House of the Week

Hentz, Reid and Adler's Vaughn Nixon house




This has been my very favorite Atlanta house for my entire life. I remember driving by it as a child and thinking this was the perfect house. It sits on Andrews Drive next to the Swan House (Inman house) and is situated in an idyllic setting.

The house was built in 1925-6 for Vaughn Nixon and is one of Neel Reid's last designs - he was dying of brain cancer as the house was completed. It was Neel Reid's homage to the Hammond-Harwood house in Annapolis, Maryland. The Hammond-Harwood house is one of the primary landmarks of colonial American Georgian architecture. The Vaughn Nixon house is not a copy, but was inspired by the Hammond-Harwood house, which was in turn inspired by the Villa Pisani pictured below.




Hammond-Harwood house


Villa Pisani

Of particular inspiration for Reid was the facade and front door, pictured below:




(Please ignore the Halloween decorations on the railing - now you know when I took the photo :))

Here is another Reid facade (Logan Clarke house in Brookwood Hills, 1922) that resembles Hammond-Harwood:



I am thankful to my architect, Brad Heppner, for my Federal style front door - which is not dissimilar to the Georgian doorways above. My entrance has an open pediment, which is common in the Federal or Adams style.



Perhaps Brad was inspired by a federal door like this one:



or this one:




You can click on any of the images to enlarge them.