Living Stone Design + Build’s mission is to build happier, healthier lives. This comprehensive design firm crafts top-tier custom homes, performs whole home renovations, and creates luxury commercial spaces specially tailored to the client’s individual need. Based in Asheville, North Carolina, the company is known for its collaborative approach, extensive experience, and commitment to green building.
Living Stone Design + Build is one of five Sullivan Family businesses, all of which work together to ensure a complete solution for the client. Atelier Maison & Co. provides home furnishings, including its own exclusive line of green pieces. The award-winning interior design firm ID.ology Interiors & Design boasts a nationwide presence. Believing that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats,’ the Sullivan family also founded the non-profit Asheville Design District to create a designated design district that supports local, family-owned design businesses. And finally, Collaborative Living Magazine is the publication that keeps the community abreast of the latest news pertaining to the Sullivan family of companies and the industry in general.
All of these organizations are committed to the environment as they collaborate to deliver a full suite of services. This commitment goes back at least 15 years, to when the Green Built Alliance first approached company President Sean Sullivan. “I thought, why would I not want to build better each and every time?” he recalls of the encounter. “And so, we decided to start building certified homes. We build each home to the Energy Star and green certifications.”
The team has had to overcome challenges in order to stick to this commitment. “It was terrible timing,” Sullivan says. “The recession hit and we were left with this model home that we had and no sales team to deploy in a new neighborhood. And so we went ahead and bought the house ourselves and used it as a model home. And we lived there for seven years.”
This challenging situation proved serendipitous when it helped the company improve upon its practices. “Even though we certified it green, we were shocked to discover upon selling it that the house had a dangerously high radon level,” says Sullivan. “And so this made us pause and pivot and really realize that we don’t know what we don’t know. Even though we had been designing green and we had been building green, we weren’t aware of other factors that were contributing to poor indoor air quality. And indoor air quality is super important because when you’re building green or you’re building energy-efficient, you’re building a really tight box. Whether it’s radon, or off-gassing from furniture or building products, or things that are brought in after construction, we became very interested in it. And so we pivoted, and we started working toward finding products that the client could use in their house, primarily furnishings that were safe.”
The team has found great success in providing environmentally friendly products to its clients. “We launched ID.ology Interiors & Design so that they could work with our clients to find all of these selections and make sure that the specifications for a home were safe,” Sullivan says.
In addition, Laura Sullivan, the other half of the Sullivan husband and wife team, began sourcing non-toxic furnishings. “It was very difficult to find, but our clients were receiving it very well. After doing that for a couple years, we really started to feel guilty that we were keeping this to ourselves; it was just such a hard product to find in the marketplace. And that’s really what inspired us to open up the furniture store Atelier Maison & Co. And once we did, we came up with this concept of designing green, building green, and teaching our clients to live green, which is what we ultimately call Whole Living,” says Sean Sullivan.
“We partner with Living Stone in all of their builds,” Laura Sullivan says of the interior design firms. “What we do from a design standpoint is make selections that are low- or non-toxic, such as the flooring, the cabinetry, paints and finishes, interior doors. With all those additional materials and finishes, we’re here to make sure that they are good quality, as well as healthy, and will contribute to good indoor air quality,” she explains.
“Furniture pieces are also constructed with a lot of the same materials as home construction: plywood, glues, adhesives, stains, finishes, paint, that sort of thing,” she continues. “We want to make sure that we have offerings for our clients that are healthy to maintain their wellness as much as we can impact from an interior standpoint.”
To accomplish the Whole Living mission, the team focuses on three target groups. “We have our external clients, the ones who pay us,” Sean Sullivan says. “We have our internal clients, which is our team, and we have our community. We want to build happier, healthier lives in all three audiences.”
This means building green no matter what the circumstance. “Every home we build is going to be certified Energy Star and certified green,” he shares. “We don’t ask the clients if they want that as an option; we just build to those standards and we go ahead and certify it. And when we do that, it gives our clients a five percent discount on their power and gas bill for the Energy Star certification. The green certification makes their house worth more than homes that aren’t certified green.”
But that’s not all. “We’ve gone deeper, a lot deeper than just those two certifications,” he says. “We really focus on the indoor air quality and we’re able to educate our clients all the way through the process so that, hopefully, they will buy non-toxic furniture. At the same time, they’ll also consider anything and everything that they bring into their house after they move in. And for our clients that have any type of chemical sensitivity, we have a couple other certifications.”
Living Stone Design + Build has won industry recognition for its commitment to green building and to excellence overall. In 2023, the National Association of Home Builders named the company Custom Home Builder of the Year. “It’s definitely the most humbling recognition we’ve ever received,” Sean Sullivan says. “To be esteemed among our peers is the greatest recognition we could ask for.”
He credits the team’s win to the “pursuit of health for our clients, building happier, healthier lives for all three audiences, and what the Sullivan family of companies has accomplished. But in particular, our commitment to and involvement with the National Association of Home Builders, the North Carolina Home Builders Association, and the Builders Association of the Blue Ridge Mountains.”
Equally important has been the company’s “pursuit of education and teaching other builders through the North Carolina Builders Institute.” The company launched an internal educational component to teaching its teams based on the NCBI format, called the SFC Learning Institute. “Sean has taken his education and his knowledge as a master builder, and he’s bringing that to our teams internally to make sure they are educated on the latest trends in green building and design, project management, and estimating,” Laura Sullivan says of the institute.
Another factor that earned the company recognition is its First Fridays program, which is another “extension of our mission building happier, healthier lives for our community,” Sean Sullivan says. On the first Friday of every month, employees are paid to spend time supporting one of the three charities that the company has partnered with: Western Carolina Rescue Mission, Bounty & Soul, and The Black Mountain Home for Children.
Now, the team is ready to take its mission of Whole Living to even more clients. The Asheville location is relatively close to the South Carolina border, making expansion into that state an obvious next step. “One of the communities that we build in, The Cliffs, has one development in North Carolina, and the other six of the seven are in South Carolina,” Sean Sullivan says. This Lakes Region of South Carolina is an ideal location, “being such a dense community for building.” The region “has really drawn us to expanding our territories.”
The team has also expanded into Cashiers, North Carolina, with the opening of a second Atelier Maison & Co. store.
With such a strong track record and the support of an entire family of companies, Living Stone Design + Build is more than ready for the coming growth. This environmentally sustainable business will be one to watch as it continues to blaze an ever-growing trail within the industry.
