Hello there,
What kind of weirdo builds a castle? My story is one I have repeated so many times in conversation that it has become a script with variations, long versions, short versions, versions where I disclose little, versions where I perhaps disclose too much. I get the same questions from everyone, mostly asking why and how. So, here is the why and how.
THE PERSON
Spoiler alert, I’m really nerdy, growing up I played a lot of sports but my true love was to escape into a book and I spent a lot of time in my room simply reading fantasy novels. It started in 6th grade when I wandered into the book store on the main street of my one stoplight town and found this book on the bottom shelf. “Dragons of Autumn Twilight” by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman featured this really cool cover art by Larry Elmore featuring a dragon, knight, a half-elf, and priestess. You aren’t supposed to judge a book by it’s cover but the cover art drew me in and I bought the book, and read it, and then it’s sequel, and I happily fell down a rabbit hole of reading of warriors, and dragons, and castles.
I read so many books I remember my custom project for 8th grade woodshop was a paperback organizer with adjustable dividers so I could separate different series. I continued in this vein reading as much as I could, and consuming other forms of media as well such as movies or video games in this genre.
I also developed a love for and expertise in computers and digital technology, it was the mid 90s and the Internet as we know it today had just been invented, it was the age of AOL and other nascent Interent companies. I started playing more and more online, playing very early online roleplaying games, but also teaching myself how to program and build websites.
I think everyone in my generation went through a phase of wanting to be a marine biologist, that was the coolest sounding job we knew, and I did as well in 4th grade, but shortly thereafter thanks to the writing of Michael Crichton (especially Jurassic Park) I fell in love with the concept of genetics and genetic engineering. In a way this makes sense that I would be interest both in the creation and programming of computers, and of organisms, for what is genetics but coding for biology? So when I went off to college it was as a dual major in computer science and genetics.
During this time period of the end of the 90s there was as of yet not an established industry for web services, if you wanted to do something online, especially as a small business, you needed to know someone. I became someone to know. I got my first collegiate job working in a plant genetic engineering research lab at Michigan State University. Normally I would not have been able to get this job as a freshman but they had recently sequenced the genome of this plant and needed someone to turn it into a searchable web application to be shared with other researchers. The deal was that half the time I had to build the website, and the other half the time I got to work on the science.
This was different and exciting for me, this wasn’t doing science like you did in high school, repeating well known experiments to achieve well known results. This was real investigative work making discoveries, developing new processes. I used gel electrophoresis to analyze plant genetics. I worked on an experiment, that was later published, on using robot assisted radial thin layer chromatography (say that five times fast) to quickly process wild type plant seed samples to find higher oil producing phenotypes.
This was very exciting work, but it was also monotonous work, and sometimes boring work. There is a lot of grind in this sort of science and grind has never appealed to me. It was also a very long road, in my lab there were 35 year old post docs still in school, still grinding, still living in student housing. However I really fell in love with the website building. I think it is because programming is a combination of creative and technical problem solving, so I switched my primary focus to computer science and started working more in that field.
I had already been making my own content websites that produced ad revenue, the largest being a very popular online literature website which was once the top website on the Internet for authors like William Shakespeare. I then started doing websites for local businesses, like car dealerships or insurance companies. I also did a couple semesters of Army ROTC and one of the classes I had to take was called Wilderness Survival. The first day of class we were issued the US Army Survival Manual FM 21-76 and at the bottom of the cover it said “This book is not copyrighted.” So of course I copied it and turned the US Army manual into a website called Wilderness Survival.
This website became the top website in its niche on the Internet as well and even got some national news coverage. At some point I decided I wanted to try ecommerce to make more money off this site and that I would start selling a really cool survival knife, so I found a company, opened a wholesale account, and started buying cases of knives to resell. It did decent and I would box up orders daily in my apartment and take them to the post office to ship out.
Concurrent with all this activity I was continually honing my skills, I became a recognized world wide expert in search engine optimization, and wrote and contributed on that topic and on programming related topics to webmaster sites or magazines. I wrote one book on the topic that was a commission for internal use only by a large corporation, and I had talks that never came to fruition of doing a book for O’Reilly publishing. I also mentored a lot of other aspiring Internet entrepreneurs.
It was now late April of 2003, I had just turned 22. My content websites were making very good money, I had just launched what was at the time the very first online coupon site (oh how I wish I had maintained my first mover advantage there), knife sales were cruising along, and business was good. I had just received the full line catalog from the knife manufacturer and it was full of swords from Lord of the Rings. I was immediately in love and thought that if I started a sword business I would have wholesale access to all these cool things. I would like to say I had some grand vision of the future and where it would lead, but in truth I just saw an opportunity and I didn’t know how good it was going to be.
I spent a weekend banging out a website and bought $1200 in inventory and in May of 2003 started selling swords out of my third floor apartment. The UPS man would bring up swords every day, and also take them away, he definitely got a lot of exercise (I would buy a home in December of that year and start working out of my garage instead and he definitely preferred that). I was able to quickly become the top ranked website for all of the lord of the rings related sword searches and so in short order became of the top resellers on the Internet. The business did very well.
I had already at this point been thinking about building a castle, I had been thinking about it since I turned 18. When my content websites first became successful I started really thinking and planning it, and while my content websites were very successful I did not in the end have a realistic budget so I do not think the castle would have happened from those content websites alone, but at the time I did think I had the financial strength for it. Still, when the sword business took off, it made my dreams feel more realistic.
I mentioned above how I would mentor other webmasters, now I feel as though I mentored them too much. So many of them copied me, making literature websites, or coupon sites, or sword sites. I helped them so they could find their own niches and instead they copied me, some would even outright steal original content I had produced, and the increased competition in the sword business was driving down prices and reducing profit margins.
It was 2006, I was 25 years old, and the manufacturer of the Lord of the Rings sword went bankrupt, most of their employees were fired. Meanwhile the aforementioned price competition had me wanting to move up to manufacturing where I would have a protected margin. So I hired some of the fired employees on a 1099 basis and went out looking for swords to make.
I had become a big fan of George R.R. Martin and had already read his books several times, so I sent him a letter. I figured the worst he could do is say no, and I would be no worse off than I am. We negotiated briefly, I was told he appreciated my midwestern forthrightness, and ultimately we came to an agreement, I wrote him a check, and I got a ten year license to produce swords from his books. Three months later HBO optioned his books for the television show.
There was a conversation George and I had on the phone during our negotiations where we talked about if his works could ever be on TV. He thought no, and he would know, because he worked on TV writing for shows such as Beauty and the Beast and The Twilight Zone. One of his inspirations for writing A Song of Ice and Fire (the true name of the Game of Thrones series), was that he was tired of being told by producers that his stories were too large, or too complicated, or would cost too much, and he wanted to write without the constraints of a TV budget. I however had just watched “Rome” on HBO and I told him, based on that show that I think HBO could pull it off. He also had enjoyed Rome, but he demurred in his response. I would like to be able to claim credit for encouraging George to sign with HBO but in reality these negotiations take a long time and I cannot fathom that he wasn’t already deep within them and just not able to disclose anything when I signed my agreement with him.
A development deal is not the same thing as a show being on the air, it took 5 years, including one major financial crisis, before Game of Thrones would be released in 2011.
Starting a new business is scary, I remember the first time I bought five thousand dollars worth of inventory for my business, how scary that was. Then the purchases grew and grew, but this was a whole other ballgame. Manufacturing has to be done in large production runs, I had to buy a 40′ container at a time, I had enough money to engineer and manufacture one sword, but it was the largest purchase I had ever made. I was very nervous, to reduce risk I tried to find partners. I asked friends and family, I even asked competitors in the sword industry. Everyone told me no, and I am now very glad they did, now those competitors buy from me, and the business in wholly mine.
The first sword came out in 2008 and that wasn’t great timing, it was a very stressful time, it sold, not super great. At one point I even had to put it on sale, but it made enough for me to make a second sword, and I kept chugging along, confident that when the TV show launched everything would turn around, and it did. When Game of Thrones launched in 2011 everything exploded. I was then able to use my relationship with George (to whom I am eternally grateful) to get a deal with HBO, and I gained a license to produce from the show as well. Then Game of Thrones became the most popular television show in the history of television and I became the sword guy for Hollywood.
THE CASTLE
As I have said I started thinking of the castle when I was 18, my thoughts grew more serious and my planning more significant as my business success grew. By 2011 when Game of Thrones launched I was deep within planning already with a size and a shape and a budget, already with crude drawings I had done myself either on paper or with basic desktop software. I talked to other kindred spirits who had built or were building castles and got information from them on tips and tricks and budgets.
I had found my city, Chattanooga, around this time. I knew I wanted to stay in the Eastern US, I knew I wanted green mountains, so I focused on Appalachia and considered all the states and most mountain towns in the region including places like Knoxville and Bristol and Asheville, ultimately I chose Chattanooga because of how beautiful it was and how close the mountains were to the city. In fact the castle is legally within the city limits and I am ten minutes from downtown. I had just found my architects, Terry Barker and Dan Trotter at River Street Architecture, and my builder Steve Birger. Now I had to find land, and I kept searching Chattanooga for the right piece of property.
After a few false starts I found this 22 acre lot on a cul-de-sac at the end of a road that consisted of the summit of a ridge that came off the eastern side of Raccoon Mountain, it wasn’t a well known area of town, many people not knowing there was any private land up there at all (95% of Raccoon Mountain is famously owned by the Federal Government through the Tennessee Valley Authority). The lot was wooded but I used Google Earth to park my camera at the summit to see what the view would be like after we cleared it. The lot was also ideal for building as it was a gentle slope up from the road with a relatively large flat area up top and good dirt with very little rock. It really was a dream find. This lot was not for sale but the lady who owned it lived in Florida so I figured she would sell for the right price. She rejected my first offer, but accepted my second. She made a very nice profit but I still feel like I got a steal, I’m sure anyone who comes up here would agree. I got 22 acres of private forest at the end of the road with the best in Chattanooga and a quarter mile of brow, all next to federally owned forest. I purchased the land in the summer of 2012.
I was a lego kid, I enjoyed building and creating, and now I was able to do it in real life. I designed the castle, I spent years designing the castle, it was a full time job. Every surface, and tile, and material needed to be researched and chosen. I also had a very restrictive budget to work with so I had to work extra hard to find or negotiate deals as much as possible.
We had a financing issue where the bank did not believe in the castle and cancelled the loan at the last minute despite having told me it was a done deal. That caused a year delay while I worked on finding back up funding. I ended up paying for half of it out of pocket (I had been saving for it since I was 18), and the cost and budget ballooned to an extent that in the end Game of Thrones being huge was necessary to achieve this dream.
The castle, due to its size was built to commercial building codes, is primarily concrete and steel, and at the tallest part stretches 78′ above grade. It took 42 months of primary construction to build, and there was additional construction before and after, and as much time spent with the aid of professional engineers and architects in planning, and as much time again (more really) in planning before I hired such people. It isn’t an unrealistic stretch to say it took 15 years all in to build from when I first started planning in earnest. When I moved in in the fall of 2017 it wasn’t quite yet done. The first floor was bare wood with no cabinets, there was no hot water, and the stone on the outside wasn’t even close to being done. It wouldn’t truly be finished until early summer of 2018.
There were budgetary cuts, originally the rear towers were supposed to be one story taller, but really purely to enhancive the exterior presence of the building, we didn’t need those rooms, so it was an easy cut to make. Originally there was also supposed to be a wall between the castle and the road. I still plan to do that one day.
The castle has 8 bedrooms and ten bathrooms. It has working gargoyles and a working portcullis. We used over 40,000 sq/ft of wall stone. I designed the crenelations at the top to be the appropriate size (meaning big enough to hide a man) I also limited windows, especially on the lower floors, to create the appropriate defensible look. The first floor is also 8 feet off grade to add to the formidable appearance. No one wants to live in a dark home though so natural light floods the interior of the home thanks to a large 200+ sq/ft skylight over the central staircase. Some of the realism had to be sacrificed on the back area just for livability reasons with the swimming pool.
I do not feel like this is the appropriate place to go into the nitty gritty on constructions details, this story is getting long enough as it is. I have a blog, buildingmycastle.com, which chronicles more of construction.
THE FUTURE
After creating the castle my focus turned into keeping the castle, it took a lot of my savings, and I did not feel very financially secure afterwards. For a period of time I listed for sale a five acre portion of my property thinking I could use a financial cushion. However these fears did not last and my financial position improved and I cancelled the real estate listing and I started thinking about legacy.
The last thing I want is to have my castle sold to the next rich guy to live in. My children have discussed who gets the castle when I die but I try to explain to them that hopefully when I die I’m 100 and they’re in their 70s and probably have their own house by then. The only way I can see to leave to my children and make sure it is protected for the future is to place it into a trust and turn it into a business.
Above all else my passion is gardening, I have always had a love of growing things, I have always been a gardener. Even as a child growing vegetables or helping my mom plan out her flower garden (graphing paper was involved). On a visit to Miami I went to Villa Vizcaya which is an old estate with a grand mansion that was converted into a museum and botanical gardens, and I was inspired. I have also been inspired by the Bluff View Art District of Chattanooga. As I researched this topic more I realized that this is how most botanical gardens were created, around a large estate, and I have decided that will be my legacy and the legacy of the castle. I will turn this property into botanical gardens so that when I’m gone the city and region will have a place of beauty to come to and appreciate nature and architecture. The castle itself will be a gallery, a museum, a bed and breakfast, or all three. I will construction additional facilities and outbuildings, cabins and cottages and hopefully a Hobbit hole where people can stay, and revenue from that will be put into landscaping and building the plant collection.
So where the castle was a 15 year plan, I now have a much longer plan, a plan for the rest of my life, to turn this mountaintop into something beautiful that hopefully will last forever and be enjoyed by generations of visitors.
-Chris