 
He did it to prove a point. “In an age when people are worried about their environmental footprint, I wanted to demonstrate an efficient way to live vertically and still have your own space,” Summerour says. The idea came to him after spending a summer in Italy, where his firm has an office. “I became fascinated by this idea of living in a tower, since it is a way of living both in an urban setting and in the country, not just in Italy, but in France and Belgium, Japan, all over the world, really,” says Summerour, sitting on the porch of his Atlanta design studio, a converted factory with no private offices or interior walls, lots of windows, and a coffee bar in the back. “So, when I came home I decided I would build a tower. But instead of building one for three hundred people” — he points with obvious contempt to a condominium tower shooting up like a hairy wart on the Atlanta skyline — “I decided to build one for ten people.” The type of single-family vertical living Summerour is talking about is, indeed, nothing new. Towers as residences date back to the Knights Templar, who dotted the Tuscan hillsides with stone structures of varying heights. Ostensibly, these were defensive outposts, combined living quarters and aerial surveillance assets for the Y1K generation. “Paolo, getteth thou butt out of bed; the hordes advanceth over the horizon.” That sort of thing. There were also some ancillary uses: Watchtowers doubled as giant air dryers in areas where cloth dying was big business. But towers were also showy digs back in the day, with curb appeal that often extended thirty or forty miles. That’s why agrarian towns such as San Gimignano wound up with seventy-two towers by the Middle Ages. McMansion envy, it seems, is at least eight or nine centuries old. Even the Leaning Tower of Pisa started out as an elaborate bell tower for the local cathedral. Sure, nobody lived in it, but it certainly wasn’t necessary to spend one hundred seventy-seven years building a one hundred-eighty-three-foot bell tower when a steeple would have done the trick. And while vertical living existed in America (most Upper East Side brownstones have more floors than average houses have bedrooms), Americans who live in freestanding single-family towers in the United States are usually wild-eyed lighthouse keepers and emotionally damaged hunchbacks with an aversion to the sun. Summerour hopes to change that. “To me this is the next logical step to urban living — getting away from homogenous corporate living, fake stucco apartment buildings, or large, terrible ego-statements that eat up resources,” he says. “In the tower setting, you have your place, and, while you are close, you are apart from others and have some room. Plus you get to say, ‘I live in a tower.’” This logic would make perfect sense if the tower Summerour built was on a quarter acre in the middle of a city, a landlocked parcel too small for anything but a cracking-asphalt parking lot with a tiny hut for collecting tolls. That aspect of “tower living” is, indeed, a big part of Summerour’s long-term vision. But the structure he built is not in Atlanta, Charleston, Birmingham, New Orleans, or Savannah (although Summerour is designing an ambitious riverside expansion of Georgia’s “First City”). No, Summerour’s new model for vertical living is in the middle of eleven thousand acres of forest and farmland in rural Georgia, a half hour drive from Franklin Roosevelt’s Little White House, and the last place on earth you would expect to see someone living in a seventy-foot tower. “I started talking about [the tower], and everybody gave me this funny look,” Summerour says. “So I figured the best thing to do was build a prototype. I bought this hunting place in Meriwether County, and, as a historical reference, I used what was known as a ‘shot tower’ as the basis for the design.” The tower is actually in the one-stoplight, one-gas station tiny farming town of Gay, Georgia, a fact that has caused it to be alternately referred to as the “Gay Tower” or “Keith’s Tower of Gay.” It is also so far from civilization that the pavement ends a mile from the front door. Once you get there, however, the whole thing begins to make sense. For starters, the structure does look like one of the few remaining eighteenth-century shot towers, once an industrial component critical to the expansion of America. Sometimes called “shot factories,” the towers are a two-hundred-year-old testament to Yankee ingenuity, and a really cool example of science in action: The purpose of the tower was to make musket balls, or “shot,” as it was called. Lead was melted in a furnace stoked at the top of the tower and poured through sieves of varying sizes. The molten drops were then dropped a hundred and fifty feet — seventy feet down the tower and another eighty feet into a well dug below. During that freefall, the lead formed a sphere and hardened just enough to remain intact when it landed in a kettle of water at the bottom. The water cooled the lead, and the shot was fished out of the kettle. Shot making was big business in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and shot towers dotted the new American countryside much the way watchtowers graced the landscape of Tuscany. In that context, Summerour’s tower looks like it belongs exactly where it is. “This is not an Italian, Tuscan tower, and I would be disappointed if it got labeled that,” he says. “It started out with the shot tower as a model, and, obviously, there were those Tuscan influences. But it is a hunting lodge.” Because the stonemasons used rock from the site — quartz that had been plowed up and stacked in piles around the farm over the past century — the tower fits the surroundings and looks as though it could have been built back when cotton and indigo were cash crops for the area. There is also an artistic ruggedness to the design. The interiors are all river-recovered cypress, and the floors are timber frame. “Obviously, we tried to make everything look like it was built by hand,” Summerour says. The lower level has a laundry and gun room, a feature that harkens back to a different century. Move up a few stairs to the first floor, and you have what Summerour refers to as the lodge room, which, in any other American dwelling, would be the living room and kitchen. The bedrooms occupy the second floor, and Summerour’s studio the third and fourth. Up top is an open deck with spectacular views of the Pine Mountain range and the surrounding forest and farmland. Four large landholders, of whom Summerour is one, entered a gentleman’s agreement to hold the land in its natural state, creating a quasi hunting preserve for future generations, one that can be seen in full from the top of the Summerour tower. “You usually have horizontal living in the country, so the idea of experimenting with vertical living was a big part of this,” Summerour says. “I didn’t want to get too caught up in the drawing of plans because I knew that, as we got further along, the building would evolve. I also didn’t know exactly how tall I wanted it, but I knew that at a certain height we would have some fantastic expanding views.” The last ten feet provided those expansive views, but they were also the most expensive part of the project. Sixty feet is the tallest a structure can be before cranes and other specialty equipment have to be brought in. “We learned how high you can push it without the costs getting unreasonable,” Summerour says. Unreasonably priced or not, the tower, at every level, is jaw-dropping. With three-hundred-sixty-degree views of a rolling landscape, you feel more like you’re standing in an open-air forestry tower than in a three-thousand-square-foot single-family dwelling, which is exactly what Summerour wanted. “My father is a wildlife professor and wildlife artist, so I grew up outside,” he says. “Look at my office [in Atlanta], and you can see that it’s like working in a tent. If I could be outdoors all the time, I probably would. Hunting is just a part of that. Whether I’m looking for game or not is irrelevant. I love the idea of hunting for wild quail and not seeing any, or maybe seeing one.” You see all manner of wildlife from the top of the tower, which has a lot of people in the town of Gay wondering if there wasn’t an ulterior motive to the design. “He’s got himself a helluva deer stand out there,” one of the sawmill hands at Vintage Lumber says over a cup of coffee in town. “I don’t think I’d be sneaking up on him if I was you. No telling what he’s got up there.” Then, to one of his buddies the guy says, “Reckon that tower’s as tall as the water tank?” The question goes unanswered, but the point is well taken. The tower is unique in any setting, but it is particularly so in a town the size of Gay, where density is a problem only if you’re a deer on opening day of hunting season. So, did Summerour go to all this trouble simply to have an indoor hunting stand? Hardly. His plans are far grander. “I believe that the American suburban experience is going to be gone in the next fifty to seventy-five years, because it’s not sustainable,” he says. “You can see that now, with counties requiring developers to pay impact fees. As congestion in suburbia continues to increase, you’re going to find people living either in an urban area, or in a productive rural environment. Vertical living is a great way of living in both those settings. You can utilize small portions of otherwise unusable urban land, and you can minimize your footprint in a rural setting while creating views you wouldn’t otherwise experience at ground level. We feel like we’ve proven the concept in terms of livability.” Now it’s just a matter of convincing people that building up is a better idea than building out. On that front at least, Summerour is happy to have convinced his harshest critics. “I had relatives who were saying, ‘How could you possibly ever sell something like that? It’s an extreme waste of money,’” he says. “So, I had them down [to the tower] a couple of months ago for a gathering, and they all said, ‘Wow, people are really going to want this.’ If I’ve got my most vocal critics convinced, I don’t know, maybe I’m really on to something.” |
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