Mayfair Manor
(1929)
Known now as the Dunhill Hotel, the Louis Asbury-designed Mayfair Manor offered uptown overnight stays and permanent residency for Charlotteans and visitors alike for decades.
237 N. Tryon St., Charlotte, NC 28202
The ten-story Mayfair Manor debuted as Charlotte’s newest hotel on November 15, 1929, less than one month after the stock market crash that launched the Great Depression. The owners, Dr. James Pleasant Matheson (1878-1937) and Dr. Clarence Napoleon Peeler (1879-1957), selected Louis Humbert Asbury (1877-1975), one of North Carolina’s first professionally trained architects and one of the region’s foremost building designers of the early twentieth century, to design the building. Better known as two of the co-founders of the Charlotte Eye, Ear, Nose, and Throat Hospital (ca. 1923), Matheson and Peeler intended to allocate the hotel’s 100 rooms equally between permanent and transient guests. The doctors purchased the land at the corner of North Tryon and West 6th Streets in 1926 for $250,000, hoping its proximity to the center city’s square and upscale storefronts would elevate the hotel to one of the state’s most exclusive destinations. The property had formerly been occupied by the Tryon Street Methodist Episcopal Church.
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Hotels were essential to Charlotte’s emergence as a warehouse and distribution center for the Carolinas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. People who came to town to do business needed a place to stay. By 1930, Mayfair Manor was one of nine major hotels in Charlotte, including the Mecklenburg, Central Hotel, Piedmont, Selwyn, Walton, Clayton, Hotel Charlotte, and Stonewall. Of those major hotels, only the Mayfair Manor building remains. When it opened, the Neoclassical-influenced Mayfair Manor featured intricate tile and marble work, a lobby with walnut woodwork and bronze fixtures, and the latest in kitchen technology, including steam tables, a 5000-dish capacity sterilizer, a ventilation system capable of changing the kitchen air every three minutes, and electric dishwashers, potato peelers, and mixing machines. Likewise, the rooms featured such innovative amenities as Murphy beds, individual telephone service, and both bathtubs and showers.
Mayfair Realty Corporation purchased the hotel in 1937 following Dr. Matheson’s death. In 1959, Dwight L. Phillips acquired the hotel. He only retained ownership for one year, during which time he invested $225,000 in renovations and improvements. A new ownership group renamed the hotel the “James Lee Motor Inn” in 1960, launching a period of frequent ownership changes until 1987, when Dunhill Hotel Associates purchased the neglected and largely vacant structure. Following a $6 million renovation, the hotel reopened in 1988 as “The Dunhill Hotel.”
Charlotte native Louis H. Asbury (1877-1975) studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before returning to his hometown to open his firm in 1908. As the first North Carolina member of the American Institute of Architects, Asbury earned hundreds of commissions in Charlotte and the surrounding counties. His notable body of work includes the 1921 Thies Automobile Sales and Service Building, 1926 Mecklenburg County Courthouse, the 1927 First National Bank skyscraper on South Tryon Street, the 1918 Old Mount Carmel Baptist Church building, and the 1928 Myers Park Methodist Church building, as well as numerous stately homes throughout Charlotte.