Est. 1916
Garran Hill
200 Hollycrest Drive · Pinehurst, North Carolina
Neo-Georgian · Built for Ambassador Walter Hines Page
6,320
Sq Ft
4
Bedrooms
6
Baths
7
Fireplaces
4.15
Acres
20×40
Pool
$4,250,000
Offered
Begin
Some houses are built for arrival.Garran Hillwas built for return.
“The Honourable Doctor Walter Hines Page, American Ambassador to the Court of St James’s” (1917), by Philip Alexius de László (1869–1937). Oil on canvas, 90.2 × 69.9 cm. Collection of the U.S. Government, Embassy of the United States, London. Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Catalog of American Portraits, object no. UK100063.
Walter Hines Page · 1855–1918
Born in Cary, North Carolina, the son of Aberdeen’s founder, Page became a man of letters, a publisher, and a reformer. He 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. When he acquired the land in early 1913, The Pinehurst Outlook reported that he had “purchased a thousand acre farm . . . upon which he will build a winter home.” He 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. He never spent a night here.
The house rose through 1915 and 1916, built by the Pinehurst Company under foreman J. R. McQueen — the same crew that built the village of Pinehurst two miles north. Rare handmade brick, laid in Flemish bond above a water table, drawn to Georgian proportion.
Page resigned the embassy and sailed home, gravely ill, in the autumn of 1918. He was carried off the train at Aberdeen that December and died shortly afterward. Ralph made the farm his home, and the house Page drew from London outlived the longing that built it. At Westminster Abbey a tablet remembers him as “the friend of Britain in her sorest need.”
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.
Press & hold any photograph — a private viewing
It does not let go until the landing, and it has been climbed every day since 1916.
A Federal mantel. A ceiling worked in panels and coffers. Bookcases arched into the wall.
French doors give the whole room to the terrace.
Original shell cabinets, arched into the wall, still hold the room together.
It is not tired of them.
Dark granite, a center island with seating, and four windows over the sink where the light lands first.
Breakfast in the chinoiserie room next door.
A house built for a man of letters keeps its promise in this room, built to the 1916 standard.
A fireplace set in the panels. A Jacuzzi bath. French doors to the grounds.
Six of 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.
Rose garden, camellias, magnolias, dogwoods. The old tennis courts wait under the longleaf pines for resurfacing.
She held the house for twenty-five years — longer than anyone. For all of them, the gardens grew under her hand.
Betty Dumaine · owner, 1959–1984
In 1959, Elizabeth “Betty” Dumaine renamed the estate Hollycrest, for the holly trees at the door. A Bostonian, born 1900 in Concord, daughter of the industrialist Frederic C. Dumaine, she was a horsewoman and a foxhunter. She planted the rose garden, the camellias, the magnolias, the dogwoods, and the American plane trees, and kept horses, hounds, and peacocks.
In 1919, at the Edith Johnson School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, her roommate was Sangwan Chukramol — who would become Srinagarindra, the Princess Mother of Thailand, mother of two kings. For her service Betty held the Thai title Thanpuying — “Lady” — and ran the American arm of the Princess Mother’s charity, founding The Princess Mother’s Charities Fund of Thailand in 1980. It operates still. The Thai royal family knew this house.
Page conceived Garran Hill. Dumaine ensured it had a future.
Her horse Blue Fox is buried on the grounds — a slate cover, a brass marker. It cannot be staged. It can only be inherited.
Someone still puts flowers there.Two miles from the village green, the house has kept its own ground since 1916 — inside the Village of Pinehurst’s jurisdiction, outside its corporate line. Pinehurst reviews what may be built here. The county, and only the county, sets its tax.
The farm that surrounded it was subdivided long ago. Garran Hill is ready. It is offered now for the first time.
200 Hollycrest Drive is the last piece of the original Garran Hill still standing on its own ground.
Offered now for the first time — $4,250,000
