The new eco-friendly community of Elk View is situated just 12 minutes from downtown Asheville, the heart of a city overflowing with arts and culture. Comprised of 25 single-family homes, this community offers a profound connection with nature even with its central location. A product of AIBL Property Group and design firm Schiller Projects, the Elk View community is driven by the landscape, fitting homes into its dense forest and steep mountains while taking care of that same land through sustainable practices.
Just as Elk View fits right into the Asheville terrain, it fits well into the vision and work of Schiller Projects. “We have a focus on sustainable and high-performance projects,” says Aaron Schiller, founder of the design firm. “We design unique, high-performance homes across the United States as well as office, hotel, hospitality and retail spaces. Our critical focus is the client and finding unique expressions that reflect their identity and region.”
Black Mountain College, whose faculty and students would go on to heavily influence the landscape of modern art, served as the inspiration for the design of Elk View. Practices that both connect with nature and utilize natural materials guided the design as well, ensuring an active relationship with the natural surroundings.
“Elk View is wonderfully unique in both scope and approach,” Schiller says. “A typical housing development would ‘stamp out’ a single design across an area. Instead, we approached this 100-acre, heavily wooded, steep and varied site as 25 unique challenges set to us by the natural landscape. Each site has a different relationship to the road, to light and air, to views and to the forest around it; therefore, each response is different. Because we were also invested in driving the project through a sustainable performance lens, we bound the designs with common building components.”…