Tena Lee/Hendersonville Star News
Braxton Dixon reflected on his lengthy career in his Hendersonville home recently.

In fact, Dixon will be the first to admit the usual constraints a homeowner places on his or her builder never applied to him.

“There was no time line, no money line; and I didn’t work from plans,” acknowledged the man who Marty Stuart once called “the closest thing this part of the country has to Frank Lloyd Wright.”

But only when you sit across from the 88-year-old – a crackling fire popping on his weathered stone hearth and a blustery wind whipping around his pre-Civil War log home – do you begin to understand what the word endurance means to someone like Dixon.

And when one of only 50 or so homes he has built in his lengthy career – like the one on Riviera Drive once owned by Tammy Wynette that burned Jan. 25 – is gone, so too, is a piece of him.

Dixon grew up in Hendersonville and joined the U.S. Army in 1942 with a buddy who eventually became the city’s first mayor, L. H. “Dink” Newman. After returning from World War II, Dixon continued a craft he had learned from his father at a young age – carpentry.

Riviera Drive home was Dixon’s first “celebrity” home

In 1961, Monument Records founder Fred Foster convinced Dixon to leave a PTA meeting the two were attending to look at a piece of property Foster had purchased on Riviera Drive overlooking Old Hickory Lake.

Dixon said he got the idea for the home’s layout as he and Foster watched two B-29 bombers cross one another in the air over the lake. “With their wings swept back – one triangle over another, I said that’s the shape of the house,” Dixon recalled. He said the home, built of concrete block with stone veneer, was extremely modern for its time.

“It was one of the first houses to have a thermostat in each room,” he said. “It was extremely before its time.”