The Lodge at Clayton Retreat

The design team was charged with master planning the Clayton Retreat campus as an overnight corporate training facility that offers an immersive and relaxing experience. The client’s goal was, “…to forget we’re just a quarter mile away from our headquarters”. The 10-acre campus includes 19 cabins, each housing multiple hotel-style rooms, for a total of 58 beds. Various outdoor gathering spaces are located throughout, including a covered pavilion adjacent to a beer garden. Located on the highest point of the site sits the 20,300 square foot Lodge, aligned toward Mount Leconte and houses an expansive dining room, meeting rooms, and various spaces that nurture training, creativity, and collaboration. An additional 6,000 square feet of covered porches obscure the separation of interior and exterior spaces.
When arriving at Clayton Retreat, visitors make a 100-foot elevation change over a quarter mile drive. As guests crest the top of the hill, they’re given their first view of the Lodge. The Lodge was carefully sited and scaled to fit into the wooded landscape and blend with the smaller cabins. The deep covered entry porch welcomes guests into a casual gathering area anchored by a bar that backs up to a two-story dining room with expansive glass overlooking the trees. All spaces open to a wraparound 15-foot-deep porch where visitors can enjoy the wooded site with views of the mountains beyond. There is an east to west axis aligned with the monumental stair connecting all three levels of circulation. This axis also serves as programmatic connection of service functions including restrooms, elevator, campus management offices and a full-service kitchen.
The monumental stairs extend a full three and a half stories and lead to soft seating break out areas overlooking the dining room, an executive conference room, and meeting room. Another half flight leads to an upper landing featuring views of Mount Leconte to the south. On the lowest level, a 3,100 square foot meeting room features a vertically folding partition which can quickly divide the room into two separate spaces. A smaller meeting room is located across the corridor and can also be split into two separate rooms to maximize flexibility.
Intersecting the main level’s east/west axis is a north/south axis that draws visitors outside into a single-sloped colonnade, terminating at an outdoor bar. A covered outdoor pavilion with a wood-burning fireplace anchors this gathering space along with a grove of string-lit London Plane trees.

Framework for Design Excellence

The Lodge presented an interesting challenge; there was a programmatic need for large meeting and gathering spaces, yet the building needed to be in scale with the smaller cabins and blend with the natural landscape. Therefore, while programming, the team Designed for Economy to create multi-functional and flexible spaces to use square footage efficiently. The lowest level was carved into the hillside, and the main entrance was located on the second level to conceal the building’s mass. A wraparound porch with deep four-foot overhangs further breaks down the height of the building, and the third level is tucked into the pitched roof forms.
An East Tennessee vernacular was used when massing the roof forms and developing an exterior material palate. A 12/12 pitched center gable creates the central mass which houses the largest meeting spaces, and a smaller gabled mass houses additional meeting spaces and service functions. The Retreat campus and Lodge facility serve as a training and team building hub. Our team Designed for Well-being by encouraging collaboration, accessibility, and inclusivity by locating informal breakout areas outside of each meeting room. The Retreat also encourages connection to nature, with walking trails between cabins and the Lodge, as well as a Zen Garden adjacent to the London Plane tree grove, offering space for relaxation and reflection.
Designing for Integration, the team tucked an elevator overrun into the roof forms and all HVAC equipment into a small rooftop enclosure hidden by pitched standing seam roofs. Steel structure allowed for expansive meeting spaces and wood porch trusses allowed for a 4-foot overhang that draws visitors eyes out to the landscape. Porches shade southeast facing glass from solar gain, and the Green Team at Clayton Lodge diligently identified and implemented sustainability practices to further reduce its carbon footprint. Notably, this included initiatives to eliminate plastic usage within the cabins and providing clean filtered water through reverse osmosis.
Exterior materials included natural cedar, locally sourced bluestone slate tile, Tennessee-quarried exterior stone, and standing seam metal roofing. Wood ceiling treatments are used to extend the natural material palette. Lastly, pea-gravel is used under-foot at the beer garden to allow for tactile sensory connection to the landscape.