The Page Provenance

Before Garran Hill was an estate,
it was an intention.

Walter Hines Page · 1855–1918

Conceived for a North Carolina son who became a man of letters, a publisher, a reformer, and an ambassador, this Pinehurst estate carries the grace of an earlier century into the present day. Page edited The Atlantic Monthly and co-founded Doubleday, Page and Company. In 1913 Woodrow Wilson sent him to the Court of St James’s, and kept him there through the years the world came apart.

From London, his imagination kept returning to the Sandhills. That same year he had bought a thousand acres of Moore County pine and named it Garran Hill: a gentleman’s farm, a peach orchard, a house worthy of return. Six weeks later he sailed for London, and the farm stayed behind.

He wrote home about it constantly. The peaches, the gardens, the pecans. He sent his son Ralph to build it, and asked only to hear of it at every turn.

“Build the farm, therefore, and let me hear at every stage of that happy game.”

Walter Hines Page, to his son Ralph · March 1918
The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page · Doubleday, Page & Co. · 1923

1915 – 1916

The house rose through 1915 and 1916, built by the Pinehurst Company under J. R. McQueen. The same craftsmen who built Pinehurst built this house: rare handmade brick, laid in Flemish bond above a water table, drawn to Georgian proportion.

Garran Hill under construction, 1916 — The house Page drew from London, rising in the Sandhills · 1916

“Well, Frank. I did get here after all, didn’t I?”

His last recorded words · Aberdeen station · December 1918

Page resigned the embassy and sailed home, gravely ill, in the autumn of 1918. He reached Pinehurst that December. Ralph made the farm his home, and the house Page drew from London outlived the longing that built it. He remains the only American diplomat of the First World War honored with a tablet at Westminster Abbey.

The House

Come in.
It has been waiting.

A house tells you what it is in the first three steps. You see straight through to the far windows before the door has closed behind you.

I · Arrival

Four and a quarter acres, and the house sits at the center of all of them.

You see the whole of it before you are asked to come closer.

II · The Entrance Hall

The mahogany rail leaves the newel in one unbroken turn.

It does not let go until the landing, and it has been climbed every day since 1916.

III · The Drawing Room

Nearly forty feet, and every foot of it points at the fire.

A Federal mantel. A ceiling worked in panels and coffers. Bookcases arched into the wall.

French doors give the whole room to the terrace.

The brick terrace beyond the French doors

IV · The Dining Room

The 1916 frontispiece has watched a hundred years of dinners.

It is not tired of them.

V · The Kitchen

Heart pine underfoot. The one floor that is not the original oak.

Black granite, a range under its hood, a butler’s pantry with a farm sink.

Breakfast where the light lands first.

VI · The Library

Shelving to the ceiling on three walls.

A house built for a man of letters keeps its promise in this room.

VII · The Sitting Room

Delft tile around the hearth, blue on white, its color kept since Holland.

In the corner, a spiral stair winds up to the study.

VIII · The Primary Wing

The whole width of the house, and a door that closes on all of it.

A fireplace set in the panels. Two dressing rooms. French doors to the grounds.

IX · The Upstairs Suites

Three more above, each with its own fire and bath.

The Rose. The Yellow. The Red.

X · The Den

A spiral stair climbs to a room kept back for quiet.

Fire going.
No one home yet.

Seven hearths are set to come on by themselves through the cold months. So the house is never cold when you reach it, and a room is always lit, waiting.

XI · The Grounds