The Wardlaw House (circa 1929)

1741 Houghton Court South, Dunwoody, GA

Originally facing Mt. Vernon Road, the house is located in Dunwoody Club Forest on Houghton Court. Commonly referred to as “The Shack” by the family, the home features high ceilings, spacious rooms and an interesting style of architecture.

Mr. William C. Wardlaw and his wife, Gertrude, built the house as a summer home in 1936. The family also had a home on Juniper Street in Atlanta, where William was Vice-President of the Trust Company of Georgia. As the banker of Ernest Woodruff, Wardlaw amassed a large fortune by helping Woodruff take the Coca-Cola Company public in 1919.

Some say “the New Atlanta” was born on the property because the Wardlaws were well connected, and often entertained early 20th-Century Atlanta leaders and their families on their bucolic property, for summer swimming in their pond, barbecues and dinners.

The Wardlaws had two sons: William, Jr., and Platt. Platt died of pneumonia at the age of 14 on January 1, 1924.

William, Jr., an honor student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, graduated in the late 1920’s with a degree in textile engineering and was an active member of the “Tech” community for more than 50 years. He founded Wardlaw & Company, an investment advisory firm in Atlanta, and was president until his death in December 1983. The Wardlaw Center, a multipurpose facility serving the athletic program at Georgia Tech, was created with donations from his widow and is named for him.

William had a very bright, rather eccentric son, who chose to go by the name of B (with no punctuation). During his youth, on a wooden Adirondack-style gazebo were nine arrowheads from the property that had been formed into his initials “BW.” As a young man, B rebelled against his idyllic, privileged childhood and told his story in a book titled “Coca-Cola Anarchist.” The gazebo is now gone, destroyed in 2003-2004 when a 200 -year-old oak tree fell on it.

Today the home is a private residence.