FARM and AWAY

When your country cabin is in a place called Summertown, you better believe there's plenty of fresh-air fun to be had

- RHONDA REINHART

When Jamie Pfeffer leaves Nashville and heads southwest to his family's weekend home in Summertown, Tennessee, the busy architect, husband, and father of four is still in full work mode for the first 30 minutes of the hour-and-15-minute drive. But as the roads start winding and Music City moves to the rearview mirror, he stops thinking of building codes and begins to really relax. "It's enough distance that you start to get out of the city mentally," he says.

But it's not until Jamie turns his vehicle onto the long gravel drive leading to his farm's cluster of buildings that he finally fully shakes off the city.

"There's just something about the crunch of the gravel," he says. "Then you start to see the cattle on the horizon and the sweeping fields and pastures." When Jamie and his wife, Laura, a veterinarian, bought their property almost a decade ago, the land wasn't quite the pastoral utopia it is today. There was no lake, no tree house, no zipline. But there was a dilapidated circa-1860 cabin built with rare American chestnut logs. Long abandoned, it was uninhabitable, but Jamie, a principal of architecture firm Pfeffer Torode (pfeffertorode.com), had a plan to make it not only livable, but also undeniably lovable.

The cabin's gut renovation included adding a second-story bunk room and a large screened-in porch. Jamie also reoriented the floor plan so the two downstairs bedrooms have calming views of the nearby Buffalo River. Through it all, though, he preserved the home's original logs.

He also kept the cabin on the small side at 1,600 square feet, opting instead for more room to roam-250 acres, to be specific. "The idea was to let the kids explore and experience the land and all the discoveries that come with that," says Jamie.

BAREFOOT FRIENDLY KITCHEN