Real Estate & Lifestyle Posts in WNC

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  August 13, 2026

Very few buildings in Western North Carolina can claim a direct line to Frank Lloyd Wright. Skyline Lodge, sitting at roughly 3,700 feet on a ridgeline three miles outside downtown Highlands, is one of them, and national travel media has spent the last several years catching up to that fact.

The most recent recognition came from Travel + Leisure, whose readers voted the property onto the magazine's list of the 15 favorite resorts in the South as part of the World's Best Awards. That is a reader-decided honor, not an editor's pick, which means it came from people who actually stayed there and filled out a ballot afterward.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  August 13, 2026

Downtown Franklin spent last Saturday covered in wet paint and loose wool, and nobody seemed to mind. ARTFEST 2026 took over the Town Square from 10 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon, free to anyone who walked up, with local artists running hands-on stations for every age that showed up.

Macon County sits about 70 miles southwest of Asheville, an hour and a half down US-74 and then south on US-441, and Franklin is the county seat at the end of that drive. The Uptown Gallery on Main Street put the whole thing together through the Macon County Art Association.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  August 13, 2026

Most of the Scottish families who shaped North Carolina never saw these mountains. They landed on the coast, moved up the Cape Fear valley, and settled the country around what is now Fayetteville. Flora MacDonald, the most famous Scottish emigrant in state history, arrived there in 1774, and half the mountain towns that have a tartan hanging in a storefront window still claim her.

The mountain story is different, and better. It belongs to the Scots-Irish, and it came in overland, on foot and by wagon, from the north.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  August 13, 2026

The bull elk in Cataloochee Valley start bugling in September, and if you have never heard it, the sound is hard to describe. It carries a long way across the open meadow at dawn, high and thin and strange, and it is the best reason to be in Haywood County before the leaves turn.

That is what September does in Western North Carolina. Summer has not quite let go, fall has not quite arrived, and the calendar fills with fairs, festivals, orchards, and mountain drives all at once. Statewide guides count more than thirty five things worth doing across North Carolina this month. A good share of them are within an hour or two of Franklin.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  August 13, 2026

The piano almost never leads in Appalachian music, which is what makes the Jeff Little Trio's Saturday night show at the Stecoah Valley Center worth a drive. Little plays a two-handed style borrowed from mountain flat-picked guitar, and hearing it come out of a piano takes a minute to get used to. The Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame inducted him in 2014.

The show starts at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 15, in the Lynn L. Shields Auditorium, in the Stecoah community of Graham County about ten miles north of Robbinsville. From Asheville it is roughly two hours west, out I-40 to US-74 and then down through Bryson City. Tickets are $25 for adults and $10 for students in grades K-12.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  August 13, 2026

Carol Fetty picked up the phone. That is where this story starts, not in a boardroom at PGA Tour headquarters and not in a marketing agency pitch deck. A vice president at a downtown Asheville art co-op read that professional golf was coming back to the mountains, called her fellow member artists, and told them the gallery needed to be part of it.

"When we read about the PGA Tour coming here, Carol got on the phone and said, 'Okay guys, we need to be a part of this,'" gallery president Margie Kluska said.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  August 5, 2026

Only two people entered the spaghetti slurping contest. The tomato poetry competition drew exactly one reader, who stood up and read to whoever happened to be standing close enough to hear.

That is how the first Haywood Grows Farm Fest opened in Canton, under a gray sky, with a full day of programming planned for a crowd the weather had not yet let through the door. Rain moved across Haywood County that morning and did what rain does to a first-year festival. It kept people home.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  August 5, 2026

Every time a Haywood County farm stops being a farm, the county gets a check. Three years of back property taxes, billed at the land's full value, due the moment that acreage leaves agriculture. For as long as anyone can remember, that money has gone into the general fund alongside every other tax dollar and helped balance the annual budget.

A draft ordinance now sitting in front of county commissioners would change where that check goes. All of it, every dollar, into a dedicated pool for protecting the farms that are still standing.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  August 4, 2026

A national travel site just named Davidson River Campground one of North Carolina's underrated places to camp, which will be news to anyone who has tried to book a riverside site there in July. The campground sits in Transylvania County, about a mile and a half up US-276 from the US-64 junction in Pisgah Forest, and it has been filling up for years.

From Asheville it is a 45-minute drive. From Waynesville or Franklin, figure an hour and change on US-64. That puts it inside easy weekend range for most of Western North Carolina, and it is one of the few campgrounds in the region where you can fish a nationally known trout stream and walk to a waterfall. Downtown Brevard and a sit-down dinner are ten minutes away.

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  August 4, 2026

There is a grassy bald about 30 minutes southeast of Asheville where you can see all the way into South Carolina on a clear day, and a new package out of a downtown bed and breakfast will get you there before lunch and pour you a glass of local wine by mid-afternoon. Bearwallow Mountain rises to 4,232 feet above the Hickory Nut Gorge in Henderson County, reachable from downtown Asheville by way of US-74A through Fairview and then up Bearwallow Mountain Road.

Pinecrest Bed & Breakfast on Cumberland Avenue is offering the trip as an add-on to a stay. Guests get a homemade breakfast at the inn, then head out with private guide Dave of Hike Bike Kayak Asheville for the morning climb. In the afternoon, Dave drives the group about 30 minutes south to Marked Tree Vineyard in Flat Rock for a guided tasting. It starts at $400 for up to four guests and runs through November 25, 2026.