This is Rose Hill, an 11,000 square foot Georgian-revival house on a 410 acre estate in Greenwood, Virginia a few miles west of Charlottesville. The house was designed by William Bottomley who is credited with many Georgian masterpieces in the Old Dominion especially in the Richmond area (for other Bottomley homes in this blog click here for Half Way House or here for Chilton). The house was completed in 1930 for Susanne Williams Massie, the widow of a Richmond banker. In the early decades of the 20th century, some of Richmond’s elite established summer homes in the Greenwood area and Rose Hill is surrounded by several of these homes, most of which still exist. The area continues to be a rural enclave of historic estates, horses and gardens. One of these estates, Tiverton, which is just west of Rose Hill, is covered in this blog (click here).

Susanne passed away in 1952 and the home was purchased a few years later by Henry Bradley Martin. Mr. Martin was the grandson of Henry Phipps, a partner of Andrew Carnegie in the Carnegie Steel Corporation (later U.S. Steel). The Phipps family built several homes in the leafy suburb of Old Westbury, N.Y. on Long Island including what is arguably one of the most attractive homes in North America, Westbury House, now known as Old Westbury Gardens. The Phipps family took their steel money and put it into an investment firm called Bessemer Trust which pioneered the concept of a “family office”, a privately owned investment firm that serves the needs of a single wealthy family by investing, disbursing funds, minimizing tax liabilities, arranging private planes, getting the merc serviced, etc.

Henry was educated at Oxford University and served in North Africa during the Second World War as part the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) the forerunner of the C.I.A. Henry was also a noted book collector who used Rose Hill to house his extensive collection which included the only privately owned copy of the original Declaration of Independence and an extensive collection of books on ornithology (i.e., the study of birds). Henry passed away in 1988 and left Rose Hill to his daughter, Alice Martin Takach. Alice and her husband, Stephen, use Rose Hill as a summer home. Rose Hill is a private home and is not open to the public.