My potter’s wheel lives in the garage studio, and it has since the week I moved in. There's a full bath and a small kitchenette as well, so a day covered in clay and glaze ends with a real shower and a cup of tea, not a duck walk through the house in wet clogs. Above the workbench is a loft I use for sleeping when I pull a late night before a show, though most of the time it's just storage for drying shelves and finished inventory. The main house has two entrances that make the whole arrangement work. One door opens straight into the gallery on the ground floor, where customers browse the shelves and never have to know I'm home. The other is mine alone, leading up to where I actually live. Downstairs used to be laid out as two bedrooms, and the bones still show it: enough room for real shelving and a proper gallery wall, a cozy kitchen where I keep tea going for browsers, and a full-size, side-by-side washer/dryer tucked beside it so glaze rags and dish towels get handled in the same load. Two fireplaces down there, both converted to gas, make the space feel like somewhere to linger rather than pass through. Cold months turn out to be my better sales months because of it. Upstairs is mine: two bedrooms, a full bath, and a kitchen nice enough that I actually cook most nights instead of ordering out. The living room fireplace runs on gas now, but I've thought about switching back to wood since it can do both. My favorite part is the wonderful breeze that blows in from the sleeping porch; they sure knew how to build them! Down the path, the little building that started out as Jane Grey Syme’s summer writing cottage earns its keep as a short-term rental. As a writer who focused heavily on nature, quiet reflection, and divine peace, this location would have been an ideal sanctuary for her. She maintained this double-lot layout to ensure she had a beautiful garden buffer of native mountain laurels, rhododendrons, and mature hardwoods, keeping her close to nature, which was a core theme of her spiritual writing. There's a full bath and a stacked washer-dryer tucked into the kitchen, so guests staying a few nights don't have to ask me for anything. It runs on its own septic system, separate from the city sewer that serves the main house and studio, though the tie-in to switch it over is already in place. Most of the year it's just a place for guests to stay; during festival season I list a "pottery experience" alongside the booking (a couple of hours at the wheel, priced separately), and that add-on carries me through the slower months. Afternoons, if the shop's quiet, I walk to A Southern Cup Fine Teas, about four minutes down Greenville Highway. Flat Rock Wood Room is even closer, and their wood-fired Neapolitan is dinner more often than I'd admit. Neither trip requires getting in a car. I take a booth at the Apple Festival every year, worth the short drive for all the foot traffic. Down the road, Boxwoods and I keep a standing trade going: a few of his home goods sit on my shelves, and he keeps a handful of my pieces on his. Weekends without a festival booked, I'm usually at the Blue Ridge Humane Society, sorting donations or walking a dog that needs the practice. After Jane, the house remained in the same family from 1944 until the day I bought it. Having updated the wiring in 2011, then the plumbing, and eventually the studio, all buildings got new roofs in 2020. Everything here was already built to support exactly this kind of life; whoever's next just has to decide what to make of it.