Hi, I’m Noah Bradley, and I’d like to welcome you to Handmade Houses!

If you have found your way to this site, it’s likely because you are seeking your dream home. Maybe you don’t have a clear vision of that future home now, but you do know that you want it to be amazing. Likely you have been searching online for inspiration and guidance to help you discover that future dream home of yours but all you have found is an overwhelming array confusing options, and conflicting opinions.

How does anyone wade through all the hype and discover their true dream home? Is it possible to achieve a truly handcrafted home? The answer is “yes” and I can help you.

I have guided hundreds of satisfied clients through the process of designing and building their home as a licensed Class A builder for over three decades… and now I’m offering the same service to you through the Handmade Houses offerings that you will find on this website.

Your home should not look like it just came off of an assembly line but rather it should be one that would be attractive enough to grace the cover of a book or magazine. And it shouldn’t cost you a fortune to achieve.

Let me tell you how I can help you… by first telling you a bit about myself…

I began my building career at the young age of fifteen while helping my father hand-build his own home. My dad was not a home-builder by trade, nor was he an architect. He was a “suit-and-tie” businessman who simply had a dream of building his own home. By working alongside that great man I learned many of the foundational secrets of how anyone can build a home… one that is tailor-fitted to who they are.

A few years later, at the age of twenty, I acquired an unquenchable desire to build my own house, and I did just that, while at the same time pursuing a college degree and working a part-time job. I started out by finding a rural and wooded parcel of land, one with owner-financing. I then went onto draw the plans of a rustic-style home… one with natural wood siding, a masonry chimney, and a metal roof. I dug the foundation with a shovel, and over the coming months I undertook every phase of the construction of that 1,400 square-foot home. The final cost of that house was less than $20,000… which was far less than its assessed value.

I learned in building that home that anyone can do the same. All it takes is action… getting started and never quitting. I had a basketful of challenges to overcome… a long list of excuses I could have used to stop me from moving forward. I was so young, I had never done it before. I had very little savings and very few tools, I had no credit, nor contractor’s license. The only thing I had plenty of was people telling me that I couldn’t do it.

Five years after building that first home of mine, at the age of twenty-five, my young bride and I sought out a simpler lifestyle and so we pursued homesteading. We relocated to the Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Tennessee where we lived in a makeshift tent while we cleared our land with a team of horses and built our new home using vintage materials that we had salvaged from several abandoned structures… an old house, a barn, and a schoolhouse. Life was good then, our days were carefree; we hiked, we tended our garden, and we helped our neighbors (who we must confess, helped us even more).

I learned a lot in the construction of that home as well. It is here that I gained strong appreciation for the use of locally gathered and salvaged materials. I also realized the dream of a deeper and more enjoyable lifestyle that comes from building one’s one home in the rural countryside. But I also had learned a very hard lesson… I had failed to build a handmade house. Heck, I didn’t even know what a handmade house was… I just knew that I was disappointed with what I had built, after putting so much time and effort into its creation.

It was a lesson that I didn’t want to repeat. In the years that followed I studied historic houses to discover the secrets of why they were so timelessly attractive and had proven so durable. I tried my hand at many of the alternative methods of construction and discovered that some were truly amazing and others made no sense whatsoever. I also worked on modern construction projects to see what the latest materials and techniques might have to offer. And then I brought the best of what each had to offer together to create handmade houses.

When my family began to grow we relocated to Central Virginia and in 1988 I founded Blue Mountain Builders, a company that would specialize in the construction of handmade houses. I assembled an incredible team of some of the greatest area craftsmen and employed apprentices under them as well. These new homes that we built were all designed to complement the landscape… each upon completion looked “as if they had always been there”. The very first home that we built made the cover of Country Living Magazine and for the next 30 years my team and I created many more Handmade Houses… most of which were also featured in over fifty other publications including…

Financial Times, The Washington Post, This Old House, Log Home Living, Country Home, Hands-On Log Homes, Early American Country Homes, The Farmhouse Book, Mid-Atlantic Country Living, Better Homes and Gardens, Timber Home Living, Wilderness Dispatch, Energy Efficient Homes, Rural Living and… many, many more.

Now, I tell you all of this not to impress you… but to impress upon you… that, as an experienced builder, I know that you too can design and build your own home. No matter where you are in life… no matter what your level of experience… nor the thickness of your wallet… you too can achieve your dream home!

I’m no Superman  (trust me on that one… lol… just ask my wife!).  I’m just an average guy who has walked the walk. Someone who has been through the process of designing and building a handmade house… over and over again… someone who has “tried it all”… someone who has “discovered the best, and left the rest”.  And yes, someone who has learned from his mistakes… (trust me, you want to do your best to avoid taking that path if you can)

I have been driven for decades to discover how to achieve the best handmade house possible. The list of publications seen above merely demonstrates that I have achieved some level of success in reaching that goal. But the greatest reward in my career has not come from world-wide recognition but rather from the satisfaction of going back to these wonderful homes that I have had the privilege to build… some now over 30 years old… and in being greeted by those same homeowners who still to this day express their continued appreciation and strong affection for their handmade house, one that we created together.

Now, that I have entered my 60’s, I am slowly shifting away from the joy of hand-building one or two houses at a time for individual clients, to sharing the insights and secrets that I have acquired through a lifetime of building truly unique homes with folks like you here online. I want to help you.

I offer here on this site a great deal of free and valuable information. I would encourage you to review the images found in my blog archive… and watch the Handmade House TV videos… and sign up for the newsletter. Together these three asset will provide you with motivation in moving forward and hopefully prevent you from learning those dreaded hard lessons.

I want to help you achieve your dream home, and avoid experiencing the nightmares so many experiences in the process of building a home. I have built and restored hundreds of homes. I’ve studied and explored thousands of them. I would like to start you out where I am now without having to spend decades to get here. I do that through the Handmade House Guild program with all of it’s offerings. I hope that you will consider joining us a Member!

Finally, I want to thank you, for taking the time to visit this site and allowing me to share my lifelong passion with you. Your time is precious, the most valuable thing you possess. If you have shared some of it here with me today… I am most grateful.

Your handmade house friend,

Noah

There is an old saying about the wisdom of “judging a tree by the fruit it bares”. Below are a few images of just some of the projects that I have designed and built throughout my career. I’d like to close this page with a bit of advice… When choosing from whom to look to for inspiration and guidance, look first at what they have done… not on the promises they promote.