Ceramic artist Helen Purdum plans to spend her Grovewood Village Studio Tour weekend at the wheel, throwing a series of oversized cat sculptures she calls "Garden Guardians." Visitors on September 12 and 13 will be able to watch the pieces take shape in real time, in the same building where Biltmore Industries wove wool a century ago. Six weeks later, a different set of doors opens a few miles up Merrimon Avenue, in a residential valley where the artists live in the houses whose studios you're touring. Same season, same neighborhood, two entirely different ways of letting the public in.
If you've lived in North Asheville long enough, you already know both tours exist. What's easy to miss is how differently they're built, and why the six weeks between them are worth paying attention to this particular year.
A Museum-Adjacent Tour With a Wine Sponsor
Grovewood Village sits at 111 Grovewood Road, tucked below the Omni Grove Park Inn on grounds that once housed the weaving and woodworking operations of Biltmore Industries. Eight working artist studios still occupy the historic building, and twice a year their doors open for the Grovewood Village Studio Tour. This year's second and final session runs September 12 and 13, noon to 5 p.m., free and self-guided.
The tour reads more like a coordinated event than a scattered open-house weekend. Sculptural wood artists Graeme Priddle and Melissa Engler are participating alongside Purdum, and the adjacent Grovewood Gallery, which represents more than 350 artists nationally, offers a 10 percent discount to tour visitors. Metro Wines, the Charlotte Street shop that's been named Asheville's top wine retailer for seven years running and picked up mentions in the Wall Street Journal and Wine Enthusiast, pours complimentary tastings for the weekend. Parking is free and on-site, though the lot is small enough that carpooling gets suggested every year.
Grovewood is also where the Biltmore Industries Homespun Museum and the Estes-Winn Antique Car Museum live year-round, so a studio-tour visit tends to turn into a longer stop. The car museum alone holds an Asheville fire truck from 1922 and a 1959 Edsel Corsair. None of that changes for the tour weekend, but it's part of why Grovewood functions less like a pop-up and more like a destination that happens to open its working studios twice a year.
For anyone planning a fall visit rather than a September one, the gallery has a solo show worth circling: ceramicist Taylor Robenalt's exhibition opens October 10 and runs through the end of the year.
A Grassroots Tour That Predates the Nonprofit Version
Beaverdam Studio Tour is the other model entirely. Now in its ninth year under its current organization, the tour traces back further than that. In the 2010s, ceramist Robert Milnes and his wife, designer Karen Milnes, moved to the Beaverdam Valley and put out an informal call to see if there was interest in reviving the informal studio tours that had run through the valley in the 1970s and 1980s. Roughly twenty artists answered within a week, and the tour has run every year since, always the last full weekend of October.
This year's dates are October 24 and 25. There's no ticket, no gallery discount structure, no beverage sponsor. It's a self-guided drive through Beaverdam Valley, reached from Merrimon Avenue by turning onto Beaverdam Road, with roughly two dozen working artists opening studios that are often just converted garages or back rooms of their own houses. The lineup has run heavier some years toward Beaverdam residents and lighter toward invited guest artists, but the format never changes: you're walking into someone's actual workspace, not a curated gallery floor.
Put the two events side by side and the contrast is the point:
- Grovewood (Sept 12-13): museum campus, gallery-anchored, sponsor-supported, 8 resident studios plus gallery inventory from hundreds of artists
- Beaverdam (Oct 24-25): residential valley, artist-run since its informal 1970s-80s roots, no sponsor, roughly two dozen home studios
- Between them: about six weeks, and roughly three miles of the same corridor off Merrimon Avenue
Neither tour is trying to be the other. One is polished because an institution built it that way. The other stays loose because the people running it are the same people whose kilns you're standing next to.
What Fills the Six Weeks Between Them
Here's the part that's changed enough this year to matter: the Beaver Lake Perimeter Loop, the two-mile trail that connects both tours geographically, is finally becoming a walk worth doing again.
Tropical Storm Helene tore through the trail in September 2024, and the damage lingered. Reporting from earlier this year found stretches near the Bird Sanctuary still cluttered with fallen trees and sawed logs, and embankments along some North Asheville properties still wrapped in construction plastic. That's not a story anyone wants attached to a favorite trail, but it's been true, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone planning a fall walk.
What's also true: the same reporting found the trail greening and brightening as the months passed, and residents have quietly added small fixes of their own. A "Peace-Love-Kindness" rock garden has appeared on the south side of the loop, where visitors leave or take a painted stone. Not far past it sits a hand-painted Little Free Library. Neither addition undoes storm damage, but both are signs that people are still using and tending the trail rather than avoiding it.
Parking for the loop is at the Beaver Lake Bird Sanctuary, 1056 Merrimon Avenue, a protected wetland that's recorded more than 200 bird species over the years. Fall migration is exactly when that number starts to matter. The lake itself dates to 1923, built by the Asheville Country Club under Edwin Wiley Grove, and remains privately held, which is why the surrounding neighborhood has kept its quiet, low-traffic character even as the trail around it has become one of the most walked routes in the area. No hiking is permitted after dark, so an evening loop needs to happen before dusk.
Walk it in mid-September, right after Grovewood's tour weekend, and you'll likely still see the storm's fingerprints. Walk it again in late October, headed toward Beaverdam, and the difference should be noticeable. That gap is the six weeks doing their work.
A Fall Worth Keeping This Way
If you're mapping the season rather than just reacting to whichever event lands on your calendar app, the order writes itself:
- Grovewood Village Studio Tour, September 12-13, for the polished version and Purdum's Garden Guardians
- The Beaver Lake Perimeter Loop, any weekend through October, to watch the trail keep recovering
- Beaverdam Studio Tour, October 24-25, for the unpolished version and a look inside the valley's actual working studios
None of this requires deciding anything about where you live. It just requires knowing that North Asheville's fall isn't one arts weekend repeated twice. It's two different communities, doing two different things, connected by a trail that's finally starting to look like itself again.
If you're weighing a move to this part of Asheville and want a neighbor's read on how a specific street or property fits into all of this, TFM Carolina is a good place to start that conversation.
