Story of a house
Home to the Hounds Winter Farm restored the land, created a lifestyle
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By Deborah Salomon • Photographs by L aura Gingerich
astures, horses, barns, hunt boxes and the estates that grew around them speak the essence of Southern Pines. Equestrienne Joan Thiele added another element: In 1990 she adapted 199 acres of Raeford farmland boasting rich, black — not sandy — soil as a home and habitat for twenty hounds, known as the Weymouth Bassets. She bred them, trained them, loved them, hunted them and built an elaborate octagonal kennel for them as well as a house for herself, which melts into the wooded landscape overlooking a pond. She built the pond, too, besides restoring an ecosystem that attracts rabbits, quail and other basset quarry. Tennis players desire a backyard court; golfers, a putting green. Thiele wanted to foot-hunt her own fields. The house: a patchwork, both genteel and sporty. Its silhouette suggests a barn. Portraits of dogs and horses hang from the walls but furnishings
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lean towards French and Asian antiques, pastel upholstery, Lalique crystal lamps — not plaids and tufted leather. Yet Thiele’s architectural objectives were light and space: “I’m not so interested in things,” she protests, something learned in Africa, where natives possessing almost nothing can still be happy. Like her surroundings, Joan Thiele has many layers. “I come from hunting stock.” Thiele’s mother owned a pack of foxhounds at their country home, in Virginia — not unusual, there and then. Thiele arrived in Southern Pines from New York for the winter hunt season. Raised in a house built in 1680, she had eloped with Werner “Dutch” Thiele when she was 22 and he, 63. The bridegroom’s primary equestrian experience: “a bad polo player.” Werner preferred Manhattan, with Sundays spent reading the Times, taking walks, visiting friends, listening to music.
January 2016P���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills