Bluestone Construction, LLC

10/19/2026

Houses don’t win awards. The people who build them do.

The Ashemore, at The Ramble Biltmore Forest in Asheville, just earned Bluestone its third International Property Award: a 2026–2027 Americas Property Award for Residential Property Development, North Carolina.

What you’re looking at: a cast stone entry arch in 34 pieces, cut from shop drawings our own team engineered. A steel stair fabricated in-house, every tread fitted to the finished drywall with no trim to hide a joint. Backlit bookcases where the shelves still adjust and the light moves with them. A kitchen built around a quartzite waterfall island, with a curved metal hood as its focal point. A keeping room centered on a hand-carved limestone fireplace.

The full four-minute walk-through is on our YouTube channel. Link in bio.

Design by Amy Conner Murphy, ACM Design. Photography and film by Andy Frame. Our thanks to Nate Monroe, Jody Dixon, and every craftsman who worked on this house.

Which room would you want to see more of?

10/10/2026

Nobody will ever notice this drain. That's the point.

In July we showed you the stainless steel slot drain going in around the pool at our Cleveland Forest Retreat project in Greenville. The promise was simple: once the Crab Orchard flagstone went down, all you'd see is a half-inch gap at the edge of the coping.

Here it is. Excess water off the deck slides into that half-inch slot and disappears. No plastic strip grate. No caulk joint. Just stone.

The four-dollar bedding tool from August built this.

Would you have noticed it?

Architecture: studioMARKO
Landscape: Caroline Bowles Barrick, Landscape Architect
Stone: Steep Creek Stoneworks
Pool: Signature Luxury Pools
Landscaper: Precision Landscape

10/06/2026

Very exciting progress at our Cleveland Forest project

09/29/2026

Months of work. One morning to finish it.

This is the plaster going on the pool at Cleveland Forest Retreat in Greenville. Plaster starts setting the moment it's mixed, so the crew from Signature Pools works the whole shell in one
continuous pass: walls first, then the floor, then every step and curve, all troweled by hand. No seams. No coming back tomorrow. No second chance.

The finish is a Heritage Designer Series pebble finish in Gray Harbor.

Everything under this coat disappears. This is the layer you'll touch for the next thirty years.

Pool by Signature Luxury Pools · architecture by studioMARKO · landscape architecture by Caroline Bowles Barrick, Landscape Architect · interiors by Ford Interior Design

Would you have guessed the finish goes on in a single morning?

09/23/2026

The Ramble Biltmore Forest just published the story of The Vantage - the concept home we designed with Van Tassel Architecture and Design and Sitework Studios for Homesite 907 on Tea House Drive. Nothing is built there yet, and that's the point. It waits for the right owner to walk the land with us.

Read their story here:

The Vantage is a Bluestone Construction concept home for The Ramble, designed with Van Tassal Architecture and Design and Sitework Studios.

09/22/2026

This room is wrapped in foil. On purpose.

Behind the pool house wall — the same wall the round window lives in — we've started a cedar sauna. Five feet by eight.

Before a single board of cedar goes up, everything that matters is already in place: a foil v***r barrier with every seam taped,

Half-inch stainless steel bars set into the structure so the benches can float with no legs under them, a hidden fresh-air intake, an exhaust fan tucked in the corner, and a dedicated heavy feed for the heater.

Next: flagstone on the floor, then vertical cedar on every wall and the ceiling, and cedar slat benches over those bars.

Follow along — the cedar goes on next week. Would you put a sauna in your pool house?

09/08/2026

Looks like quarried slate. Weighs a fraction.

This is DaVinci composite slate on the pool house at Cleveland Forest Retreat. It reads like the real thing, matches the
main house, and takes hail and falling limbs without cracking — which matters under Greenville's oaks.

The roof curves at the eave, so it couldn't go on as panels. Every slate went on as an individual piece: two stainless steel nails in each one, a small shim between neighbors so the gaps stay uniform, layer by layer up to the peak.

Copper drip edge underneath all of it — blinding today, brown in a year, green in ten. Then the hip and ridge, the
crowning touch.

Roofing by Falcon Roofing of the Carolinas. Architecture by studioMARKO, Interiors by Ford Interior Design, Landscape architecture by Caroline Bowles Barrick, Landscape Architect.

Follow along — the stone is next. Would you have known this wasn't quarried slate?

09/02/2026

A circle made of straight lines.
11:03 in the morning this was a round hole in a block wall. By 5:25 that evening, the ring was up — the masons were back the next morning for the final touches.

The keystone goes in first — the piece at the top that everything else leans on. Then the masons work their way around the circle, one straight-edged stone at a time, each one cut so the joints point back to the center. No template, no form. Just a level, a string line, and a crew that has done this before.

Pool house at Cleveland Forest Retreat, Greenville SC.
Stone by Steep Creek Stoneworks with the Villegas crew.

Follow along — the slate roof went on the same day. Have you ever watched a round window get built?

08/30/2026

The front door faces Bearwallow Mountain.

Front porch, back porch, and 20-mile views off the back. Cedar timbers and stone, covered porches
on two levels front and back, and the primary rooms turned toward the long view. A traditional mountain house — the kind that looks
like it has been standing there a while — but the plan is doing something
specific: the elevations give up the easy wall space so the view gets the room
instead.

Built by Bluestone Construction Designed by Shamburger Architects.

Which would you rather have on a July evening — the upper porch or the lower one with the hot tub?

08/20/2026

There's a drain running around this entire pool. You can't see it in any of these shots.

At our Cleveland Forest Retreat project the Crab Orchard flagstone stops a half inch short of the coping, and that shadow line is the drain. The whole deck drains through it. On most pool decks you'd have a plastic strip grate running the full perimeter and a caulked expansion joint at the stone — we used neither.

But the reason it works is the part nobody photographs. Every stone gets templated and cut by hand to hold a half-inch mortar joint around its whole perimeter. And watch what the mason taps them down with: a four-by-four. Soft enough it won't crack the flagstone, heavy enough that the weight squeezes the mortar out the sides and beds the stone right down to height. A rubber mallet won't do that.

A half inch of shadow. Everything else is stone.