LUXURY BY THE WATER
Grand home off South Carolina coast evokes splendour of cathedral, elegance of museum, with cosy touch
The castle-like stone house on the waterfront offers a panoramic view of the Colleton River off the southern coast of South Carolina, adjacent to Hilton Head. It sits on a large tract of forest — mostly live oaks and magnolias cloaked with Spanish moss — salt marsh and tidal creek, with a large pond at the end of a long tree-lined road. The scene is like a nature preserve, and, indeed, much of the land was once a conservancy.
This is Baqache, or Shady Retreat. It’s a property in the Colleton River Plantation, a luxury gated community of about 700 residences and a generous stretch of shoreline.
“What’s unusual is to have this big a lot in a gated community,” said owner Brock Rowley. “You get great privacy and quiet.”
The real estate market on Hilton Head Island is strong, with sales and prices higher this year than last year, said Ann Lilly, a broker associate at Charter One Realty.
Overall sales of single-family houses — driven mostly by retirement, second-home and investor buyers — are up nearly 21 per cent, and in the high-end market over $1 million, they’re up about nine per cent, said Judy Collins, a real estate agent with Celia Dunn Sotheby’s International Realty.
“Comparing similar golf resorts and beach communities — like the Hamptons in New York, Palm Beach in Florida or Nantucket on Cape Cod — to the Lowcountry (South Carolina coastal areas including Hilton Head Island and Bluffton), you’re sure to find unprecedented luxury at an enticingly lower price,” she said.
Not all are luxury properties. Small condos are available from around $150,000 and single-family houses from $250,000, Lilly said. Nearby Bluffton has more land to develop and builders are developing new neighbourhoods with houses from the low $200,000s, “something our millennial buyers seek today,” Collins said. (Prices in U.S. dollars.)
The Rowley house’s interior evokes the splendour of a cathedral and the elegance of a museum. It measures 20,700 square feet. It has 10 gas-burning fireplaces, seven bathrooms, six kitchens, a library, a music room, a bar and tea rooms, maid quarters and one 3,500-square-foot master-bedroom suite with a dressing room and his-and-hers bathrooms and closets. The property is for sale for $9.95 million, down from $13.6 million when it originally hit the market four years ago. It’s appraised in the range of $15 million to $18 million, Rowley said.
The Rowleys collected art and furnishings, silver and lamps, china and glassware over decades of travel around the world. There’s a gold Baccarat chandelier that cost $100,000 when it was made in the 1930s; a mid-19th-century silver epergne bought from the estate of North Pole explorer Richard Byrd; and a pair of 20th-century hand-carved walnut Queen Annestyle chairs with ball-and-claw feet (value $3,000).
A 20-page furniture and accessories inventory, prepared by an antique appraiser, was compiled for estate-planning purposes. It adds $1.3 million to the property’s value; adding the art raises the value to more than $2 million.
Rowley and his wife, Elizabeth, are selling the house and contents because they plan to move to a retirement community. “We’re in our 80s,” he said.
“We bought most of the art and furnishings for these rooms, and many pieces aren’t easily adaptable. The 24-by-14-foot silk oriental rugs will not easily fit elsewhere.” They hope the purchaser will buy much of the decor.
The architecture is European style, much of it salvaged and repurposed from original material.
Rowley helped design and build the house. He studied architecture, then engineering. He was president of U.S. Steel’s American Bridge division, which he later bought in a leveraged buyout.
The octagonal yellow tea room is encased in glass and mirror walls and topped with a leaded glass ceiling saved from a now-demolished New York City hotel built in the late 1800s.
“The mirrors make the room seem larger than it really is, and you feel like you’re sitting outside,” Elizabeth Rowley said. Beyond the window, dozens of ibises rest on a bare-limbed tree like floating white orbs.
Pocket doors leading into the red-walled library are 4 1/2 inches thick and 12 feet high. The ceiling is 35 feet high, and the room is 42 by 22 feet. Stepping into the library is akin to walking into a church. The Colleton River can be seen out the window at the room’s end.
The ceiling is decorated with hand-carved wooden trusses. A walnut, mahogany and iron pulpit (value $10,000), stands in one corner. “I brought it from Ripley, England, in Yorkshire,” Brock Rowley said. “They were tearing the church down, and I took it home. It was taller, but we cut four feet off to fit here. The fireplace wood surround was carved right outside under our oak tree.” The hardwood-floor design is identical to the Louvre floor in Paris.
The long gallery hallway is flanked on one side by a glass wall of doors opening onto a patio facing the river. A moonlit sky comes to mind, as well as musical sounds. “This is where we hold our black-tie New Year’s Eve parties,” Elizabeth Rowley said. “We tent the outside for the musicians and entertain 140 guests.”
In the dining room, birds alight on cherry-blossom branches on the silk wallpaper hand-painted in China. The fireplace mantel is a sculpture of birds, insects and flowers.
Brock Rowley’s office is panelled in wormy chestnut milled from an old barn in Tennessee 30 years ago. His desk is angled to offer a sight line through a kitchen window to the fountain, rose bushes and Meyer lemon trees in the garden.
The music room is legendary. It was lifted from a room in the Hungarian Embassy in Paris before that building was torn down and rebuilt. “We took the room apart, brought the components back, reassembled them in a warehouse and fit them into the space here,” Rowley said. The solid French oak panelling with gold-leaf trim was hand-carved in 1830.
A pool house, potting shed and three-bedroom, 2,500-squarefoot guest house adorn the property. “The guest house is far away from the main house so our visitors can do what they want,” Rowley said. “We give them golf carts to go back and forth.”
Plantation residents are automatically members of the Colleton River Plantation Club. The property owner’s association fee is $18,000 per year, plus a one-time initiation fee of $15,000.
“I marvel that as large as the house and many of the rooms are, it’s still comfortable for just two people,” Elizabeth Rowley said.
“We’ve made it cosy and intimate,” her husband said. “But someone has to want to live here in the first place. It’s not like in New York or Miami where everything sells. It’s not a house for everybody.”