Fernhill is owned by the people who work in it. There is no private equity group setting quarterly production targets, no regional manager, and no script. That is increasingly rare in American dentistry and it is the single most important thing on this page.
Thursday morning, room 4
How the day runs
A dentist at Fernhill works one operatory at a time. That is an expensive way to run a practice and it is the reason we see fourteen patients a day between three of us rather than forty.
It means nobody is numbed and then abandoned for eleven minutes while the dentist checks on someone else. It means if your appointment needs an extra twenty minutes, it gets an extra twenty minutes, and the person after you isn’t made to wait for it — the diary already has the slack built in.
It also means we cannot squeeze in favours very often, which is the one honest downside and the reason Delphine guards those two emergency slots so fiercely.
14
Patients a day, across three dentists
1
Chair per dentist, at any moment
The dentists
We don’t rotate patients through whoever is free. You get assigned to one of us at your first visit and that is who you see, unless the work belongs to someone else’s hands.
DDS · Founder · Restorative & endodontics
Opened Fernhill in 2016 after eleven years in a six-chair corporate practice off Tunnel Road where she was expected to see thirty-two patients a day. She does the molar root canals here, under a microscope, and she is the reason nobody in this building is allowed to say ‘you should have come in sooner.’ Grew up behind the counter of her family’s panadería in Durham and still judges a town by its bread.
DMD, FAGD · Sedation & anxious patients
Ellis takes every patient who says the word ‘terrified’ on the phone. He is exceptionally slow, narrates everything before he does it, and will stop mid-procedure the moment you raise a hand, every time, without a sigh. Twenty-two years in and he still books ninety minutes for a filling if that’s what someone needs. Plays upright bass in a bluegrass trio that gigs at the Salvage Station most months.
DDS, MS · Prosthodontist · Ceramics & implants
Board-certified prosthodontist, which is three extra years of training in exactly the work most practices refer away: implants, veneers, full-mouth reconstruction, and anything where the shade has to be perfect. She designs and mills the single-visit crowns herself. Runs a stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway before clinic, in the dark, in February, which nobody else here understands.
A patient once told me the worst part wasn’t the drill. It was lying flat under a strip light while two people talked over you about your mouth as though you weren’t in it.
Dr. Ellis Thorne, DMD — on what we changed first
The building
214 Montford was a family home for seventy years and then a firm of architects for twenty. When we took it on in 2015 it had eleven-foot ceilings, six rooms with north-facing sash windows, and a staircase we weren’t allowed to touch.
The renovation took fourteen months and most of it went on things you can’t see: acoustic insulation between every operatory wall so you never hear the room next door, a separate mechanical plant in the basement so the suction pump isn’t humming under your chair, and a HEPA filtration unit in each room. What you can see — the oak slat walls, the limewash, the plants that Corey waters on Mondays — came in well under budget by comparison.
There is no television in the waiting room. There is no music with lyrics. There is a kettle, a good one, and the front desk will make you tea.
1912
The house was built
6
Treatment rooms, all with windows
14 mo
Renovation, finished 2016
0
Televisions on the walls
Have a look round
Photographed on an ordinary Tuesday, nothing staged, nothing tidied that wouldn’t normally be tidy.
The hygiene team
Three registered dental hygienists, between them forty-one years of experience, and all three have been here since before we had a second dentist. You’re assigned to one of them and you keep them — which matters more than people realise, because the person who cleaned your teeth six months ago is the person most likely to notice something has changed.
Tasha handles the anxious and the very young. Corey does the periodontal maintenance cases. June is the one who will tell you the truth about your flossing, kindly, once, and then never mention it again.
Front of house
Delphine has run this front desk since 2017. She answers the phone herself, she knows what your insurance will and won’t pay before she quotes you, and she is the person who decides whether we can squeeze you in today. Be nice to Delphine.
What we won’t do
Come and see
We cap the practice at around two thousand active patients across three dentists, because past that the ninety-minute first visit and the hour-long cleanings stop being possible. We’re at roughly nineteen hundred.
If we ever close the books we’ll say so plainly on this page rather than quietly stretching everyone thinner.
214 Montford Avenue
