Home to at least four billionaires, the low-key, ‘no frills’ enclave of Cashiers has one of the country’s highest concentrations of wealth.
7 min
CASHIERS, N. C.—Shortly before 4 p.m. on a recent November afternoon, Buck’s Coffee Cafe was buzzing with a steady stream of customers that included a local chef, the scion of a hot-sauce empire, a real-estate developer and others.
Two Porsches and a pickup truck were parked in front of the shop, which serves as a de facto town hall at the intersection of North Carolina Highway 107 and U.S. Route 64.
If Cashiers had a town centre, this would be it: a crossroads surrounded by a smattering of retail.
In the Blue Ridge Mountains, the unincorporated village has no mayor, no local police force and no central public water supply. There is a limited public sewer system, just a handful of sidewalks and one Ingles supermarket, affectionately known as “Mingles” because it is where locals tend to socialise.
But what Cashiers does have is lots of uber-wealthy homeowners who have been coming to the area for more than a century.
With a full-time population of just 825—and at least four billionaires with homes—Cashiers has one of the highest concentrations of wealth in the country, according to data from Altrata, a wealth-intelligence firm.
Drawn to the area’s climate and natural beauty, most deep-pocketed homeowners, including billionaires like Ken Langone, a co-founder of Home Depot, and members of Nashville’s Ingram family, own property in a half-dozen private golf communities fanning out from the main intersection.
Even as real-estate values in Cashiers (pronounced Cash-ERS) nearly doubled over the past five years, locals have resisted overdevelopment in favour of retaining its small-town character, which provides relative anonymity to its wealthiest residents.
A September article in The Wall Street Journal, disclosing the presence of four billionaire families, got the community talking.
“People said, ‘Four? What an insult. We’ve got more than that,’” said Ann McKee Austin, who summered in Cashiers as a child and who co-developed, with her brother William McKee, the Wade Hampton Golf Club in the 1980s. “It attracts low-key people, not jet-set people,” said Austin.
South Carolina politician Wade Hampton III, a Confederate general, was among the first to build a summer lodge in Cashiers in the 1800s.
By the 1980s, golf communities with courses designed by Tom Fazio, Arnold Palmer and others began sprouting up in the area.
Today, there are at least 15 clubs on the Highlands-Cashiers Plateau, a roughly 25-mile area that includes Cashiers and its sister town of Highlands, a quaint tourist destination with high-end shops, restaurants and hotels.
By contrast, Cashiers has no Main Street and is “no frills,” said real-estate agent Kati Miller of Caliber Fine Property, comparing it to the fictional town of Mayberry. “You’re not going to see Prada or any sort of chain. It’s hard to get to—the closest airport is 45 minutes away on windy one-lane roads.”
Life in both places largely revolves around the clubs, where the average home-sale price was roughly $5.4 million over the past three months, said Ali Moody of Caliber.
Owning property is often a prerequisite to membership, which costs upward of $100,000 plus annual dues. Besides amenities like golf, tennis, croquet and dining, clubs also provide infrastructure like roads, water and sewer systems, making construction of luxury homes possible.
“Clubs are like mini-cities, quite frankly,” said Jody Lovell of Highlands-Cashiers Sotheby’s International Realty. Some clubs even provide workforce housing.
Over the years, the ranks of wealthy residents have swelled to include Langone, who paid less than $1 million combined to buy 5.77 acres at Wade Hampton in the 1990s, records show. (For many years, the late Bernie Marcus, another co-founder of Home Depot, also had a place there.) Martha Ingram, who succeeded her late husband as chairman of the billionaire family’s conglomerate Ingram Industries ,bought at the Chattooga Club more than three decades ago.
Langone said he was visiting a friend for the weekend when he toured Wade Hampton and was “blown away” by the newly-built golf course. He bought land before he left and built a four-bedroom home that he has added to over the years.
He said people in Cashiers are civic-minded, hard-working, and kind. “I go there, and they treat me like I’m just anybody else,” he said, “which is the way it should be. ”
Martha’s son, David Ingram, and his wife, Sarah, own several properties at Chattooga—and they recently purchased the club from his uncle (and Martha’s brother) John Rivers, who developed it in the 1980s.
Members of the McIlhenny family, which has been making Tabasco in Louisiana since the 1800s, also own in Cashiers, as does billionaire Scott Hardman Ward, a scion of Russell Stover candies, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent , who spent $4.6 million in 2022. He is now looking to sell his property for $5.25 million.
Billionaire energy mogul William Doré owns two homes in Wade Hampton, which he purchased for about $3 million combined in 2016 and 2019. And Ric Elias, the billionaire CEO of Red Ventures, recently sold a roughly 2.6-acre lot at the Club at High Hampton for $2.5 million, after paying $2.25 million in 2023. Elias and Bessent didn’t comment. Ward, Doré and the McIlhenny family didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Year-round residents say wealthy “summer people” don’t get any special attention. Pro golfers with homes in the area regularly grab a slice at Slab Town Pizza, said restaurant manager Scott Mulchay. No one bats an eye.
Langone said one of his favourite events is a July Fourth get-together hosted by a family at High Hampton, who serve barbecue; people dress in Americana, sing patriotic songs and fire off a mini-cannon, he said.
“We don’t need to prove what we have or show what we have,” he said. “We just enjoy everyone’s company.”
Despite its unpretentiousness, a turning point for the Cashiers luxury market came in the early 2000s, when Discovery Land Co., the developer behind Montana’s Yellowstone Club, opened Mountaintop Golf & Lake Club, drawing more well-heeled buyers not just from the Southeast, but other parts of the country. The McKee family’s sale of the High Hampton Inn in 2017 to the operator of Tennessee’s popular Blackberry Farm, which renovated the historic property, had a similar effect. undefined
Rob Palumbo, who works in the financial services industry in Atlanta, fell in love with Cashiers’ tranquillity 25 years ago, and for years he owned a log cabin on the Tuckasegee River. In 2013, he and his wife, Melanie Palumbo, paid $800,000 for a 2.3-acre lot at Mountaintop and built a six-bedroom house.
Like other resort areas, Cashiers experienced a Covid boom that turbocharged home prices.
Between 2020 and 2024, the average home sale price jumped 88.8% from $1.05 million to $1.98 million, according to data from the multiple listing service. Despite economic uncertainty that has slowed the luxury market nationwide, Cashiers recently had a string of sales above $7 million—a once-untouchable price point.
“For the longest time, $6 million was the ceiling,” said Caliber’s Miller, who said prices are rising as new homes sell for the first time.
The record in Cashiers was set in July, when a house at Mountaintop with a glass-and-steel facade sold for $11.11 million, said listing agent Liz Harris of Cashiers Sotheby’s International Realty. The prior owner paid $600,000 for the 1.85-acre lot in 2020, records show. “What kept [the market] down before, honestly, was people didn’t know about it,” Harris said. The buyer couldn’t be determined.
Earlier this month, a 6.5-acre estate at Cullasaja Club—halfway between Cashiers and Highlands—sold for $12 million.
Some real-estate insiders say the market, as it currently exists, can only grow so much.
Cashiers has six months’ worth of world-class golf between May and October, but there is less to draw people there during the “shoulder” seasons, said developer Sam Lupas.
A bigger issue is inventory. Many of the clubs have waiting lists, Miller said, even Mountaintop, where the initiation fee will be $275,000 starting January 1. “I hate to say it, but we need another club up here,” she said. “They’re all full.”
In 2003, locals voted against incorporation out of fear of paying higher taxes or ceding autonomy to government bureaucracy. Instead, local philanthropists have supported a local charter school, library, boys and girls club and volunteer fire department.
Two decades ago, when a hotel developer tried to build an Econo Lodge near the main intersection, residents swooped in to purchase the land. They designed a Village Green that is encircled with a low stone wall, and a hard-to-find entrance in the rear. “It was meant to be for the people that live here, and you access it from behind the scenes, rather than ‘Stop here and have a picnic lunch,’” said Austin.
Over the past few years, Cashiers has experienced growing pains amid its newfound popularity. During the summer months, traffic can back up for miles, said the Rev. Steve Hines, a retired clergyman who is a member of the Chattooga Club. “There were wealthy people here before, but not at this level,” he said. The growth “has gotten a little out of hand.”
Affordable housing is also an issue, said Jackie Hooper Hernandez, a clerk at Lulu & You clothing boutique, who said she is lucky to live with a relative about 8 miles from the shop. Other family members drive more than 30 minutes to work. But she puts up with the inconveniences of the summer influx because her livelihood depends on it. “We might hate the traffic,” she said, “but you know, if we didn’t have that, I wouldn’t have a job,” she said.
Some people think Cashiers would be better off incorporating, so that it could benefit from having its own tax base and public infrastructure.
But others believe there is reason to fear overdevelopment. “I’ve witnessed an overbuilding [at other clubs], where going to dinner or getting a tee time for golf almost became a lottery system,” said Hufstetler, who just bought the $12 million house in Cullasaja. He previously owned homes in Destin, Fla., and on Lake Oconee, Ga., that he sold when those areas became too crowded.
Lupas said he and his partners are working on an effort to bring hospitality, retail and housing to Cashiers in a way that is both appropriate and “authentic” to the community. “Some people think I’m an evil developer,” but he said the opposite is true. He believes a certain amount of growth is good for Cashiers, if not necessary. “Everybody wants it to stay like it was in 1950, but it’s not possible.”
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Weary of ‘smart’ everything, Americans are craving stylish ‘analog rooms’ free of digital distractions—and designers are making them a growing trend.
5 min
James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.
The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.
Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.
The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.
But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.
Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.
New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.
And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”
Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.
“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.
From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.
Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.
Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.
In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.
A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.
“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.
“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”
Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.
Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.
“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”
A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.
Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.
Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.
“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.
As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.
“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”
Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.
The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.
When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”
Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?
“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.
Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”
More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.
For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.
Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.
Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.
“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.
In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.
Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.
The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.
Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.
The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”
