Rhodes Hall

Rhodes Hall is the castle the furniture man built on Peachtree. Amos Rhodes made the fortune — the installment plan for furniture that made middle-class customers into a market — and spent it on the granite house on the avenue in 1904. Willis Denny designed it, the young architect who gave Atlanta a Romanesque Revival mansion in Stone Mountain granite — the material usually reserved for churches and courthouses — on the street where the city's wealth built its houses. Rhodes called it Le Reve, the Dream; the papers called it the castle on Peachtree.

The house was the statement of the New South's money — the furniture magnate who'd started with a store on Decatur Street building the granite mansion that out-did the older fortunes. Denny died a year after it was finished, thirty-one years old, the house the masterpiece of a career that ended before it should have. The granite kept its quality; the interior kept the belle époque grandeur that was already going out of style when it was built — the house that was magnificent and anachronistic from the day it was done.

Rhodes Hall is the last of its kind — the Peachtree mansions were demolished for the commercial street the avenue became, and the castle survived because it was too good to tear down and too large to move. The Georgia Trust has its offices upstairs; the rooms are the house museum and the event space that keep the building's grandeur in use.

Rhodes Hall is the archive's castle file — the Stone Mountain granite mansion the furniture magnate built on Peachtree in 1904, the architect's masterpiece finished a year before his death, the last of the avenue's great houses standing in the city that demolished the rest.