You Can Go Home Again

Atlanta has deeper roots than many people think. In a city filled with transplanted residents, a native Atlantan is almost hard to come by. But many of these natives are actually more than just native to the city — they’re native to their childhood homes, sometimes even to their childhood rooms. These are the people who have their architectural plans framed on their walls. They propose to their wives in their childhood homes. They save each original cabinet door to reinstall and find long-lost toys during renovation. During the holidays, especially, memories surface of what used to be.

Many details of the Bowdens’ 1923 Lewis Crook house, right down to the last doorknob, are just the same as they were when Henry Bowden was growing up there.

Bowden’s family bought the house in 1950, when he was six months old. After he was grown, he bought the house in 1997, and despite a major renovation that left little but the famous Crook faÁade with swooping swansneck molding above the front door, the details are much the same.

Bowden, 57, gives his wife, Jeanne, all the credit for painstakingly collecting all the pieces – from doorknobs and fixtures to cabinet doors and bathtubs – and designing a renovation of the house to fit them.There are several old drawings of the original house hanging on their walls.

“I have the same medicine cabinet door, with the same knobs, the same red cup I used to brush my teeth when I was a little boy,” said Bowden. “We put ’em all back up.”

The library may be in a different part of the house, but it is certainly reminiscent of the home of Bowden’s childhood. Above an original red leather armchair is a huge map of the world with the travels of Bowden’s parents marked in pen. It sits next to the desk that the late Henry Bowden Sr. kept in his office, where he practiced law, and across from a sofa where Bowden’s parents snapped photographs of couples they had over to visit.

The Bowdens kept Bowden’s mother’s bridge table with a needlepoint coverlet and the breakfast table where his dad read from the Bible every morning. There is still a Bible on the table, and the current Bowden family is true to tradition. Their daughter, Caroline, lives at home, making her a third generation Bowden in the house, and their son, Henry is a fourth generation Bowden at Emory University.

In this Habersham neighborhood, where tradition is strong, they’ve even got the same neighbors. The Bowdens say they can think of at least three other families on the street who live in old family homes.

A few years ago, Tony Aeck was working on shaping a natural amphitheater in his 14-acre yard, much like the one his parents built while they lived on that same property, when he saw a flash of something red buried in the ground. He took his finger and scraped away the loose dirt and discovered a tiny red Native American chief. “The last time I saw it was 48 years ago when I was sitting right there playing with it,” Aeck said.

Aeck’s father, also an architect, studied the international style, and his mother was an interior designer who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright. They bought the land along the Chattahoochee River in 1937 and in 1945 built a cozy two-room house. Aeck was born in 1947 and spent all of his childhood years there.

Aeck’s parents made two major additions to the house in 1956 and 1972 and modified a natural setting into a large amphitheater, where they had opera performances for as many as 400-500 guests.

Today, Aeck’s amphitheater sits before a 26-foot movie screen, where he shows movies for as many as 140 guests several times a summer. Aeck acquired the house in 1997 and turned it into a six-bedroom house. It’s very much an Aeck work of art: His mother’s furniture and folksy art and ceramic crafts are still in use.

“[My father] did a lot of the house himself, and I helped him as a child, which is probably how I found my interest in architecture,” said Aeck, 59, a founding principal of Lord, Aeck & Sargent. “I laid that brick,” he said, pointing to the diagonal brick pattern of the kitchen floor.

 
Sally and Art Merrill in front of their home with niece Lindsey Merrill, who dropped by to work on college applications.

At birth, Art Merrill, 65, lived next door to the house where he grew up and where he lives now with his own family. He was seven when his family bought the house — then red-brick — in 1948, to make room for his youngest brother, Randy. The three Merrill boys — Art, Harrison and Randy — grew up playing ball on the sprawling front lawn with the neighborhood kids and had two mutty dogs, Mushy and Tootsie. The boys were star swimmers, and Art and Harrison shared a room over the garage until they went off to college.

Merrill met his future wife, Sally, while he was studying at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and she was at Gaucher College. She headed to Atlanta to Emory University for a master’s degree, and lived with her in-laws to be for a time. Years later, when Merrill’s father, also a physician, moved out in 1986, she moved back into that house with Merrill and their six children.

The Merrill house is always bursting at the seams with family; at any time there’s likely to be a cousin working on college applications on the kitchen counter, cousins and brothers meeting up to go rock climbing or assorted family members gathering around the table for a game of bridge.

Margaret Poer Moor lived in her Buckhead home from 1955 until her daughter, Liz Hanger, acquired it in 1996. Moor died last month at 95, just as Hanger was recounting memories of her childhood for this story. As family gathered to say good-bye, they reminisced about living in the old Tuxedo Road house, tucked beneath old oak trees down a long driveway.

The original house that Hanger’s parents bought was the old hunting lodge for the property where Villa Juanita now sits on the corner of West Paces Ferry Road. It was built in the 1920s with a large stone fireplace and beamed ceilings. It had one bedroom, a small kitchen and one bathroom. Before moving in, the family, which included three-year-old Liz, her brother, David, and their two teenage sisters, Martha and Margaret – added on four bedrooms and three bathrooms, among other additions, but left the “lodge room” generally untouched.

Hanger, her husband, Jim, and their two sons moved into the house in 1996. “We’ve not done anything but paint it,” she said.

She also remembers waiting by the window for the family’s help, her “second mother,” Celene, to show up in the mornings, and stealing heart-shaped tea cookies from a tin her mother kept hidden under the bed. Later, in 1981, Hanger’s wedding reception was held at the home. More recently, she recalls her mother’s 90th birthday celebration at the house – a hat party because her mother adored hats.

Hanger shared all these stories with her mother on her last days. “They say your hearing is the last thing to go,” Hanger said. She believes her mother heard every word.

  
The late Ward Wight with his son Ward holding his grandson Ward in 1969 at left. In the center, the grandson is now all grown up and holding his own son Ward Harris Wight, with proud grandpapa Ward holding a photo of the late Ward. At right, the Wight home is unchanged since the family bought it in 1963.

The mantlepiece in the living room of Ward Wight’s classic Buckhead brick home has paid homage to generations of Wights—and five Wards. The portrait of Wight’s mother, Sarah, above fireplace mantle, was painted for her debut in 1938. Twice it’s been replaced with a portrait of the late Ward Sr.—Wight’s grandfather—to photograph all of the Wards together.

The Wights have held the family home as dear as they hold family names. Wight, 61, was almost finished with his senior year at The Westminster Schools when his parents bought the house in 1963. Mr. Wight, a savvy gardener who developed new varieties of camellias, fell for the lovely gardens and spacious greenhouse, while Sarah Wight was delighted with the large 1930s brick home. Young Ward fell for the basement recreation room that would serve as his pre-college quarters – complete with a separate entrance and a long mahogany bar.

Wight says the house, which he bought in 1999 when his parents moved into a retirement facility, has changed little since he first lived there, aside from adding some of his own furniture and a large stuffed turkey he shot in South Georgia. Now, the Wights enjoy the house whether it’s his mother over for a quick visit, a Christmas Eve traditional get-together or one of Wight’s famous “Ward of the Dance” shag parties on the old wooden floors. The five grandchildren play in the gardens, especially the old flower bed he has converted into a giant sandbox.

The Brooms are Decatur through-and-through. Candler Broom, the grandson of a former mayor of Decatur, and his wife, Colline, whose grandfather was the first superintendent of the Decatur schools, met in high school in – where else? – Decatur. Broom was a football hero at Decatur High School, and his future wife was 13 when they first met; he was 16.

The 1924 house they live in had belonged to Broom’s grandparents since 1928. In 1953, when Broom was 13, his family moved from a nearby street to a house behind his grandparents’ home that had once been a coop where his grandfather raised pigeons.

Broom, 66, spent his childhood there, trotting through the backyard to his grandparents’ house and back. He and his brother spent many nights with them, sitting on the living room floor playing with toy metal soldiers from a large basket.

After the Brooms were married in 1962, they spent a year living in a room behind the garage of Broom’s grandparents’ home, then lived in California for a number of years. In 1971, they bought the house from Broom’s grandmother.

Today, the interior of the house is renovated, but it is still a gathering place for their family – especially during holidays when their son and daughter, who also live in Decatur, visit. “We have three generations of people still coming here,” said Colline Broom.

A silver goblet and communion set sit atop the Philips’ mantel as a reminder of the days when their home was the manse for Decatur Presbyterian Church, where Philips’ father was the minister. Philips, 59, was seven when his family moved in, and the house was so large he had his own private bedroom on the second floor, which is now the master bedroom.

The living room, still decorated with American antiques and a secretary in the same spot as it was when Philips was a boy, was a busy place, since it was a gathering place for the people of the church. It was also the place where Erskine Russell, the defensive coordinator for the Georgia Bulldogs, recruited Philips to play football for the University of Georgia. In June 1968, Philips gave his wife a diamond engagement ring made from one of his grandmother’s earrings.

In 1983, Philips, and his wife, Donna, bought the home from a minister who had bought the house from the church. They have renovated it four times, adding rooms to the back of the house, redoing the kitchen and adding a wine cellar. They also raised their three daughters there.