A Cathedral in Inches

A Charleston infill home blends timber framing, student craftsmanship, and celestial design—on a 20 by 40 foot lot.

by Cameron Glaws

In the Cannonborough-Elliotborough neighborhood of downtown Charleston, South Carolina, capping the end of one of the city’s narrowest and shortest streets, stands a house that shouldn’t exist. Not because of some metaphor, but because, by all practical standards, it couldn’t. Sitting on just about every inch of a 20 by 40 foot lot, boxed in by overlapping zoning setbacks, its creation seems as improbable as it was inevitable.

I bought the land in 2022. It was a postage stamp by Charleston standards, shaped more like a leftover than a lot. I honestly didn’t have much in mind but to maybe design a little but livable house, taking cues from designs for small spaces by George Holt, whom I had worked for and learned under in college. Although at some point, for some reason, something crossed my mind — a timber frame that had been sitting in storage for over a year.

Back in the fall of 2021, my friend Gary Norton — a sawyer and millwork supplier who had long-tinkered with the idea of designing and selling kit-houses in the spirit of the old Sears & Roebuck mail-order homes — had donated a set of southern yellow pine timbers to the American College of the Building Arts, a renowned trade school in Charleston that specializes in traditional craftsmanship, materials, and techniques. That semester, a group of freshman students at ACBA, under the guidance of Professor Arnaud le Rouzic, a master timber framer from France, cut and raised a single-room timber frame as part of not only their curricular training, but simultaneously, Gary’s prototyping.

The frame was true to tradition; mortise and tenon joinery, hand-cut, pegged together. Not a decorative nod or a hollow gesture — this was the real thing. A 24-by-16-foot gabled structure, built the way they’ve been built for centuries. When the semester ended, the frame was disassembled and stored in a barn at Gary’s mill in Orangeburg, South Carolina, waiting for, if not fully expecting, a second life.

Extremely accurate CAD files accompanied the project parameters executed by the students. Every sill, rafter, brace, and tie — labeled in exploded layouts, assembled elevations, and plan views. Dimensions were called out to the 32nd of an inch and radii to the hundredth of a degree. When I first saw the plans, I was struck. Charleston hasn’t seen a true timber-framed home in over a hundred years. And certainly not one built by trade apprentices with their own hands…call that one two hundred. It felt important. I held onto the idea, and when I found the lot on Rose Lane, I knew it was time.

Rose Lane is in a pocket of Cannonborough-Elliotborough where the streets run tight and houses lean a little closer to one another. It’s modest and full of texture, tucked between past and progress.

To make the idea viable, I nearly begged two of the smartest architectural minds I know—who are usually busy with projects of grandeur on a bit larger scale: Andrew Gould of New World Byzantine and Tom Podhrasky of Tom Henry Design Company. Andrew, in particular, is known for designing churches and also homes that read like sacred spaces, often in the Byzantine Orthodox tradition and design style. His work carries the weight of meaning without needing to declare it. I showed them the frame and asked a simple question: could we build a real house around this? Like, a real, actually livable house?

The result is a modest two-story home. The ground floor is masonry — a block base wrapped in stucco, holding two small bedrooms, each with a full bath. The second floor is the timber frame, raised once again and adapted into the kitchen and living space. We added a third bedroom off the back, making it a full three-bed, three-bath home, totaling about 1,300 square feet. It eats up practically the entire lot with the help of zoning variances galore and extremely understanding neighbors.

However, square footage doesn’t tell the whole story here.

When we started construction in 2024, something remarkable started to coalesce. With Gary’s help I tracked down Arnaud le Rouzic, figuring of all people he might be best suited to help me reassemble this thing. Either that or examine the timbers for twist and checking and tell me I’d be better of cutting a new frame after the 3 years in storage. With the former luckily the case, he informed me that several original crafters of the frame were now rising seniors. These same students who had built the frame as freshmen returned to raise it again, now a little older, a little more sure of themselves. Under Arnaud’s guidance, they assembled it once more as they had years before in ACBA’s vast classroom workshop, and capped it with a whetting branch, honoring the age-old timber framing tradition of marking the completion of a frame with a sprig of evergreen. It was a rare and full-circle moment—student work becoming permanent, educational craft turned into lasting architecture.

Inside, we kept the materials honest. The ceiling on the ground floor exposes the underside of the same 1.5-inch pine planks used for the second floor’s flooring. All the interior walls are clad in tongue-and-groove, giving the house a texture that feels simple and monastic.

The timber frame “nave” itself rises over 18 feet at its peak. The ceiling is painted deep blue and finished with 46 gold-leaf stars, matching the number found on Juan Diego’s famous tilma bearing the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It’s a gesture of reverence that gives the space a celestial quietude that’s hard to explain and impossible to ignore.

Of course, old sits next to new at 5 Rose Lane. The home runs on a Control4 smart system — lights, shades, climate, sound, even the ceiling lighting — all automated, programmable, and integrated. Our interior designers, Sarah Glenn Boman and Rebecca Rumph, assembled a collection of furnishings, hardware, artwork, and a color palette (their specialty) that fit naturally in the space; pieces that feel considered, not curated. Timeless, not trendy.

Outside, nested in the siding of the front gable facing Rose Lane, sits a hand-carved Tudor rose, painted by Andrew himself. It’s a subtle emblem—a nod to the name of the street, the shape of the home, and the handmade heart at its center.

Gary got his kit house in the end. Though I doubt he imagined it would come with gold stars, Byzantine ceilings, and full smart-home integration. It started as a student project and ended as a livable miniature cathedral, built to stand as long as the great cathedrals of Europe themselves — even if the Mokes that squeeze down Rose Lane are one day replaced by Venetian gondolas.

Charleston is a place that honors its architectural past. But preservation doesn’t always mean imitation. Sometimes, it means returning to old methods, applying them in new ways, and building something that couldn’t have been built any other way.

Cameron Glaws

Builder / Preservationist

B.A. Historic Preservation and Community Planning, College of Charleston, Class of 2009