Structure: Gerhardt Nimmer Cabin
Location: Gatlinburg, Tennessee
Architect: Gerhardt Nimmer
Date: 1960
Story: Are you ready for a story of travel, love, and architecture? In 1908, Gerhardt Nimmer was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin to August and Ida Nimmer. August, Gerhardt’s father, was a carpenter and a house builder.

In 1934, Gerhardt fell in love and married a woman named Hazel. Gerhardt became a CPA, and the couple spent their lives working + building a family in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In order to get away from the hustle n’ bustle, they began taking vacations to Gatlinburg, Tennessee in the 50s.

Now, although Gerhardt was a CPA by trade, he had acquired a love of woodworking and carpentry from his father. Thus it should come as little surprise that, in the late 1950s, he picked out an 8-acre plot of land on a high bluff overlooking the Great Smokey Mountains and determined to build him and his family a cabin.

Recruiting some skilled laborer friends from back home in Minneapolis, Gerhardt designed + built a glass-filled mountaintop cabin for him and Hazel. The simple, Miesian-style house still sits atop that hill: a simple 1,120 sq. ft. monument to what hard work, love, and resilience can achieve.