Twenty feet of this property touches Hudson Road. From there the drive runs six hundred feet back, past a neighbor's lily pond and over a bridge, into three acres of hardwood canopy with a creek through the middle. You cross that water once by car and again on foot, because the saltwater pool sits on the far bank. Haywood Mall is two miles behind you. The hospitals, Haywood Road, Woodruff Road and downtown are minutes away. No HOA, and outside city limits. Private and central are usually a trade. Here they are not. Built in 1986 and running to 6,556 finished square feet on three levels, the house was described by its owner, a working interior designer, as Hemingway meets Contemporary. That is accurate. The shell is all light and volume: vaulted white ceilings, walls of glass under transoms, clerestory bands, wide-plank oak floors. The finish layer is warmer and more collected, gathered over decades of travel. In the sunroom, a single beam runs the length of a vaulted ceiling glazed on three sides. In the family room, a fieldstone fireplace climbs the full height of a two-story window wall under a hand-hewn timber mantel. The main level holds two living rooms. The sunken living room runs from the front door through to a covered porch above the pool. The family room gathers around that stone hearth. Between them sits a formal dining room, a vaulted sunroom, a secondary bedroom and a private office, so nobody has to negotiate for the quiet one. The kitchen sits in the middle of everything, three walls deep, with a full-height Viking refrigeration pair, a 48-inch Viking range under a carved surround, and a second gas cooktop beneath the statement hood. Two islands, one cabinetry and one furniture-style in wood. A bay-windowed sitting and breakfast room opens off the far end. It is a kitchen built by people who fed a crowd, often. The primary suite is on the main level and reads as its own wing: bedroom, sitting room, private office, a skylit bath, and two walk-in closets each running nearly twenty feet. An open staircase climbs to a landing walkway overlooking the stone fireplace. Two more bedrooms share a Jack-and-Jill bath up here, alongside a hand-painted mural suite and a loft that has been a study, a den and a bunk room depending on who was staying. The terrace level walks out to grade. Terra cotta underfoot, a brick fireplace, a pool table and a champion-length shuffleboard, and an antique hand-carved mahogany bar that began its life in an English pub. Guests find this room and stay in it. Roof 2023, primary bath expanded 2010, county water and public sewer. A gym, two more baths and storage sit on this level alongside a three-car garage. Outside, the property stops being a house and becomes a compound. More than a thousand square feet of deck and covered porch wrap the back behind glass railings: twenty-five by seventeen under roof, thirty by fifteen open, and a screened dining porch over everything. From there the wooden bridge crosses the creek and its boulders to a saltwater pool with a raised spa and a diving board, lined in hand-stamped, hand-glazed tile and held at a constant eighty-two degrees by solar panels. A columned pavilion sits at the head of it with a fireplace and a full bar. String lights run the length of the yard. Past the pool, a path opens into a level clearing with a fire pit and a swing hung over the creek, and beyond it the Owl's Nest deck. Arrival is a circular paver court under hardwood canopy. The house has a record. Home since 1993 to an inventor with fifty-plus patents, and it opened its gates for years to a benefit ball for the South Carolina Ballet, catered by seventeen restaurants. The Platters played beside the pool. So did the Beach Boys, and Dean Torrence of Jan and Dean. None of it required a board's approval, and nothing on the deed prevents it now. What the property does next is quieter or louder, depending entirely on who buys it. Some photos show virtual staging as examples.
