of them chasing a plastic ball around a court the size of a driveway. Picklepalooza takes that crowd, puts a bracket around it, and turns a morning of paddle sport into groceries for families across Western North Carolina.

That is the whole idea. Entry fees, sponsorships and donations collected at the courts buy food for people in this region who are still short of it. [VERIFY: insert the confirmed event date, host venue, host town and beneficiary organization from the Citizen Times article.]

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 22, 2026

A garage in Bethel has turned out albums and songs that climbed the charts, and that was never the plan. Purple Ridge Recording Studio sits on the second floor of a building Mark Pinkston put up next to his house, and the first set of blueprints called for a gym.

What went in instead was a recording room designed by an acoustician who works with studios around the world, framed largely in wood, and stocked with materials that had to cross an ocean to get to Haywood County. Pinkston never advertised it. Musicians found it anyway.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 21, 2026

A new Indian restaurant called Andaaz has opened in Asheville, and the Asheville Citizen Times got inside for a first look. For anyone in Western North Carolina who has spent a few years working through the same short list of takeout menus, a new Indian kitchen in Buncombe County counts as actual news.

Asheville is about 70 miles from Franklin, a run north on US-441 to US-74 and then east on I-40 that takes a little over an hour on a clear day. From Waynesville it is closer to 35 minutes, and from Hendersonville you are 25 minutes up I-26. That puts Andaaz well inside the dinner radius for most of us, which is exactly why Asheville openings matter to people who do not live there.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 21, 2026

Franklin is spending just over $6.6 million to quadruple how much treated water it can hold at any given moment, and the practical result for Macon County water customers is that the maintenance restrictions everyone grumbles about should largely disappear.

The treatment plant sits on Industrial Park Loop, just west of town off US-441, about an hour and fifteen minutes southwest of Asheville. The town built it in 1975, and a lot of the original equipment is still doing the job.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 21, 2026

Twenty artists from North Carolina's far western counties are packing up their clay, fiber, metal, paper, and wood and heading east this August. Connecting to Place II: Blue Ridge Craft Trails Invitational 2026 opens August 7 at Mars Landing Arts Center in Mars Hill and runs through September 27. Admission is free.

The work comes from Franklin, Waynesville, Dillsboro, Bryson City, Cullowhee, Canton, Cherokee, Maggie Valley, and Brasstown. For a lot of Asheville-area gallery-goers, that is the part of the state they drive through on the way to somewhere else. This show puts it all in one room.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 21, 2026

Five bats hit a mist net strung across a gap in the Nantahala National Forest this summer, and the biologists who worked them loose realized within a minute that they were holding a species North Carolina had not confirmed in a net in more than a decade.

All five were Indiana bats. All five were reproductive females, which meant they were not lone wanderers passing through. It meant there was a colony somewhere close, raising pups, in a forest most people assumed the disease had emptied.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 21, 2026

The mountain bikers got there first. Friday morning, a group of riders dropped in at the top of Bracken Preserve's new trail system and rode it all the way down, rolling out at the bottom right as Brevard Mayor Maureen Copelof was ready to start the ribbon cutting. Nobody scripted a better opening than that.

City officials, conservation groups and a good crowd of supporters had gathered to celebrate the opening of a 34-acre expansion to the preserve, and the new trails that came with it: the Mac Morrow Trail, the Bailey Loop and the Bailey Connector. The city purchased the additional acreage in 2024, and the work of turning it into something people could actually use took the two years that followed.