One-owner mansion replicates antebellum style in Germantown
The three acres that come with 9190 Winding Oak in Germantown do not grow cotton, soybeans or other crops, but the house there could pass as a plantation home with its large columns and deep wrap-around porches and balconies.
Like antebellum mansions, this neoclassical house predates the war — the Persian Gulf War (1990-91), not the Civil War (1861-65).
A family that sells new luxury cars hired the late architect Lavelle Walker — known for his work in traditional or neoclassical architecture — to design their 8,000-square-foot, 15-room home built in 1988. No one else has owned the house.
The estate hit the market about two months ago with a list price of $1.295 million. Its address — 9190 Winding Oak Way — almost explains why passers-by on Forest Hill-Irene Road cannot see the mansion. The house sits on secluded grounds at the end of a long, curvy
drive.
The home’s veneer is synthetic stucco, but there’s nothing synthetic or token about the massive columns, deep porches and balconies, and numerous arched windows.
Entering the front door, you step into a grand hallway with the traditional soaring ceilings, chandeliers, and layout for the living and dining rooms.
The master bedroom suite is on the ground floor, with three large bedrooms upstairs. Each has its own private bathroom.
The house includes such modern adaptations as a kitchen that opens to a large family room and large, numerous windows.
The kitchen is immense, with two big islands offering sinks and seating. The kitchen has commercial refrigerators, a Wolf brand stove with six burners, two griddles, double ovens and an additional oven, two warming drawers, a convection oven and a deep fryer.
But the kitchen is also beautiful, featuring a massive copper range hood. Its color complements what may be the jewel of the whole place: a backsplash of Himalayan salt block that is back-lit. The colors of the salt tiles — normally used for cooking — radiate from the interior light and steal the show.
In the adjacent family room, the arched windows frame another showpiece of the home: the backyard pool. Fed by a waterfall and lined with stacked stone, the asymmetrical pool seems to replicate a swimming hole of an Ozark stream.
The second floor continues the “very classical floor plan” designed by Walker, said David Tester, the listing agent and broker and co-owner of Marx-Bensdorf Realtors.
“Bedrooms on each side of the central hallway in the front, a third bedroom and upstairs den on each side of the central hallway in the back,” Tester said.
Oak floors are throughout the house except on the carpeted third level, where the extra space could be used for a playroom, media room, man cave, “however you want to use it,” Tester said.
A permanent wood ladder angles up to the roof from the middle of the room. The ladder leads to a hatch that opens to a “widow’s walk.” That’s a small, railprotected space on the roof where one can stand to “survey your grounds,” Tester said.
“The home without question is reminiscent of Southern plantations in the early days in the South,” Tester said. “... It’s a great place to host large parties or families to come in and go out easily and naturally.
“The house design, I think, is a combination of magnificence and simplicity, all in one place.”