Reynolds-Gourmajenko House
(ca. 1928)
This is the area’s only residence designed by the renowned European-trained architect William Lawrence Bottomley of New York City.
715 Providence Rd, Charlotte, NC 28207
The Reynolds-Gourmajenko House is a singular structure for Mecklenburg County. It is the area’s only residence designed by the renowned European-trained architect William Lawrence Bottomley of New York City. It is the only known local example of the Tuscan Revival architectural style with this degree of refinement. Tuscan Revival is a composite style derived from the domestic architecture of the Italian Campagna (including Tuscany, Umbria, Lombardy, and the Veneto) that was reinterpreted by American designers in the nineteenth century with unrestrained freedom and endless improvisation.
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The unique house was built for William Ayers and Blanche Morgan Reynolds. Born in Oxford, Pennsylvania, William (1877-1928) played football at Princeton University and went on to coach the sport at both the University of North Carolina and the University of Georgia before becoming an executive with the Southern Cotton Oil Company in Columbia, South Carolina. A native of Durham, North Carolina, Blanche (1881-1962) spent her formative years there and in Richmond, Virginia. In 1917, she was one of eighty-two women who organized North Carolina’s branch of the women’s suffrage organization the National Woman’s Party. Married in 1904, William and Blanche moved to Charlotte in 1908. Construction on their Providence Road house began in 1925. Shortly after the house’s 1928 completion, William died, leaving Blanche and the couple’s only child, Morgan Ayres Reynolds (1905-1997), to whom Blanche deeded the house in 1941. In 1934, Blanche met Alexis Gourmajenko. They married shortly thereafter and were married until his death in 1948. Blanche never remarried.
Born in New York City, Bottomley (1883-1951) received his undergraduate degree in architecture from Columbia University before traveling to Europe to complete his training at Rome’s American University and the École des Beaux-Arts. He quickly established himself as an architect-of-choice for the culturally elite in New York and throughout the South, especially Virginia. He designed several of the stately homes along the tony Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, as well as the River House apartment building in Manhattan, a luxurious skyscraper at 535 East 52nd Street, and Long Island, New York’s unique Dutch Colonial Revival style Canoe Place Inn. Bottomley is known to have designed two other residences in North Carolina – Raleigh’s Tatton Hall and the DeLeon F. Green House in Weldon – and “restored” the early nineteenth-century Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Warrenton, North Carolina, using buttresses and a Flemish bond brick veneer to convert the frame structure into a Gothic Revival edifice. As for the Reynolds-Gourmajenko House, its notable features include a leather-walled séance room, frescoes on the bedroom ceiling, and what is reportedly Charlotte’s first residential swimming pool.