At The Cliffs, there’s a path to wellness for everyone: An active outdoors lifestyle, world-class golf courses, wellness centers, spa treatments, vibrant communities, and the splendor of nature. Every day is an opportunity to discover a new approach to health, happiness, and longevity. Here, three members reveal their unique approaches to wellness.
Reimagining Clinical Care: Dr. David LaMond of Blue Sky MD | The Cliffs at Keowee Falls
In 2008, Doctors David and Natalie LaMond established Blue Sky MD in Hendersonville, North Carolina. It was around then that they discovered The Cliffs. For years they rented a house on
the lake in the summertime with their two sons. Now, their boys are both in college, one at University of Tennessee Knoxville and the other at Wake Forest. The LaMonds decided to take the leap and recently closed on a house in The Cliffs at Keowee Falls. The house will be a gathering place for the family, and a retreat from the helm of their wildly successful wellness clinic.
What began as a primary care practice with an emphasis on prevention has since scaled into a transformative healthcare model. Blue Sky MD now spans nine offices with nearly two
hundred employees across North Carolina and has appeared three times on the Inc. 5000 list of the U.S.’s fastest-growing privately held companies.
“Everything we do in primary care is actually secondary prevention, meaning that we order a test like a mammogram or a colonoscopy to find a disease at an early stage. But it’s not truly primary—preventing things before they happen.” Over twenty years ago, when LaMond was training at Albany Medical Center, this idea of truly preventive medicine was an exciting new frontier. His colleagues, like Dr. Mark Hyman, championed functional medicine and the revolutionary concept of “food as medicine.”
“As a young career physician, I would see spry seventy- and eighty-year-olds and wonder: What is making them healthier?” Now he’s zeroed in on the answer. It’s a hybrid, personalized
approach to care. “There are several healthcare tools, but it’s also about lifestyle.”
Blue Sky MD’s model of care was designed to go beyond treating symptoms, integrating these broader wellness principles into primary care and creating a personalized, patient-centered experience long before the concept became popularized. “Off we went, and we started teaching people about nutrition alongside what I would call traditional primary care.” This includes managing chronic diseases and addressing issues like lipids, heart disease, and diabetes. The team also considers aspects of health that can’t be measured in a blood panel, like mental health and weight gain. Advanced approaches like metabolic rate assessments and hormone screenings allow the Blue Sky MD team to incorporate nutrition strategies, behavioral therapy, and other interventions based on a patient’s unique physiology into their treatment plan.
Natalie works on the clinical side as a supervisory physician who helps mentor some of the twenty-plus mid-level providers underneath them, conducting chart audits and handling other clinical needs. David acts as CEO and medical director. These days, his primary focus is scaling Blue Sky MD’s impact. “I’m interested in population health, so trying to touch not just a couple hundred patients or a couple thousand patients in certain clinical scenarios, but tens of thousands of patients across the Blue Sky MD network,” he says.
“The funny thing is: Simple things are simple,” LaMond says. Certain, simple, science-backed lifestyle modifications—diet, exercise, social interaction—are logical and impactful. They’re the factors powering the health of those spry octogenarians the LaMonds had once wondered about.
“Obviously, we practice what we preach,” David says. “We try to get a good amount of sleep. We move daily with intent. We eat clean, for the most part. And I’m very intentional about keeping a close-knit group of people who I keep in touch with.”Research shows that the healthiest “super-agers” (People in their 70s or 80s with the cognitive or physical function of people decades younger) center their lives around community and social interaction. “I think that’s really important,” he says. “Not just challenging yourself, but keeping a community.”
The Serenity of Sanding: Woodworker Edward Giard | The Cliffs at Keowee Springs
Over his decades-long career working with some of the world’s leading sporting goods companies, Edward Giard, Jr. dedicated himself to the art of product creation, striving to innovate and bring to life ideas that had never before been imagined. Then, twelve years ago, he retired, “tapping out” of the corporate world to spend more time with his four children and wife of thirty-three years.
One fateful day post-retirement, Giard stumbled into the weird, wonderful world of epoxy art, where makers take beautiful slabs of gnarled wood and fill negative space with various colors of epoxy, creating sculptural furniture and display pieces. He was intrigued.
When the Giards built their home at The Cliffs, they needed something to hang above the fireplace. It was the beginning of the pandemic, and Giard’s routine was upended. So he dove in, embarking on his first epoxy woodworking creation: a four–by-seven-foot, solid oak and translucent epoxy, backlit panel featuring the intricate silhouette of Lake Keowee.
The process unlocked a new world of creativity for Giard. In later pieces, he carved ornate depictions of landscapes, images from nature, or abstractions into epoxy and all manner of wood, from maple to an extremely sentimental felled crepe myrtle. Each piece can take three months from start to finish.
“Whether it’s the lake, a sunset, a mountain view, a blue crab, or whatever the theme may be, I hand-draw it and then engrave that into the wood,” his “blank canvas,” he says. Next, he creates a waterproof mold that will hold the wood and the epoxy, which takes several weeks to cure. After curing, he applies a “float coat” of epoxy over the top, then begins sanding, a “tedious” process that spans weeks more. But as an introvert, he says, he relishes the tedium.
“Sanding is incredibly time-consuming, and everybody else in the world seems to hate it, but it doesn’t bother me because you’re in your cocoon,” he says. “You’re going grit by grit by grit, meaning there are coarse, rough spots in the beginning. But the finer you go, the smoother the wood becomes and the more transparent and shiny the epoxy becomes.”
To the untrained eye, he says, one phase of this process may look indistinguishable from six phases later. “But once you get it, it’s like knowing a good diamond or a good wine. I don’t know much about wine, but somebody who knows what they’re doing knows about the oak in the aroma. I can tell where I’ve sanded and where I haven’t, just by feel. It’s a solitary, peaceful time for me.”
Before one piece is finished, he might start on another. But he limits the number of works he produces to about six per year. “I don’t want it to become a job,” he says. “Because it’s a passion—creating something I haven’t seen before.”
Doing the work involves shutting out the world for a bit: ear protection, eye protection, and a respirator. He can get very immersed in it, for hours at a time—and possibly forget to eat a meal or two while he’s in the zone. With his beloved dogs sniffing around at his feet, the typical rapid-fire thoughts we all cycle through quiet down, he says, and he finds new clarity in situations that have been bothering him or comes to helpful realizations out of the blue.
“When you’re spending hours—crazy, loud sound, gloves on, smothering three or four of your senses—you’re figuring out the universe,” he says. “I sleep really well after I’ve finished with all that. Normally, I’ll wake up at 3 a.m., thinking about all this silly stuff. But if I’ve gotten it out over an eight-hour session with a piece of work, I’m physically done, I’m mentally done, and I sleep like a rock. There’s definitely something very therapeutic about it.”
Meditation and Manifestation: LEED-Certified Clinical Hypnotist Dan Donnelly | The Cliffs at Keowee Springs
In Dan Donnelly’s morning regimen, he and his girlfriend wake up, have a cup of coffee, and spend some time in his infrared sauna. If he’s by himself, he meditates and does a session of self hypnosis. This starts a wellness-filled day.
When Donnelly (a real estate mogul and investor with an HVAC empire) lived in Manhattan, he needed a way to cope with stress. Traditional meditation, however, didn’t cut it.
“Everyone has their definition of what meditation should and shouldn’t be,” he says. “I’m a very active entrepreneur, and conventional meditation—sitting cross-legged for thirty minutes in silence while it’s two hundred degrees—didn’t resonate.” He developed an approach that worked for him: setting intentions by candlelight, then picturing a visual manifestation of said intention in his mind’s eye.
Then, he says, he met a psychotherapist who told him, Dan, you really should become a hypnotist. “So, I became a hypnotist.”
Within a few years, Donnelly earned certifications in hypnotism and executive coaching simultaneously. “The best way to heal from a divorce is to keep your mind busy, so that’s what I was doing at the time, and I fell in love with hypnosis.”
By 2018, Donnelly had sold several of his businesses. And he was eyeing an escape from New York.
So he manifested something different. In 2020, he showed up at The Cliffs at Keowee Springs and fell in love. “I wake up every morning responsible for my own destiny. I have a beautiful lake outside, a beautiful sustainable home, and amazing people all around,” he says.
His home is “designed for wellness,” he adds. “I look at common sense—all the things my parents, grandparents, and elders taught me—drink more water, exercise, and get eight hours of sleep. All those different things have become harder over the years.” He chalks this up to technology; however, as much as technology is a problem, it can be a solution. His 57th Street building in Manhattan, he says, was an early proving ground for air purifying scrubbers in the “dog days of COVID,” and some of that purifying technology has made its way to his home at Keowee Springs, including air scrubbers and a three-stage water filtration system. He also developed a signature scent he pipes throughout all of his homes. He says it smells like the ocean.
“I’m very, very sensitive to mold and allergens,” he notes. “I can’t change the world outside, unfortunately. One day, maybe I’ll be able to do that. But for the time being, when it comes into my residence, I can scrub and keep it clean.”
This story was featured in Cliffs Living magazine. To see more stories like this one and learn more about The Cliffs, subscribe here.
