Winston-Salem-born architect Luther Lashmit was barely 25 years old when he returned home to design what is believed to be his first building — the 1925 Fleshman-Graham House in Historic Washington Park. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill and Carnegie Institute of Technology, Lashmit went on to study architecture at the Fontainebleau Ecole des Beaux-Arts School in France. Back in Winston-Salem, the young Lashmit found himself surrounded by wealthy clients in the midst of a building boom. It was the perfect storm for an inspired architect.

His first clients, Thomas and Mina Fleshman, personified the upward mobility of the times. Several years earlier, the couple had moved with their daughter to “millionaire’s row” on Cascade Avenue to live in one of Winston-Salem’s grand Victorian mansions. Designed by the same architect who built the R.J. Reynolds home on West Fifth Street, the Fleshmans proudly christened their opulent home Eglantine — French for “wild rose” — for the flowers that grew on the property.

The home was a perfect symbol of an era born of industrial revolution, replete with its fancy gables, dormers, wrap-around porch, corner turret, porte-cochere, and a multiplicity of chimneys. If architecture, as it is said, is “society made visible,” Eglantine was in complete harmony with all things Victorian: heavy meals, elaborate clothes, ornate furnishings, flamboyant art, melodramatic plays, loud music, flowery speeches, and thundering sermons. To this architectural landscape, Lashmit was asked to design a “modern” house for the Fleshman’s daughter, Geraldine, and her new husband, Gregory Graham.

Seeking a new architecture free from all the Victorian trappings, the young architect embraced the Colonial Revival movement that was sweeping America in the 1920s and proposed a sub-type of the popular style — Georgian Revival.

The quiet symmetry and sense of order that characterized the Georgian-style cottage stood in sharp contrast to the asymmetrical emblem of elitism and exclusivity that Eglantine seemed to extol.
Instead, Lashmit’s brick H-shaped, clean-lined cottage glorified the virtues of simple living. The home, which was on the same property as Eglantine, sat modestly at the end of the property. It was both balanced and in perfect proportion — an architectural reaction to the over-the-top design of a bygone era.

Inside, that same simplicity was evident in the home’s traditional style and use of local materials. Guests entered a central, two-story reception hall paneled in knotty pine. Hand-hewn wooden ceiling beams and pegged wide-plank floors provided the perfect setting for a hand-wrought iron chandelier that hung from the peak of an 18-foot ceiling. The result was a country house in the Old English style and a symbolic return to simpler roots.

The reception hall — also known as the living hall — served as the heart of the home. Measuring 27 feet long and 18 feet wide, the room was the largest and most impressive space in the house and served as a gathering place for family and friends. While the concept was not new in American architecture, its inclusion in the design was a departure from the architectural devices that sometimes separated gender and class in the Victorian-home sensibility.

Through the years, the home has seen its share of mechanical and technological updates, although they’re cleverly hidden. As a result, the house retains its original footprint.
While the formal gardens, orchard, and aviary that once surrounded the house are now long gone from the landscape — along with Eglantine — a number of flowering shrubs and trees have been planted strategically around the property. 

Lashmit’s Georgian Revival cottage went on to win him a national design award and an invitation to join one of Winston-Salem’s most prestigious architectural firms — Northrup & O’Brien. A couple of years later at the age of 27, Lashmit would serve the firm as lead architect on perhaps his most well-known architectural masterwork — Graylyn.

In 1976, Lashmit was honored as the first recipient of the Gold Medal Award of the North Carolina Chapter of the American Institute of Architects for his contributions to architecture over five decades. Amid a lifetime of architectural achievements, the 1925 Fleshman-Graham House remains one of Lashmit’s, and Winston-Salem’s, best.