The Wright-Inspired Lodge on a Highlands Ridgeline That National Magazines Keep Covering

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.

For a 40-key property up a narrow mountain road in Macon County, competing against resorts with spa wings and golf courses and marketing budgets to match, that is a notable result.

An Award Decided by the People Who Slept There

The Travel + Leisure World's Best Awards work differently from most travel accolades. Readers score properties on rooms and facilities, location, food, service, and overall value, and the magazine tallies the results. There is no judging panel, no submission fee, and no way to lobby an editor into a placement.

That distinction matters for a place like Skyline Lodge. The property does not have the amenity list that usually wins these categories. What it has is a setting, a building with real history, and a restaurant people drive up for, and enough guests apparently felt strongly about that combination to vote it into the top fifteen across an entire region.

The lodge has also turned up repeatedly in Travel + Leisure's editorial coverage, including roundups of the best weekend getaways in North Carolina and features on the revival of the American motor lodge. Beyond that magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, Southern Living, Elle Decor, House Beautiful, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal have all written it up, and the Journal ran it as a stop on a Blue Ridge Mountains road trip.

Anyone who lives on the plateau has watched this build slowly. The Highlands and Cashiers corridor has drawn wealthy summer visitors since the 1800s, but the national design press paying sustained attention to a specific Macon County building is newer, and it has changed who shows up in town.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Connection Hiding Up Skyline Lodge Road

Howard Randall commissioned the building in 1929 and hired Arthur J. Kelsey to design it. Kelsey had studied and worked under Frank Lloyd Wright, and he brought that training with him to the ridge above Highlands.

You can read it in the building without knowing any of the history. The lodge runs long and low along the contour of the mountain rather than rising up off it. The materials are native granite, chestnut, and hand-cut cedar shakes, all of them pulled from or matched to the surrounding forest. Guest rooms open onto winding exterior corridors rather than a central interior hallway, which keeps you moving through open mountain air every time you leave your room.

That was Wright's basic argument: a building should belong to its site. On a plateau where plenty of newer construction is visible from a mile away, Skyline Lodge does the opposite and mostly disappears into the tree line until you are nearly on top of it.

The property today holds 39 guest rooms and one suite. That is small by resort standards and it is part of why the place works. There is no way to feel processed through a building that size, and the common areas, the courtyard fire pits, the lounge, and the fireplaces tend to put strangers in conversation with each other.

Ninety Years of Boom, Collapse, and Rescue

The lodge's history has not been smooth. It opened in the mid-1930s as a luxury retreat aimed at people who still had money after the 1929 crash, which was a narrow market even in a good year. Randall died and the property closed in 1938, barely into its run.

It sat through the lean years until someone stepped in during the 1950s and brought it back. For the next several decades it operated as a mountain lodge of the ordinary sort, familiar to locals, unremarkable to anyone outside the region, and slowly wearing down the way these buildings do when the roof, the wiring, and the plumbing all age at once.

The current chapter started when Indigo Road Hospitality Group, a Charleston-based company, took on a full renovation and reopened the lodge in July 2021. The work leaned into the mid-century bones instead of papering over them, which is the choice that made the rest of it possible. A gut renovation into generic mountain-modern would have erased the reason anyone writes about the place.

That is the part worth appreciating for those of us who have watched older WNC properties get demolished, subdivided, or renovated into something unrecognizable. Highlands came close to losing a building that cannot be replaced, and nothing about the rescue was guaranteed at any point in that ninety-year stretch.

The National Register Listing That Made It Official

In June 2022, the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources announced that Skyline Lodge had joined the National Register of Historic Places. The listing came a year after the property reopened, and it put a formal stamp on what the architecture press had been saying informally.

The nomination cited the lodge as locally significant under two criteria. The first covers entertainment and recreation, recognizing the building as a hotel constructed to capitalize on the tourist industry that had been shaping Highlands and Macon County for decades. The second covers architecture, describing the lodge as a rare and highly intact example of a Mid-Century Modern resort-style hotel that demonstrates the importance of Wrightian influence on Modernist design.

That second point carries the most weight. Plenty of buildings in the region are old. Very few are architecturally significant on a national scale, and fewer still have survived with their original design intent legible. The word the nomination used was intact, and that is the hard part.

National Register listing also brings practical consequences. It opens the door to federal and state historic preservation tax credits for qualifying rehabilitation work, which often decides whether an owner restores a historic property or replaces it. North Carolina's historic tax credit program has saved a substantial number of buildings across the western counties, from downtown storefronts in Waynesville and Sylva to mill buildings and hotels.

Listing does not restrict what a private owner can do with their building, a point people often misunderstand. It is a recognition and a financing tool, not a restriction.

Oak Steakhouse and the Case for Driving Up for Dinner

Skyline Lodge houses Oak Steakhouse, which operates as a full restaurant rather than a hotel dining room that grudgingly seats outside guests. The menu runs on Certified Angus Beef with produce pulled from area farms, and the room takes the same ridgeline view that the guest rooms do.

For locals, that reframes the property. You do not need to book a night to experience the place. A Friday drive up from Franklin runs about forty-five minutes on US 64 East, and from Cashiers it is closer to twenty-five. Sylva and Waynesville are longer hauls but still doable for an occasion.

Reservations matter here, particularly on summer weekends and through October when the plateau fills with visitors. Highlands has a small number of serious restaurants and a large number of people wanting tables, and the math does not favor walk-ins.

The lodge grounds are worth arriving early for. The outdoor courtyard has fire pits going when the temperature drops, which at 3,700 feet is most evenings outside of high summer. Hiking trails run off the property directly, and Whiteside Mountain, Dry Falls, and Bridal Veil Falls are all short drives away.

What National Attention Does to a Small Mountain Town

Recognition like this cuts in more than one direction, and anyone who has lived here through the last decade knows it.

The upside is real. National coverage brings visitors who spend money at restaurants, galleries, and outfitters across Highlands, and it extends the season past the traditional summer window into spring and late fall. It also validates preservation work, which makes the next restoration project easier to finance and easier to justify to a skeptical lender.

The complications are equally real. Highlands has been a high-cost market for a very long time, and increased national visibility does not push prices down. The town's population multiplies several times over between winter and August, and the housing stock reflects that pattern, with a large share of homes sitting empty much of the year while the people who staff the restaurants and shops commute in from Franklin and beyond.

Both things are true at once. A building that nearly did not survive got restored, listed, and celebrated, and that is worth something on its own terms. The pressures that come with attention are worth naming honestly rather than pretending they are not part of the story.

Making a Weekend of It

If the award has you curious, the plateau is worth a full weekend rather than a single meal. Highlands fits a lot into a few walkable blocks, with the Highlands Playhouse, a strong gallery scene, and the Highlands Biological Station and its botanical garden all within easy reach of Main Street.

The waterfalls are reason enough to make the drive. Dry Falls lets you walk behind the sheet of water on a paved path, and Bridal Veil Falls sits close enough to the road that you can practically see it from your car. Whiteside Mountain gives you one of the best summit views in the state for about two miles of walking on a loop trail.

Timing shapes the experience considerably. Late September into October brings peak color, and the elevation means Highlands turns before Franklin and the lower valleys do. Summer draws families escaping heat from Atlanta and the Carolina midlands, since the town regularly runs fifteen to twenty degrees cooler than the flatlands. Spring is quiet and the water runs hard. Winter is the cheapest and emptiest stretch, with the caveat that mountain weather can shut the roads without much warning.

What strikes me most about the Skyline story is what it says about this corner of the state. A building sat on a ridge for ninety years through a failed opening, a closure, a rescue, and a long slow decline, and it turned out to be worth more than anyone realized. That pattern repeats across Macon, Jackson, and Haywood counties in ways most people never notice.

If the mountain life around Highlands and Franklin ever moves from a weekend idea to something you want an address for, I am around and happy to talk through what the market actually looks like up here.

Sources: Skyline Lodge press page, Skyline Lodge about page, Indigo Road Hospitality Group, The Southern Scoop on the National Register listing, NC DNCR, WNC Magazine

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is Skyline Lodge in Highlands NC located?

Skyline Lodge sits at 470 Skyline Lodge Road in Highlands, North Carolina, about three miles from downtown along a winding climb up the mountain. The property rests at roughly 3,700 feet on a ridgeline in Macon County, surrounded on nearly every side by Nantahala National Forest. The drive from downtown Highlands takes about ten minutes, though the last stretch is narrow and steep enough that you will want to take it slowly. From Franklin, plan on roughly forty-five minutes by way of US 64 East, and from Cashiers about twenty-five minutes heading west.

What Travel + Leisure award did Skyline Lodge win?

Skyline Lodge was named one of readers' 15 favorite resorts in the South in the Travel + Leisure World's Best Awards, which are decided by reader votes rather than by an editorial panel. Guests score properties on rooms, location, food, service, and overall value, so the ranking reflects actual stays rather than a press tour. The lodge has also appeared in Travel + Leisure roundups covering the best weekend getaways in North Carolina and newly renovated motor lodges nationwide, along with coverage in Condé Nast Traveler, Southern Living, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal.

Who designed Skyline Lodge and why is the architecture significant?

Arthur J. Kelsey designed Skyline Lodge, and he trained and worked under Frank Lloyd Wright. The influence shows in the low horizontal massing, the native granite, the chestnut interiors, and the hand-cut cedar shakes that let the building settle into the ridge instead of standing above it. When the National Register of Historic Places listed the property, the nomination cited it as a rare and highly intact example of a Mid-Century Modern resort hotel demonstrating Wrightian influence on Modernist architecture in the region. Very few Wright-lineage buildings of this scale survive intact anywhere in Western North Carolina.

Is Oak Steakhouse at Skyline Lodge open to people who are not hotel guests?

Yes. Oak Steakhouse operates as a full restaurant inside Skyline Lodge and welcomes diners who are not staying overnight, which makes it a realistic dinner destination for anyone in Highlands, Cashiers, Franklin, or Sylva. The menu centers on Certified Angus Beef with produce sourced from area farms, and the dining room takes advantage of the same ridgeline views the guest rooms do. Reservations are strongly recommended, especially on weekends and through the busy summer and leaf season stretches when the plateau fills up with visitors and second-home owners.

When is the best time of year to visit Skyline Lodge?

Late September through late October brings peak color to the plateau, and the elevation means Highlands turns earlier than Franklin or Sylva sitting lower down. Summer is the other high season, when the town's cooler temperatures draw families escaping heat from Atlanta and the Carolina lowlands. Spring is quieter and the waterfalls run hardest, which makes it a good window for hiking Whiteside Mountain or visiting Dry Falls without crowds. Winter is the slowest and least expensive stretch, though mountain weather can close roads, so check conditions before committing to the drive up.