(courtesy photo / David White)

What do you get when you take a log cabin and supersize it until it reaches into the sky as high as the towering hardwood trees around it, fill it with big screen TVs and lots of man-friendly furnishings and, just for kicks, throw in a party porch with a hot tub? An outrageous log home.

The ultimate man cave.

And, in the case of owner Gerald Kirkland, home sweet home.

Kirkland’s three-story log mansion – often billed as the Kirkland Kastle – has become a star of its own. Destination America’s “Epic Log Homes” TV show featured it as the “Texas-size log fortress.” The Discovery Channel, NBC TV, the online version of Forbes magazine and a website called Outrageous Estates all have lavished lots of attention on it.

CREATING PARADISE

Kirkland grew up west of Canton where pastures meet rolling hills covered with thick patches of forest.

“I’ve always liked this area,” Kirkland said. “This is a beautiful area.”

With his Kaufman-based company ProBox, a leading manufacturer of stereo system enclosures, doing better than ever, Kirkland set his attention on a 40-acre piece of property he owned at the intersection of Texas Highway 243 and Van Zandt County Road 2602.

“I wanted to develop it into my own paradise,” Kirkland said.

It was not going to be easy.

“The trees were so thick, you couldn’t even walk through here,” he said as he steered an ATV on a drive that winds through the property. “And this lake right here. It was nothing but swamp.”

Undeterred, he had many of the cedar and oak trees cleared and the messy looking swamp dammed and dug out, transforming it into a 12-acre lake.

Gerald Kirkland’s property near Canton includes the main house, a gazebo, covered bridges and more; a look at the great room and the staircase leading to the two-story sleeping lofts; one of the clawfoot bathtubs in the house; and the party porch extending from the home has plenty of room for entertaining.

This story is featured in the current IN Magazine, a sister publication of the Tyler Morning Telegraph. The magazine is available online at inmagtexas.com .

Even though he had absolutely no experience in building any type of home, he came up with the audacious notion of building a log home on a scale few ever had attempted.

“I always wanted something different, something unique,” he said on “Epic Log Homes.” “And I knew that what I wanted really didn’t exist.”

To make the difficult task even more difficult, Kirkland insisted that the house would not use a single piece of precut timber shipped from somewhere else.

“The name of this game was we had to use what we had … only what was available. This was the game for us. This was the challenge. This was going to have Texas rock and Texas cedar.”

Kirkland picked each and every piece of timber. He scoured his property looking for the perfect cedar trees. When he couldn’t find what he needed, he convinced nearby property owners to let him take specific trees. Almost all of the 6,000 or so pieces of timber used were harvested within 20 miles of the house.

“Sometimes work would stop for days at a time until we found what we wanted,” he said. “Sometimes we had to build some sort of road through the woods to get a tree out.”

The most challenging pieces to find were the four 40-foot-tall cedar posts that had to help support the weight of the ceiling in the great room. Each tree had to be very straight, very wide and very strong.

He built a sawmill on the property to cut and treat the harvested timber.

Kirkland and the crew did not work from blueprints but instead “freestyled it,” somewhat making it up as they went along.

The first to go up was the threestory great room with its 40-foot ceiling. From that starting point, the house was, as Kirkland puts it, “woven together” one room at a time, extending from what already was in place.

They used boom trucks and other special equipment to lift and place the heavy logs. Kirkland designed special equipment to cut the decorative cedar rails used on the stairway, balconies and porches.

Boulders pulled from the making of the lake became the steps leading to the large cedar front door and focal points of the landscaping. Smaller rocks are used in the house’s underpinnings and columns.

THE HOME

Five years in the making, Kirkland’s castle boasts 4,800 square feet of indoor living space and another 9,800 feet of space under extended covered patios and porches. The great room, with its leather furniture, metal chandelier and hand-crafted cedar tables, leads into an entertainment wing that includes a kitchen with commercial appliances, granite countertops and lots of cedar cabinets.

The sports bar area has leather bar stools and glows in the light of neon beer signs. Bathrooms and a bedroom are also on the first floor.

The stairs lead to the second floor, which houses two mastersuite bedrooms on two levels. The first level contains a dressing room and bathroom while the bed and a second bathroom are located on the higher level accessed via a spiral staircase.

Kirkland had entertaining in mind when he built the house. It is wired for stereo sound and bigscreen TVs are just about everywhere one looks. A 3,500 squarefoot covered party patio has a hot tub and lots of space for mingling. The nearby band stand is put to use when he brings clients and friends over for live music and a good time.

The property also includes an attractive gazebo in the front yard, three-bay barn, a covered bridge that looks like it belongs in the New England countryside and wooden piers, one with a diving board, that jut into the lake stocked with fish.

He recently ripped out three adjacent first-floor windows and in their place put in a huge fireplace using more boulders from the property.

And he’s not finished. The next item on his to-do list is building a swimming pool in the back yard.

“It (the house) needs a really cool pool,” Kirkland said. “I’ll make it look like a pond or maybe a lagoon.”

KIRKLAND

Kirkland’s supersized log home seems to capture both his “let’s have fun” side and his “let’s work hard” side.

“I like doing this stuff,” he said of the challenge of doing things that many think are impossible.

He said he’s not satisfied unless he’s taking on a challenge. He usually doesn’t accept “it can’t be done” as an answer and taking it easy for an extended period of time is not going to happen.

“I think it turned out okay,” he said, pausing at the bar. The smile on his face makes it clear that he knows that the house turned out more than just OK.

“I’m happy with it,” he continued. “I enjoy it.”

And perhaps that’s what matters most, for after all, Kirkland’s castle is his home.