This is a great house that I photographed for the architectural firm of Meyer Greeson Paullin and Benson, now known as Arcade Architecture, in Cashiers, North Carolina. The project was later featured in The Plateau Magazine as part of a story on true family getaway homes in the region.

Photographing an Interior Hallway With Purpose

A hallway is easy to overlook in architectural photography, it's a transitional space rather than a destination room, but in a well-designed mountain home, hallways often do important work connecting the more dramatic living spaces while offering their own quieter design moments: a considered light fixture, a run of built-in shelving, a window positioned to catch a specific forest view. Capturing that transitional space well requires the same care given to a home's primary living areas.

Working With Meyer Greeson Paullin Benson

This firm, now operating as Arcade Architecture, has a distinctive approach to mountain residential design that blends traditional materials, stone, timber, reclaimed wood, with contemporary spatial planning. Photographing their projects consistently over multiple years has meant developing a genuine familiarity with their design language, which makes each new project easier to approach with confidence about what will photograph well.

From Private Project to Published Feature

Being featured in The Plateau Magazine's coverage of true family getaway homes reflects the kind of validation that comes from strong architecture paired with strong photography. Regional lifestyle publications like this one play an important role in shaping how a design firm's work is perceived locally, and a well-photographed feature can meaningfully expand a firm's visibility among prospective clients in the same market.

Why Bookstore Availability Matters for Print Features

Seeing a project appear in print, available at local bookstores rather than only online, still carries a particular kind of credibility for architecture firms and photographers alike. Print publication requires a different level of editorial vetting than online-only content, and that added scrutiny is part of why physical magazine placements remain valuable even in an increasingly digital media landscape.

What Makes Cashiers Homes Distinctive

The Cashiers and Highlands area of North Carolina has developed its own distinct residential architecture style over the decades, one that respects the mountain setting through natural materials and generous porches while still incorporating modern conveniences and open floor plans. Photographing homes in this market means understanding how to represent that specific blend of rustic and contemporary in a way that feels authentic rather than like a generic mountain home template.

The Role of Regional Lifestyle Magazines

Publications like The Plateau Magazine serve a specific and valuable audience: homeowners, second-home buyers, and design enthusiasts specifically interested in the Highlands-Cashiers plateau. Being featured in this kind of targeted regional publication often generates more relevant client inquiries for an architecture firm than a broader national feature would, simply because the readership is already precisely the audience most likely to commission a similar project.

A Continuing Collaboration

This project represents just one entry in an ongoing collaboration with this architecture firm across many mountain properties over the years. Each new project adds another example to a growing portfolio that demonstrates both the firm's design range and the consistency of the photography documenting it, a combination that continues to generate new opportunities for both parties involved.

Lighting Challenges in Interior Hallways

Hallways present a specific lighting challenge: they're often narrower and darker than the rooms they connect, relying heavily on borrowed light from adjacent spaces or carefully placed fixtures. Photographing a hallway well means balancing that limited available light without making the space look artificially bright or flat, while still preserving enough shadow and depth to convey the sense of transition and movement that a hallway is meant to provide within a home's overall floor plan.

Building Trust Through Repeat Publication Features

When an architecture firm and photographer appear together in a regional publication more than once, it signals a level of consistency that readers and prospective clients pick up on, even if only subconsciously. That repeated visibility reinforces the idea that this particular collaboration reliably produces work worth publishing, which is a meaningfully different signal than a single standalone feature might send on its own.

What This Project Represents Going Forward

Projects like this one serve as a useful reference point for future mountain home photography, both for this specific architecture firm and for other clients in similar settings. The lighting solutions, compositional choices, and styling decisions that worked well here inform how future hallways, and future mountain properties more broadly, get approached on subsequent projects.

Details That Bring a Hallway to Life

Small architectural details, a built-in bench, a run of windows, an interesting ceiling treatment, often carry more visual interest in a hallway than the walls themselves. Identifying and highlighting these details during a shoot, rather than treating a hallway as simply the space between two more important rooms, is what turns a transitional photograph into one worth including in a finished portfolio or magazine feature.

This kind of attention to secondary spaces reflects a broader philosophy that applies to every project: every part of a well-designed home deserves consideration, not just the rooms most obviously built for entertaining or showing off. That philosophy is part of what continues to make this collaboration with Arcade Architecture, and mountain home photography more broadly, such a rewarding area of specialization.

For anyone planning a similar mountain home project, taking the time to identify these overlooked spaces before the shoot day arrives is a simple way to ensure the final photography set feels complete rather than focused only on the most obvious rooms.

It's a habit worth building into every project, regardless of scale.

Small spaces deserve the same attention as the grand ones.

More projects from this collaboration are on the way.

Every hallway, every stairwell, and every quiet corner of a home tells part of the larger design story, and capturing that fully is what separates a complete architectural photography set from an incomplete one.

This project remains a good example of that principle in practice.