William of HearthStone Homes placed 1st in the Chief Architect Residential Home Design Contest in April! He fell in love with log home design back at the very beginning.
“My family is my number one passion, and residential design is my second. I often find myself doing plans in my downtime, just to relax. I fell in love with residential design in high school, when I took a board drafting class. Putting pencil to paper and laying out rooms and shading in stone hatchings, was a dream come true to me. I was already an avid artist, doodling my own comics and painting. I was the Art Letterman for my class and graduated with honors 12th in my class. Being from such a small town it is all about picking the right career when you finish high school. So I chose design.
“After graduating from Walters State Community College Magna Cum Laude with an AS in Drafting and Design in 1999, I took my first design job as a Project Designer for Hearthstone Log and Timber Homes in Newport, TN. I started out right out of school working with AutoCAD to do revisions and with Hearthstone’s production software (Cadwork, Informatique) which is used for the CAD/CAM manufacturing of their log homes. Eventually, Hearthstone invested in Chief Architect (version 6) in order to create preliminary and concept design plans for their customers. Chief quickly became one of the primary design tools we used to generate design plans.
“In 2001 I left Hearthstone, Inc and floated between a couple of jobs taking my knowledge of Chief Architect with me to each. Eventually, I went to work for R. Allen Design who was using Chief Architect X2 almost exclusively to produce plans for customers. Coincidentally, they sub-contracted work back to Hearthstone, Inc. Last year I was fortunate enough to return to Hearthstone, Inc. full-time. My experience with Chief Architect allowed me to jump right back into the deep end of the pool as if I had never left. Hearthstone began in 1971 as a restorer of old log homes in the Appalachian Mountains. It wasn’t long until there were more people who wanted those homes than there were old logs for restoration. So, they set about learning how to craft new homes in the old Appalachian style. Today we design and build everything from hand-hewn log homes to timber frame homes, to hybrid homes that fuse both log and timber designs. Personally, I fell in love with the log home back when I started designing. The craft, the design, the look, and the feel of these style homes are in my blood. Being born and raised in these mountains, I really appreciate the hard work and determination of my ancestors and am excited to be back at Hearthstone Inc. doing what I love to do.
“Chief Architect has provided our company with a quick and easy solution for us to get preliminary and concept plans, models, and renderings in front of customers. Chief also accepts exports from our production software, which we use to operate our CAM manufacturing Essetre and Hundegger machines. This means the actual timber we will eventually produce looks just as it is supposed to in a customer’s Chief model.
“Over the course of my eighteen years of design experience, I’ve used AutoCAD, Revit, DataCad, Archicad, and more… Chief Architect by far has the most user-friendly interface and does the best job.”
Update: William also won 1st place in October’s Residential Design Contest and the 2017 Chief Architect Design of the Year contest – Residential Design Catagory! We want to thank him for his commitment to Chief Architect and for sharing his design process with us and our community.
Winning Design
More from William
Connect with William
(800) 247-4442
