Street Level
The Keen Details The Triad is basically a living museum for the homes — and influential ideas — of Charles Barton Keen
Reynolda House
Top: Photo Courtesy of Reynolda House Museum of American Art Bottom: Charles Barton Keen, 1928. COurtesy of Sara Keen Pilling
By Jim Schlosser
C
harles Barton Keen was the architect of millionaires. From the early 1890s until his death in 1931, Keen designed houses and estates along Philadelphia’s famous Main Line and in exclusive neighborhoods on Long Island and in Boston. He also designed the clubhouse at the isolated and super exclusive Pine Valley golf club in New Jersey, considered one of golf’s most treacherous challenges. Later in his career, Keen commuted from Philadelphia to Winston-Salem. In the words of architectural historian Margaret Supplee Smith, “The opportunity to come to New South money was irresistible.” In Winston-Salem, he designed at least twenty houses in the ritzy Buena Vista neighborhood, at least six in Greensboro’s Irving Park, and several in Durham’s Hope Valley. He designed a clubhouse for Greensboro Country Club after the old one burned. With urban growth, many of his houses in the North have been demolished. Not so in Greensboro, WinstonSalem and Durham. By all accounts, they all still stand, except for the Greensboro Country Club clubhouse, which has long been replaced. The works include Keen’s best-known creation, Reynolda House in Winston-Salem. Built between 1912 and 1917 for tobacco magnate R.J. Reynolds, the estate covered 1,067 acres and included a dairy farm, a nine-hole golf course, extensive gardens and Keen’s signature creation, a long, stucco house with green tiles and solid columns. The cost of the entire project was $120,000. “That’s the amazing thing; they have survived,” Smith says. “This makes this area practically a museum of Charles Barton Keen.” The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Smith, Harold W. Tribble professor emerita at Wake Forest University, presented an exhibit in 1981 on Keen at Reynolda House, which has been preserved as an art museum. The exhibit was done after many visitors expressed as much interest in the house, the architect, the landscape and the family who lived there as they did in the art displays. Smith will bring her expertise on Keen to Greensboro February 19 when she speaks at a Greensboro Country Club event sponsored by Preservation Greensboro and the Charlotte Chapter of the Institute of Classical Art and Architecture. A Smith friend who shares her love of Keen’s work, architect James Collins comes closest to a modern-day Keen. He divides his time practicing in Greensboro and New York and specializes in building grand homes, particularly in Irving Park. He spent 16 years in Philadelphia, exposed daily to Keen houses on the Main Line. “When I came here twelve years ago, I was driving around Irving Park and about wrecked my car. All those Charles Barton Keen houses,” he says. He includes Keen touches in the houses he designs. He and Smith toured Irving Park recently and counted six Keen homes — three resemble Reynolda House with their stucco facades and green tile roofs: the former Smith Richardson House at 1700 Granville Road, the former Richardson Preyer House at 603 Sunset Drive, and the former Alexander McAlister house at 700 Country Club Drive. Three other Keen creations show little resemblance to Reynolda but demonstrate how Keen designed in various styles. The other three Keen houses are the old Clement Wright house at 105 Sunset Drive; the Jackie Humphrey home at 1607 Carlisle Road; and the Bill and Kathy Burling house at 205 Irving Place. Smith and Collins February 2013
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