Congratulations to Hearthstone’s Project Designer William Woody on winning Chief Architect’s Residential Design Contest! Chief Architect software brings home design projects to life. Automated building tools for home design, interior design, and kitchen & bath design make it easy to create construction drawings, elevations, CAD details, and 3D models. Hearthstone uses Chief Architect to communicate projects to clients with 3D visualization tools, specify materials and produce Plan and Construction Drawings. The software allows us to create a virtual reality experience for customers throughout the design process. This really helps them get a better feel for their future home.
“My name is William M. Woody and I’m 38 years old. I am from Parrottsville, TN. I have a beautiful wife named Jamie, three wonderful kids: Dillan who is 14, Kailyn who is 10 and Ashlin who is 8. My family is my number one passion, and residential design is my second. I often find myself doing plans in my down time, just to relax. I fell in love with residential design in high school, when I took a board drafting class. Putting pencil to paper and laying out rooms and shading in stone hatchings, was a dream come true to me. I was already an avid artist, doodling my own comics and painting. I was the Art Letterman for my class and graduated with honors 12th in my class. Being from such a small town it is all about picking the right career when you finish high school so I chose design.
After graduating from Walters State Community College Magna Cum Laude with an AS in Drafting and Design in 1999, I took my first design job as a Project Designer for Hearthstone Log and Timber Homes in Newport, TN. I started out right out of school working with Autocad R.14 to do revisions and with Hearthstone’s production software (Cadwork, Informatique) which is used for the CAD/CAM manufacturing of their log homes. Eventually, Hearthstone invested in Chief Architect (version 6) in order to create preliminary and concept design plans for their customers. Chief quickly became one of the primary design tools we used to generate design plans.
In 2001 I left Hearthstone, Inc and floated between a couple of jobs taking my knowledge of Chief Architect with me to each. Eventually, I went to work for R. Allen Design who was using Chief Architect X2 almost exclusively to produce plans for customers. Coincidentally, they sub-contracted work back to Hearthstone, Inc. Last year I was fortunate enough to return to Hearthstone, Inc. full-time. My experience with Chief Architect allowed me to jump right back into the deep end of the pool as if I had never left. Hearthstone began in 1971 as a restorer of old log homes in the Appalachian mountains. It wasn’t long until there were more people who wanted those homes than there were old logs for restoration. So, they set about learning how to craft new homes in the old Appalachian style. Today we design and build everything from hand-hewn log homes, to timber frame homes, to hybrid homes that fuse both log and timber designs. Personally, I fell in love with the log home back when I started designing. The craft, the design, the look, and the feel of these style homes is in my blood. Being born and raised in these mountains, I really appreciate the hard work and determination that my ancestors put intoI am excited to be back at Hearthstone Inc. doing what I love to do. “
Chief Architect has provided our company with a quick and easy solution for us to get preliminary and concept plans, models, and renderings in front of customers. Chief also accepts exports from our production software, which we use to operate our CAM manufacturing Essetre and Hundegger machines. This means the actual timber we will eventually produce looks just as it is supposed to in a customer’s Chief model.
Over the course of my eighteen years of design experience, I’ve used AutoCAD, Revit, DataCad, Archicad, and more…Chief Architect by far has the most user friendly interface, does the best job of putting together functional plans and models, and gives the best overall visual to the complete project compared to all other software I have used. Customers just don’t respond well to lines on paper anymore. They want to be able to see it and walk through it. Chief architect really allows them to get a sense of feeling for their proposed home.
Examples of Woody’s work:
