When Mary and Chris set out to build a cabin in the rolling hills of Brevard, North Carolina, they wanted more than a getaway — they wanted a design that could feel like home today and adapt for the future. Their search led them to modern cabin plans from DEN Outdoors, where they found the Alpine 2.2, a design that balanced clean, contemporary style with practical, builder-ready details. To complete their vision, they paired it with a detached garage modeled off one of DEN's tiny house plans, giving them flexible space for storage, vehicles, or future use as an accessory dwelling unit.
What makes their story stand out is how they got there. After a design-build team sent costs spiraling out of control, Mary and Chris were on the verge of selling the lot and walking away entirely. Instead, they found DEN — and stayed on budget, on design, and on track. It's proof that great design paired with careful planning can deliver both peace of mind and a timeless home.
Going with Modern Cabin Plans Over a Design Team
Mike: Tell us a little bit about yourselves and where this project is, and which DEN design you ultimately built.
Mary: My name is Mary Shanklin. This is my husband Chris Teman. We built our DEN outside of Asheville in Brevard, North Carolina. We had purchased this lot — it's a half-acre lot — probably around 2018. And quite honestly, we went with a design-build team initially. We really encountered a lot of runaway costs, and it really didn't accommodate what we hoped to accomplish. We were ready to give up. We were ready to park the job, sell the property, and move along.
Mike: Whoa. So tell us what happened next.
Building a Garage with Loft to Match the Home
Mary: We were looking at other houses. It's a little bit early into Covid when it was really difficult to find builders. But we happened to find a great builder who lived by us — Ryan Jacques with Going Green Builders, a little bit more environmentally conscious. And Ryan, kind of asking us to find the design, I stumbled into DEN and just instantly saw that it was really what we wanted to accomplish: bringing the outdoors in.
Mary: We are in our sixties. And what we get the most compliments on, actually, is the DEN garage — modeled off of one of the DEN tiny house plans. We could make it an accessory dwelling unit in the future if we ever needed to.
Chris: The garage is 20 x 12, 12-foot side walls, and it's got a loft at a little over nine feet inside. It could be redone as an accessory dwelling unit.
Building with Cabin Plans That Fit Their Lifestyle
Mike: What do you currently use the loft for?
Chris: It's unfinished right now, so really just storage. But once we finish it, it could be a kids' playroom, grandkids' playroom, some kind of studio.
Mary: I have visions of it being my map room where I get to spread out all my maps and figure out where I want to go hiking, biking, and exploring. But we're still working on that. That's phase two.
Chris: Our builder had actually built one of these designs as a home for someone else, so he had the plans already — he could build it without any effort and gave us a really good price on the garage. And one of the reasons we liked the first-floor master bedroom so much was the living area on the first floor without necessarily needing to go upstairs. That became increasingly important as we thought about it long-term.
Mike: The buildings look incredible. This in-between patio space is really charming. Do you guys spend a lot of time there?
Mary: We do. And what's really nice about it is the passive solar situation. You've got that full bank of floor-to-ceiling windows, and in the winter we get all that sunlight in. But in the summer, it's shaded. That little patio area gets the benefit of shade — a lot in the summer, which we appreciate.
Customizing Cabin Plans for Comfort and Function
Mike: Give us the interior tour. Where do you guys like to spend time?
Mary: We definitely had a little help on the interior design, but it really is a textbook DEN on the interior. This is a pretty inviting place — this morning we had a fire, and it really does heat up the house. It's form and function. We did the splits and kind of a low-profile look. There are these lights we love — just called a Sirius light — everybody who's come in, their jaws just drop.
Mike: I was recently in an Alpine 2.2 and it is just a phenomenal space.
Mary: So much function. You can see the loft up there. During the day, we're down in this main area a lot. We'll have dinner here. We did a fun thing because it is so many windows — we're not on 20 acres, so we got these windows that you can raise up and they block out the road. The kitchen has ample room for seating for three. Very functional without too much. And having this pantry really gives us the opportunity to store everything.
Mary: It's kind of funny — the plan called for the washer and dryer upstairs. Our builder said, "you know, we could do this downstairs." So we took a closet area right at the base of the stairs and put in little stackables. That's the nice thing about the DEN — it accommodated a change like that easily.
Creating a Functional and Comfortable Cabin Interior
Mary: At night, we elected not to do televisions in the downstairs, because who wants to really bring a TV into this space?
Chris: One thing I did want to mention — we built on a slab. Some challenges with that: to get the vent from the stove outside, we had to do some boxing of the ceiling since we're not going underneath the floor. But it is a lot easier to build on a slab down here.
Mary: We made a concession to TVs upstairs for the grandkids. And we find your stairways are really something — we did a really cool little scene with the stairwell.
Mary: Here's the upstairs bedroom — this is where we prefer to stay right now. It's just really cozy. And we find that the washer/dryer downstairs freed up this space. We haven't done it yet, but the original washer/dryer closet is going to become a little office — you can get a little privacy. But it is also so cool that when we're here, there's so many windows everywhere. When somebody spots a deer — there'll be like a half dozen that come through the property — and you can see them from multiple windows. It's like being outside.
Chris: And I think the best thing we did is go for the full wall of glass. Some people just do half windows. That's really what makes it — with the sun and the passive solar. Going back to what we were talking about before — we kept the railings clear with plexiglass, and it really does speak to keeping the whole space open.
Mary: We're in the county, not in Brevard proper, but we do have central water. We're close to a mile and a quarter from downtown Brevard, and yet we're in this secluded dead-end cul-de-sac. You seem like you're out in the woods, but you have access to all the urban amenities of Brevard.
Mary: I did a post on Reddit about this, and one of the bigger challenges people mentioned was finding ample property for their DEN. But I feel like, from what we accomplished — not just the Alpine 2.2 but also the garage — even on a half-acre, sloping lot, you're able to live pretty comfortably and privately.
Reflections on Their Completed Modern Cabin
Chris: Where we live in Winter Garden, Florida — outside of Orlando — we live in the first designated green community in Florida. A new urbanist community called Oakland Park. We kind of had our eyes open on what the architecture of the house would be like, and the functionality. Mary ran into DEN online and we just thought it was a great looking design, and it's kind of different — there weren't designs like this out there. All the other kind of modern houses were just modern houses. They weren't unique. And then we liked the hygge design concepts of the DEN — how you furnish it, the type of flooring, the color, just the basic furnishings that make it really inviting.
Mary: Also, this is not a design that's begging you to spend a fortune on furnishings or 10% of your budget on landscaping. The simplicity of it allows you to accomplish it without going over budget. Which we did not go over budget. The house that the design-build team was doing? That was going over budget before ground broke. This, we were able to stay on target.
Mike: What has been your favorite part of the process of building a house?
Chris: So this was a really heavily treed lot. We were in a little bit of shock when the lot was cleared and leveled for the house — we're like "oh, what did we do?" And then months later we came back and the framing of both the garage and the house was done. That was probably where we could say, "here we go."
Mary: Once you start to get the drywall up, you can really get a sense of the space. But honestly, I feel like it was what we added to the space — some of the furnishings, the lighting, a really light touch of color in that backsplash. It was what we added to this really strong foundation to personalize it without mucking it up.
Mike: If you had a friend who was endeavoring to do the same with a set of DEN designs, what advice would you give them?
Mary: Two things. First, don't be afraid to build on a slab. The plans call for going up on posts, and all that wiring inside the structure works. But it's really not challenging if you need to adapt. For us, going up higher just wouldn't have worked on this lot. Second, don't be afraid to tweak the design to meet your needs — the way we brought the washer and dryer to the main floor.
Chris: I agree with Mary. The other thing — the design itself is artistic, it's a sculpture to me. So I wouldn't worry about the house at all. I would say: find the lot that fits what you want. Figure out which way the sun is, how you can orient the house, and what views you're going to get — because you don't need all these windows if you're not really looking at anything. As for the plans themselves — I ran a county planning department, so I'm familiar with building departments. How simple the DEN plans are to submit was really great.
"We were ready to wave the white flag on this lot and the project. We could have ended up just giving up altogether or buying an existing house. But this let us do really exactly what we wanted to do." — Mary Shanklin
Find your way back to the build — the same plans Mary and Chris used when they nearly gave up on their Brevard, NC dream home.
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