The Importance of Being
Otto Lavishly talented, private, Otto Zenke’s brilliant interior designs came to symbolize new South culture and elegance — and the By Jim Schlosser ideal Gate City home.
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Photography by sonny sherill
ust drop Otto Zenke’s name. No explanation was needed. He was that well known for a half century before his death at 79 in 1984. People here and elsewhere still remember him as vividly
as his designs. Otto Zenke “gave the new South a whole style of interior decoration,” the highly esteemed Connoisseur magazine declared in a 1985 remembrance. In a 1965 column, New York interior designer William Pohlmann called him “the confidant and advisor of the merchant princes that rose in the South in the 1930s and 1940s and came into their own after World War II.” His home city of Greensboro basked in being the nexus of Zenke’s gilded world. His ads in The New Yorker magazine put us on the map: “Otto Zenke Inc., studios in Greensboro, Palm Beach and London,” they trumpeted. “Two things are known about Greensboro,” quipped the late Joe Morton, owner of an area chemical company that merged with the Charles Pfizer Co. in 1958: “Burlington Industries and Otto Zenke.” Morton built a Tudor revival manse with French flourishes that still stands on Kemp Road West in Hamilton Lakes. It resembles a small castle. Zenke, of course, did the interior. “I like beautifully, clear simple lines rather than ornate details,” Zenke once said. “And I like a client who thinks big — not necessarily from a cost standpoint, but from one who can envision a grand concept.” As the thirtieth anniversary of his passing approaches, it’s worth looking back on his legacy and his love for and loyalty to the Gate City. “He brought eminence to his adopted city of Greensboro,” Connoisseur magazine observed. “Elegance and beauty were his trademark.” Though he traveled the world, Greensboro was the hub of Zenke’s activities and where he maintained his studio. Zenke’s original studio was something out of the old South, a tree-shaded 19th century home at West Washington and Eugene streets, a “jewel in the jungle,” as his beautiful dwelling on the seedy side of downtown was once called before it was torn down. Built by Eugene Morehead, son of Governor John Motley Morehead — who lived in The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Blandwood Mansion less than a block away — the home and Zenke’s studio were featured in House Beautiful magazine in the 1960s. Even though Zenke and preservationists put up a mighty fight to save the house in the 1960s, the city used its power of eminent domain to demolish it to make way for the brutalist modern City-County Governmental Center, which Zenke, a foe of modern architecture, must have loathed. He was not alone. As a replacement, Zenke built an exquisite, L-shaped, 28,000-square-foot combination home, studio and workshop across the street. The stuccoed English Regency studio/home/workshop had very clean exterior lines and was graced with dormers and two chimneys. Zenke added ivy to the yellow stucco facade along with other architectural touches, including his trademark porch lights. When finished, the building looked as if it had been there a hundred years. He connected it to two old houses he owned facing Eugene Street, which he furnished with fine antiques. After Zenke’s death, the county bought the complex for $1.8 million, and Sheriff B.J. Barnes occupies Zenke’s spacious old office. His department uses Zenke’s old studio. The exterior still looks pretty much as Zenke left it and the building retains Otto Zenke’s name. One didn’t drop in on the studio. No indeed. Doors stayed locked. An attendant came when a bell rang to see if Mr. Zenke “was available.” Zenke’s clients, of course, all lived at a decent remove from the then unstylish and deteriorating downtown. They included the Prices of JeffersonStandard fortune; philanthropist Joseph Bryan, who used to visit Zenke at his Irving Park home from the 1930s until Zenke’s death; the Borens of Boren Brick and Pomona Terra Cotta Co.; Ben Cone of Cone Mills Inc.; and William Meyers, owner of the old Meyers Department Store, who had a Georgian home that still proudly stands in Fisher Park. Polly O’Connell, who with her husband, Walter, a top executive with the Olin Corp.’s aluminum division, had Zenke decorate homes they lived in at different times — in Ireland, in Connecticut and, in the 1940s and early 1950s, on Greensboro’s Nottingham Drive in Irving Park. Polly O’Connell was October 2013
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