By BROOKLYN BROWN
One Feather Reporter
CHEROKEE, N.C. – On the morning of Tuesday, April 28, modules were set at the area across the road from McDonald’s in Cherokee, N.C. for the new office building for Kituwah, LLC. The building is under construction by Cardinal Homes, a business of Kituwah, LLC. Sam Owle, chief executive officer of Kituwah, LLC., says they expect to be in the new office space by Oct. 1, the beginning of fiscal year 2027, if not sooner.
“We’ve been deeply in need of an office building and a space for our team that’s centralized and united. We lost the former office building to a fire in December of 2023…This office building is going to give us the space to expand as well.”
Owle said the team was working out of the old Chestnut Tree Inn for a while, which was not sustainable.
Cardinal Homes, a business of Kituwah, LLC., sets modules for their new office space on the morning of Tuesday, April 28. (BROOKLYN BROWN/One Feather photo)
“For a while, there was a makeshift office in the old Chestnut Tree building, and that needs major renovation done. We had to send in some environmental testing. There was some mold. There was some asbestos in that building. It wasn’t sustainable to stay there. And in the meantime, we’ve had some of our folks over at the KG3 office, and then obviously some of us are stacked here [at the Kituwah Home Center] on top of each other, using this as a makeshift office until we got through all the approvals to do this building. So, the general process has been long from that standpoint. It took longer to get the go ahead, work through all the necessary hurdles to get it approved first. But once it was approved, it’s been in our capital budget. The board has had this planned in the capital budget for the past couple years,” Owle said.
“Once we got it approved, the construction on those modules started in late November of 2025, and they were finished roughly at the end of January with some finishing work in February due to holidays. But after that, it was really getting the lag from then to now finalizing contractors and then getting a set date, getting that crew ready.”
As for the old Chestnut Tree Inn, Owle said the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) will have to make the decision about what to do with the building.
“A lot of people get confused about that property and the Clarion Pointe. Those are all tribal purchases, tribal properties, and we were tasked with improving them and making them commercially viable. So, the Chestnut Tree, those renovations have been done to the rooms. They’ve been consistently pretty full with folks from the casino and some of the work groups that the casino has. That actual space down there, there needs to be a real assessment of what does it look like? What does the tribe want to do with it? There are these concepts out there where you have like these living spaces and communal spaces as part of workforce housing. Due to the age of the building, some of the environmental stuff, there will have to be an assessment done on: Does it make sense to gut it and renovate it, or does it make sense to knock it down and build something else?”
Owle said moving into the new office space will also improve technology for the company.
“We’re centralizing technology. There was pretty weak connection over there prior, and the accounting folks need constant connection for their systems and financial transactions. We were using Starlink as well, and then we have internet over here. So just consolidation of some of those expenses is going to be one benefit and then having access to better technology to keep from any kind of workplace interruptions,” he said.
Owle added that the new space will open the opportunity for internships. “We were talking about this last summer, and it was still up in the air whether we were going to be able to get this thing moving, but we put it down anyway as a goal and said, ‘We’re going to assume this will be done by the first of fiscal year of ‘27 and by the summer of ‘27 calendar year, we will have interns.’”
