One of Georgia’s hidden gems is the Big Canoe Community, located 60 miles north of Atlanta in the Appalachian foothills. Set in picturesque lakeside, mountain scenery, this premiere 6,000-person community is host to 27-hole championship golf tournaments, weddings, writers’ retreats, trivia nights and other events.

In the center of it all, the Clubhouse at Lake Sconti, which serves as Big Canoe’s central activity hub and meeting place. It boasts stunning views of Lake Sconti and a combined 35,000 square feet of meeting rooms, dinning space, and golf cart storage. The original, 1970s-era clubhouse burned to the ground 14 years ago after suffering a lightning strike. Despite rebuilding the clubhouse in 2006 with a classic cedar shake roof, severe wind and hail damage from recent North Georgia storms left the roof so badly damaged that it needed a full replacement.

According to Katie Wercholuk, marketing and communications director for the Big Canoe Property Association, the community began looking for a stronger, longer-lasting roofing solution for its clubhouse after the last bout of storms.

“It was a beautiful roof, but we weren’t getting the longevity out of the cedar shake as originally intended,” said Wercholuk. “We want our residents to be proud of their clubhouse and to not bear the cost of a new roof every 10 years. We needed something with durability that would be able to stand up to mountain weather, which can sometimes be unpredictable.”

After several months of searching for a solution, the Big Canoe Property Owners Association contacted Colony Roofers, a veteran-owned roofing company based in Marietta, Ga. Mark Seymour, the company president, recommended CertainTeed’s Matterhorn Shake in the color ‘Cedar’ — a product that would match the look of cedar shake and offer the added durability and longevity of metal roofing.

Seymour noted that due to the weather conditions, the clubhouse’s existing cedar shake roof was rapidly failing.

“You should get about 30-40 years out of a cedar shingle roof, but it was 11 years and the original roof was deteriorating much quicker than it should have,” said Seymour. “A lot of the cedar shake shingles were curling up and breaking apart. The building also sits inside of a valley and gets a lot of wind, so many of the hip and ridge shingles were coming up.”

The Colony Roofers team specified 40,000 square feet of metal roof panels for the job, which including the clubhouse, an attached restaurant, and an adjoining golf cart barn. With the job being the company’s largest to date and the worksite located at the base of a mountain, the project took approximately eight weeks to complete.

“Putting a roof on an operating business is difficult, so it required a lot of coordination with the property owners association,” said Seymour. “Big Canoe is also up in the mountains, so some of the bridges and roads you have to navigate aren’t meant for tractor-trailers and big machinery. If we were doing a standing seam roof where you have to stage long runs of metal and cut them to size, we would have definitely had some issues transporting it.”

Seymour appreciated the way Matterhorn is designed and palletized, as it allowed his team to minimize the staging area required for the installation. An interlocking panel system allowed to crew to install the product quickly and get Big Canoe’s business operation back to normal faster, he said.

“Weather is unpredictable in the mountains and storms will come and go in the evenings,” said Seymour. “The main thing that helped us move quicker was the Matterhorn system. It goes on well and interlocks in a way our guys can understand. It’s a well-designed, user-friendly product.”

According to Wercholuk, the new roof has been a “win-win” for the Big Canoe community.

“It’s not just low-maintenance, it’s no-maintenance and it looks beautiful,” said Wercholuk. “Anytime you have guests or visitors, the clubhouse is something you want to show off. We have intentionally tight architectural controls here and everything just blends into nature.

“You would never be able to tell it’s metal from far away,” Wercholuk added. “Metal provided the look we were after as a mountain community, but with more efficiency.”

To learn more about Matterhorn metal roofing, visit www.certainteed.com/metal-roofing.