G Home: Home Resurrected

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Home Resurrected

G Home

If you want to get inside Dwain Skinner’s head to understand how the artist recovered and put together the pieces of his recreated, L-shaped farmhouse in the foothills of Landrum, start in the kitchen and ask him about the door to the walk-in pantry. He’s not sure where the black-framed screen door came from originally, probably some country store somewhere in the Carolinas. He spotted it and another like it at a Rock Hill junk shop while a student at Winthrop College as the 1980s faded into the ’90s.

Dwain often walked to nearby country stores during his childhood spent in Greer, when it was still a Mayberry kind of town. So when he saw the screened doors, he was struck not only by the nostalgia they stirred but was also intrigued by their unusual design. He had been to enough estate sales and thrift shops with his family to know the pieces were a good find.

Doors like that might go for $250 now, but Dwain guesses he paid $15 for both. “I was like, twenty years old, and I had them sitting in an apartment with no idea what I was ever going to do with them.” His college girlfriend, Lisa, wondered, too. Even though Dwain already told her he planned to marry her, she could not envision that one of those doors would one day be in her kitchen. All he said was, “I think they’re cool.”

It was back then, before the green movement started in housing, when curbside recycling was still catching on, that Dwain started to amass the materials he and Lisa would use to one day build and furnish this 3,300-square-foot farmhouse. He eventually would fill several barns and an eighteen-wheeler on his grandmother’s farm with salvage (some of which he still has yet to use) from several sites, including an 1870s farmhouse that he happened upon in rural, northern Greenville County. The modest $1,600 he paid to gut the post-Civil War house supplied much of the material for the Skinners’ new homesite—he saved everything from the staircase, which is prominently featured in the main house, to fireplaces, floor joists, and studs.

The endeavor has not only been eco-friendly (and economical), it has allowed Dwain—a graphic artist, carpenter, and now contractor—the chance to create on a grand scale while satisfying his devotion for items from yesteryear. Not surprisingly, Dwain prefers to travel by back road when going from here to there, and when something catches his eye, whether it’s an abandoned house, a bathtub at the edge of someone’s backyard, or a sign for a forgotten business, he can’t help but consider how he can use it in his home. “I guess that’s the artist in me,” admits Dwain, who just turned 40, “to always be creating or building something.”

His larger canvas is a 17½-acre parcel, secured in 2000 through a family friend who was selling off acres of an inherited estate to cover taxes. The friend offered as much as they wanted at a good price. Now, the Skinners only wish they’d bought more.

The couple vividly remembers seeing this land for the first time: Two creeks running on opposite sides of the knoll where their house now sits and meeting in a crescent-shaped pond. Then, there is the view of the mountains. “I mean it was breathtaking at first when we saw it,” Dwain says. While reading about the area, they saw references to the days when Native Americans lived by the twin creeks and learned how the woods later hid homebrew. “This area is called the Dark Corner because they used to moonshine here,” Lisa says, “and we actually have found stills on our property.”

The Skinners would come to call it Crescent Pond Farm and use the same name for Dwain’s custom-furniture company. With help from his father, Dwain started construction on a cabin that was supposed to be for weekend getaways. At the time, he and Lisa and their new daughter lived outside Charleston, where Dwain worked as an artist for the city newspaper. But the couple became disenchanted with housing opportunities in the escalating coastal market, and before the cabin was finished, decided to move here to build their dream home and be closer to family.

Lisa returned to nursing full time so Dwain could serve as the designer, contractor, and chief laborer. He spent a full day watching the sun move across the sky and illuminate the land before deciding where to place the main house. “It’s the best view, and it’s the middle of the property,” he says. But it required an expensive, 1,500-foot driveway from Glassy Mountain Road that had to be built over one of the creeks.

Today, as visitors drive up, they first pass the creek-side cabin; then comes a homemade playhouse for daughter Grayson. Atop the hill, they find the main house in addition to a covered well, a relocated smokehouse, and a bustling chicken coop constructed from locust trees and barn wood.

The family’s cream- and khaki-colored home is built into the hillside, with the still-unfinished basement accessible from the back. In front, the L-shaped design, which Dwain based on a Campobello farmhouse, allows for a kitchen garden.

As with much of the exterior landscaping, Dwain used rock recovered from a plantation outside Tryon for the garden pathways, and he hand-cut the tops of the fence pickets. Posted at the garden’s center is a bee skep basket, a memento from one of the Shaker villages the Skinners have visited during their travels and a sign of the simple, primitive style celebrated inside.

There are lots of exterior doors along the front and back porches, allowing for excellent cross breezes when opened. Most of the time, though, everyone uses the entrance that extends past the laundry room and leads straight into the kitchen.

The focal point here is the kitchen island, which Dwain fashioned from the counter of a country store in operation generations ago in Woodruff. It took him more than two years to convince the great-grandson of the store’s owner to sell it. The country-store feel extends into the walk-in pantry, where there’s an antique icebox with canisters of dry goods on top, and 10-foot-high shelves, inspired by the basement pantries of the Biltmore House, that are stocked with a mixture of vintage cans and modern convenience foods.

The light fixtures above the island came from a Chicago sewing factory, while Dwain retrieved the tin ceiling tiles from an old Charleston building damaged by fire, paying $50 for the lot. Dwain cleaned them up and fit the tiles together on a grid. He faced similar jigsaw-puzzle challenges as he constructed many of the home’s interior walls with tongue-in-groove pine recovered from his grandmother’s 1870s farmhouse.

The pine is hand-planed and, in several cases, Dwain and Lisa decided to keep the original paint, including surprising shades of rose, lime, and eggshell blue. In the dining room, Dwain lifts up a framed photo of his daughter to show a phone number that someone wrote on the wall long ago. Lisa often teases her husband that he is an old soul trapped in a new body because of his passion for finds like these. “It’s such a love of his, and he displays so much excitement about it, you can’t not love it as well.”

With every step through their home, there’s a piece of history: The Ace Cleaners sign in the laundry room. The wooden shelves and sliding ladder in the den that came from a Walterboro pharmacy. The light at the bottom of the staircase, saved six decades ago from Dwain’s grandparents’ church.

Upstairs, there are three bedrooms, but it’s actually the master bath that has the best stories. Dwain spotted the footed bathtub in a backyard and bought it for $40 from a man who renovated the dorms at North Greenville College years ago. Lisa requested the circular shower after seeing one like it at a Kohler design center. Dwain made the bottom of the shower from a sheep feeder, covered it with truck bed liner, and had the shower curtain and rod customized by an awning company.

A hand-crank device next to Dwain’s extra-tall sink harkens back to the days when pieces of soap had to be shaved off. Then there’s the rusty sign for Lady Faire Beauty Shop out of Spartanburg. “Since I was a graphic design major, I’m always mixing in old signs and old letters,” Dwain says.

Down in the basement, Dwain has installed a wine closet, and he intends to finish off the rest of the space with a fourth bedroom, a rec room for Grayson, and a canning pantry for Lisa—a chance to use the other screened door that’s been in storage since college.

There are plans for more outbuildings on Crescent Pond Farm, including a garage, potting shed, and an artist’s studio, and the couple is already sizing up crank windows at a Greenville factory to use for a greenhouse. Dwain, it seems, will always be collecting materials for his next project, even if he’s not sure what it is. His wife has become hooked on the hunt as well.

“Now I drive down back roads, and I find myself unconsciously looking for old houses to tell him about,” Lisa says. “They’re like treasures. You find them, and if you get the honor to try to salvage one, you get to walk through another person’s life for a short period of time.”