[Durham INC] Preservation Durham Home Tour May Saturday and Sunday - Don't Miss It!

[Tom Miller]

Preservation Durham Home Tour May Saturday and Sunday - Don't Miss It!

 

Preservation Durham will offer a home tour this spring. This tour is
designed to highlight excellent recent renovations of historic homes and to
champion the preservation choices of their owners.  Houses included are
located all over Durham and represent a number of styles and periods.   The
architects, designers, and contractors responsible for the work will be
showcased.  Preservation can mean a lot of things and the homes on tour will
demonstrate that.  

 

Several houses on the tour have a connection to West Durham.  Just to whet
your interest, the tour will include the "The Annexe," a wonderful
conversion of an historic Sprunt Avenue garage into a thoughtful personal
aerie in a garden setting.  The tour includes a couple of century-old
worker's cottages. One of these, the 1905 Ivory and Annie Smith House on
Ninth Street, is one of the oldest houses in Watts-Hillandale.  It was
occupied by the same family for nearly one hundred years and has been
lovingly renovated.  There is a cluster of beautiful homes in Old North
Durham and Duke Park, all of them designed by important Durham architects
Rose and Rose, Each house has been saved by new owners each with their own
ideas about what preservation can be.  You will want to see them.

 

Perhaps the star of the tour will be the magnificent Hill House on South
Duke Street.  Designed in the Spanish Mission Style for Durham
philanthropists John Sprunt Hill and his wife Annie Watts Hill.  This house
has just emerged from a painstaking restoration.  Seldom opened to the
public, the Hill House is wonderful to see and not to be missed.  John
Sprunt Hill and his father-in-law George W. Watts were instrumental in
building Watts and Lincoln Hospitals as gifts to Durham.  They also
developed the Hillandale golf course and the original subdivision along Club
Boulevard.  George W. Watts was Ben Duke's partner in the Erwin Cotton Mill.
Hill House and Watts Hospital were both designed by architect Bertrand
Taylor.  When he died, John Sprunt Hill left Hill House in trust for the
benefit of women's organizations in Durham.

 

Farther afield, way up off the Guess Road, is the Giles Latta House.  The
oldest part of this house was built in 1850 placing the house among the
oldest surviving homes in Durham County.  Now surrounded by modern
subdivisions, the old home and five acres of the Latta farm is still
surrounded by a number of ancient farm buildings including a mid-Nineteenth
Century log kitchen.  Neglected for years, the house was in a state of near
collapse when the current owners bought and restored it.

 

The tour is scheduled for this weekend, May 21 and 22, from noon until 4
p.m. each day.  Your ticket will include both days so you can visit all the
houses at your own pace.  Tour-goers will receive a tour booklet describing
each house and its history.  To buy tickets, click on this Eventbrite link:
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2022-preservation-durham-home-tour-then-now-ti
ckets-323251673457>
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2022-preservation-durham-home-tour-then-now-tic
kets-323251673457 .  If you prefer, you can buy your ticket during the tour
at Hill House, 900 South Duke Street.

 

Preservation Durham has been presenting the best of Durham's historic
architecture in tours like this for more than twenty-five years.  Mark your
calendars.  It'll be fun!  This event will conform to all covid guidelines.

 

 

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