Image credit: Atlanta History Center
The complex of gardens at the Atlanta History Center (AHC) joins Old Salem’s gardens in Winston-Salem as seedbeds where the Southern Garden History Society took root. Our continuing bond with the AHC’s Cherokee Garden Library has made the connection even stronger, the relationship long being personified by Garden Library senior director and past SGHS president, Staci Catron.
Magnolia’s predecessor, Hoe & Tell, Volume 1, Number 2, recounts the SGHS initial visit during our first annual meeting, held in April 1983. Members toured key spots, including the late-1920s Swan House Garden, the Quarry Garden, the Smith Farm, and the Cherokee Garden Library. Two SGHS members who later served as presidents played important roles during this gathering: Florence Griffin, who chaired the meeting’s planning committee and University of Georgia professor Catherine Howett, who addressed the group and discussed a new exhibit, Land of our Own: Landscape and Gardening Traditions in Georgia, 1733-1983. (The gardens SGHS visited were then operated by the Atlanta Historical Society [AHS]. AHS was designated the Atlanta History Center in 1990, while its landscape grouping became the Goizueta Gardens in 2014 in honor of benefactor and former AHC trustee Olga C. de Goizueta.)
Given the scale of this property, the Gardens page will divide AHC’s overall landscape between several posts. The Swan House comes first, owing to both its historical importance to AHC and its widely appreciated architectural significance. Acquired by the Atlanta Historical Society in 1966 and a central component of the thirty-three-acre complex, this one-time residence of the cotton-wealthy Edward Inman family figures among Atlanta’s standout dwellings. Design credit goes to the highly-respected Atlanta architect Philip Trammell Shutze, not only for the house, but also for the adjoining landscape. Later named for the repeated use of swans on the interior, the home and its grounds join such previously discussed properties as Cheekwood in reflecting the influence of late Italian Renaissance forms and motifs on the architect. After attending Georgia Tech and Columbia, Shutze devoted several years to study in Rome and exploring European and English gardens. There he honed talents to be manifested clearly in his Georgia commissions.*
Perhaps most notable in Shutze’s landscape concept was his marriage of the west façade of the ridge-top house to a grand combination of dual stairways leading down a series of terraces. This design tour de force starts with paired serpentine stairs, featuring ornate iron-rails, leading from a central doorway to the first landing. From there a pair of linear stairs fan downward while enclosing a cascade flowing over a series of pools, all ending with a broad grass lawn. To give texture, line, and verticality to the spaces, Shutze installed large stone walls and balustrades, joined by features such as fountains, obelisks, urns, and statuary. Extensive shrubbery plantings and wooded sections flank the house, thus offering a feel of green isolation as a setting for Shutze’s creation.
A hidden curved drive gives access to the opposite façade. Here one enters the house under a massive two-story portico supported by massive two-story Tuscan columns. Immediately to the south Shutze placed another signature feature of his creation, although it is much smaller in scale than the architect’s stairs-and-cascade layout on the west. Here he centered a one-level formal garden room on a fountain placed in a raised ogee-sided pool, while he terminated the box-edged central path with a stone bench dominated by a spread-winged eagle and flanked by large urns. In turn, these features were bracketed with paired columns supporting broken pediments, large shells being set within. Shutze’s mannerist application of classical themes is reminiscent of Bryant Fleming’s work at Cheekwood and suggests that in both settings the designers were having fun drawing elements from the classical repertoire while creating truly remarkable garden spaces.
Clearly, the Swan House enjoys an important place in the overall Goizueta Gardens group. Yet, as SGHS discovered in 1983, it is but one of multiple distinct landscapes found within the overall site. Subsequent posts will offer individual garden descriptions, while also referencing the 2003 twenty-first annual meeting, our second Atlanta gathering.
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Students of Shutze’s work at Swan House have cited various British influences evident at Swan House. For details, see: https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/GA-01-121-0055. Shutze found employment with the prestigious Atlanta firm of Hentz, Reid and Adler. The “Reid” of this group was Neel Reid who played an important design and installation role at Hills & Dales, as discussed in the Gardens post for December 13, 2024. Reid is also cited as a founder of the Georgia school of classicists. The 1976 Swan House National Register nomination notes that he had provided an initial brick Georgian Revival design for the Inmans. See: https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/5afb50d2-c85a-4069-92ca-720348577771
For more on the Swan House, visit: https://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/buildings-and-grounds/swan-house/
For a map of the entire site, see: https://www.buckhead.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Atlanta-History-Center-Buckhead-Atlanta.png
Recommended reading: Staci L. Catron and Mary Ann Eaddy (photography by James R. Lockhart), Seeking Eden: A Collection of Georgia’s Historic Gardens, 286-301.
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