“Sometimes you meet a client and within the first five minutes you just know,” says Ron Bills of Providence Builders. “You realize you’re going to have fun together. You share the same vision, the same values—and you can’t wait to get started. That’s the kind of relationship that produces something truly special.”
Ron has spent two decades building some of East Tennessee’s finest custom homes, and along the way he’s learned to trust that first instinct. I understand exactly what he means, because I felt it too, the moment I met him and his wife Diane, who is also his business partner. That instinct has only deepened with time—what began as a professional relationship has grown into a genuine friendship with both. Ron didn’t set out to build houses; he arrived at it through a winding career that taught him how to lead people, and it shows in everything he does. Diane shares his eye for building as well, but her gift lies in something just as essential: making every client feel like the only one in the room.
By Nathan Sparks | Photography by Bruce McCamish
Appeared in Cityview Magazine, Vol. 42, Issue 5 (September/October 2026)
I remember one moment, on an upland bird hunt in North Georgia, having a conversation about what it took to reach his level in homebuilding. He told me it wasn’t enough to build a great house—you had to learn how the homeowner wanted to experience the space. Take the time to get the plan right, and the perfect home follows. Plenty of builders claim the “design-build” label, but with over 500 homes completed, Ron’s proof is in the numbers of satisfied clients. I was still turning that over in my head when Ron showed me another side of himself: a taste of the same intensity that built Providence Builders.
My cocker spaniel, Chota, flushed a covey in the moment of my distraction, and Ron shot a clean double while I came up with nothing but a few spent shells. That same empathy for clients, paired with a competitor’s drive, is what pushes him to deliver a superior building process every time.
Diane Bills is every bit as impressive as Ron, just in her own way—and together, the two of them are what make the Providence customer experience truly outstanding. She’s the anchor that holds the ship steady, the diligent researcher always hunting down the best products and deals for customers. But what makes Diane extraordinary isn’t just what she does—it’s who she is. She’s the epitome of positivity, and I’ve never walked away from a conversation with her without feeling better than when it started. In an often uncertain world, that’s a gem to be treasured.
That connection doesn’t come from a portfolio or a price sheet. It comes from a conversation—the kind where both sides lean in, where a future homeowner starts describing not just square footage but a life they’re trying to build. That’s when the magic starts, Ron says—when they tell you exactly how to design their perfect home. That connection—immediate, personal, and lasting—is at the heart of everything Providence does. It’s exactly what unfolded when Jon and Brenda McGurk first sat down with Ron and Diane.
A Builder Built Differently
Ron didn’t arrive at homebuilding by accident. Before founding Providence Builders in 2005, he spent years in aerospace engineering and corporate leadership, a background that instilled a level of precision and process rare in residential construction. When he and Diane set out on their own, they didn’t just start a company. They built a system.
“With Providence, you don’t just get an individual—you get a team of top-quality professionals driven to deliver at the highest level,” Ron says. “Our openness, our transparency, our disciplined process—that’s what sets us apart. And we have one rule with every client: we have to have fun.”
Today, Providence is one of East Tennessee’s most respected names in fine custom homebuilding, with a design-build model that keeps architecture, construction, and interior design working in concert from day one—no handoffs, no gap between vision and execution. Clients receive a 450-line-item budget backed by a four-inch binder of quotes and plans, an undertaking that takes over 200 man-hours. Diane drives that process to ensure clients are never left wondering, with monthly draw reports and reconciliations throughout the build. “We’re stewarding someone’s dream—and their investment,” she says. “That’s a responsibility we take very seriously.”
The recognition has followed: Providence has earned Cityview Magazine’s Best of the Best Award for Custom Home Builder—Over $1 Million three years running. Ron credits the team—designers, project managers, craftsmen, and trade partners, many with decades alongside Providence. “There are over a thousand people who touch a home by the time it’s finished,” he says. “We make sure every one of them knows how important their role is. Because it is.”
Finding Their Way Back to Tennessee
Jon McGurk is a man who knows how things get built. He spent decades rising through the ranks of a corrugated packaging company, eventually overseeing eleven manufacturing plants across nine states—tilt-wall construction, metal buildings, industrial facilities. But when he and Brenda decided to build their dream home on a two-and-a-half-acre lakefront lot near Loudon, he found himself in genuinely unfamiliar territory. “A house has a lot more detail than anything I’d built before,” Jon says, laughing. “But it was fun. I enjoyed it.”
The McGurks’ path to East Tennessee is a story of homecoming. Jon grew up in North Dakota, went to college in New York, and met Brenda in Rochester in the fall of 1988. They married two years later and moved to Knoxville in 1990 for a job offer, landing in Lenoir City, close enough to Dixie Lee Junction that the area still feels like home. Their children were born there. Their roots ran deep. Then, in January of 1998, Jon was transferred to Ohio. They spent the next two-plus decades in the Midwest—raising a family, building a career, buying a 173-acre hunting property along the Killbuck River—but Tennessee never left them. “We just loved it here,” Jon says. “I remember when they called to say they wanted to transfer me. I was like, damn. We were just getting going.” When Jon retired, the decision was easy: come back to the state they’d always loved and build something permanent.
The Right Piece of Land
Finding the lot took nearly two years. The McGurks knew what they wanted: lakefront, room enough for what they had in mind, no HOA, no gated community, no stack of rules to live by, and a dock. That combination proved harder to find than expected, especially once Covid-era buying frenzy hit. “We were looking for probably two years,” Jon says. “Everybody was buying everything up.” What they eventually found was tucked into the trees along a quiet stretch of shoreline: a small, wooded two-bedroom cabin on a sloping lot, barely a glimpse of water through the dense growth. You could roll a beer bottle across the cabin floor, the grade was so pronounced. But the size was right—just under two and a half acres—and the dock was already there. “I thought it was flatter than it was,” Jon admits. “But it worked out pretty good.” While hunting for land, Jon had also been scrolling through floor plans for months, eventually settling on a sprawling, single-level ranch that opened to its surroundings rather than closing in on them. Land in hand, plan in hand, he needed a builder.
Finding Providence
Jon met with a couple of Knoxville builders, but when he sat down with Ron and Diane, something clicked. “My uncle is a well-known architect in Minneapolis— calm, collected, sharp as they come. Ron reminded me of him right away. I just liked him. And I liked Diane. That was it. We decided to build with Providence.”
From day one, the collaboration felt easy. Jon brought his plan, Providence brought its process, and together they began turning a concept into a home. Ron visited the site personally to understand the topography, the grade, the views—what the land wanted to be. Then the real conversation began. “We begin by understanding how our clients live,” Diane explains. “How they cook, entertain, relax, and recharge. Then we design a home that supports that lifestyle—not the other way around.” For the McGurks, that meant no interior stairs in their living area, a kitchen designed for cooking and gathering, and a connection to the outdoors that felt seamless, not ceremonial.
Massaging the Vision
What followed was the kind of creative back-and-forth Providence Builders is built for. One of Ron’s first changes: he flipped the entire roofline orientation so that walking through the front door, your sightline travels straight through the great room and out to the lake—the same vaulted, wood-clad room whose wall of glass now frames the water and the pool beyond. “That was the whole point,” Jon says. “When I come through the front door, I just want to see right through to the water. Ron made that happen.” As the design evolved, so did the program. When the McGurks added a pool, Ron flagged the need for a bathroom nearby so guests wouldn’t have to trail through the house—that bathroom got built. When shade became a concern at the outdoor bar, a covered structure went up, storage tucked in alongside it. “Over time, we just did stuff like that,” Jon says. “Massaged it.”
The interiors came together under the guidance of Diane and Providence’s interior designer Anne White.She is also someone I’m proud to call a close friend, a true expert in her craft, and she goes the extra mile on every project without fail. Anne has a way of walking into a room and making it brighter just by being in it—a rare gift that shows up in her designs as much as it does in person. Her collaborative approach with Diane reflects the same principle driving the architecture: make it beautiful, but make it livable. Warm woods, natural stone, and soft layered finishes echo the landscape beyond the glass and shift character as the light moves through the day. The palette feels grounded and serene without feeling restrained, and every room connects to the ones around it, and to the outdoors beyond. “Our goal is to make every home as perfect as possible,” Anne says. “We design for how people actually live—not just how it photographs.” Comfort doesn’t come from furniture or finishes alone, Diane adds that it comes from balance. “Proportion, light, texture, the way materials meet. That’s what makes a home feel right.”
Building It Right
The build took more than two years, groundbreaking to move-in, with Ron’s team tracking every budget item and posting daily updates through BuilderTrend. “We don’t draw something we can’t build beautifully,” Ron says. “Our plans are detailed to the millimeter.” For Jon, who’d overseen industrial construction across nine states but never built a house, it was its own education. “It wasn’t smooth every single day—with a project like that, it never is,” he says. “But overall, it was a real good experience. Providence is pretty solid. I learned a lot. I’d do it again.” For Ron, that endorsement is the real goal on every project: not just a beautiful home, but a client who felt heard and respected throughout. “Building a home should be fun,” he says. “It’s one of the biggest investments of your life. You deserve to enjoy the process.”
A Home Built by Many Hands
As Ron likes to say, over a thousand people touch a home by the time it’s finished. Atlas Pool Designs built the lakeside pool, its glass-railed deck framing an unbroken view of the water, while Creative Hardscapes laid the stone patios and pool surround that tie the outdoors to the in. Cella Flooring & Design handled the tile and flooring throughout, and Standard Kitchen & Bath, a Knoxville institution since 1956, brought the cabinetry to life around countertops fabricated by Smokey Mountain Tops. Stokes Lighting outfitted the home with fixtures as functional as they are beautiful, including the dining room’s showpiece chandelier. The family’s heirloom dining furniture was recovered with elegant Schumacher fabrics from Wolfgang Interiors to accent the other interior finishes. Ferguson enterprises supplied the plumbing and fixtures throughout the kitchen and baths. Farmer Garage Door, serving East Tennessee since 1963, and HIS Security rounded out the build with quality that goes unnoticed until you need it. No home would be complete without a perfect compliment of windows and doors, Home Choice Windows and Doors came through with windows by Sierra Pacific and a grand entrance door from DSA. Outside, Diversified Enclosures built the screened spaces where the McGurks now spend much of their time. And two artists left the home’s most personal touches: Eugenia Alameda hand-painted its wall mural, and an original painting by celebrated Smoky Mountains painter Robert A. Tino greets guests in the foyer.
Life on the Lake
The McGurks have settled in with the ease of people who’ve finally arrived where they belong. Mornings begin on the porch with coffee and a long view of the water. Jon reads the news and lets the quiet do its work; Brenda gravitates to the great room fireplace, its stone chimney rising into the vaulted ceiling, when the seasons turn. The outdoor bar and pizza oven have already hosted a Fourth of July party so unhurried nobody thought about dinner until after seven. “Everybody makes their plate and goes outside,” Brenda says. “All the mess is out there. It’s perfect.”
Jon’s building a tackle box for crappie runs with his daughter Casey—the lake holds crappie, walleye, bass, and stripers that run big near the dam. He grew up on the water and had a lake place in Ohio; once you’ve lived on the water, you don’t want to live anywhere else. “We just love being on the lake,” he says. “That’s the whole thing. We sit here all day.”
It’s exactly what a home is supposed to do: make you not want to leave. Ron Bills has been building toward that outcome for two decades, one relationship and one carefully considered decision at a time. The McGurk home is the latest expression of that purpose—and by the looks of things on that porch, it got there.
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