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Historic Plaza Midwood

The VanLandingham Estate, consisting of a sizeable Bungalow-influenced house set in a four-plus acre landscaped park, is one of Charlotte's most important early twentieth-century suburban estates and one of the few that were developed and survived. Proven by being part of the National Register of Historic Places. It is set on meticulously landscaped grounds designed initially by Leigh Colyer, one of the region's earliest known landscape architects. It is known that the grounds are as significant a part of the VanLandingham Estate as the House. They are a product of years of work and have inevitably changed with the life cycles of the plantings and the wishes of successive owners. On three-quarters of the land, along the street sides of the estate, Colyer used an informal, asymmetrical arrangement of plantings. This provided a naturalistic setting for the rustic architecture of the house. A canopy of random-spaced oaks shades the property, interspersed with some hemlocks and spruce and one deodar cedar. A low stone wall with gate posts at the drive entrances runs along the street and is lined with Japanese holly. In the 1960s Ralph VanLandingham brought rocks and earth from his summer home at Linville in the North Carolina mountains. He created informal rock-ringed beds under the trees, planted with azaleas from the mountains.

All of this motivated VL Residences to design a project to enjoy the fruits of years of thoughtful work and design in both the estate and grounds. Creating the perfect setting and allowing people to live within history.

It began in 1912, at the height of the city's excellent boom period; Ralph VanLandingham, a well-to-do cotton broker, and his family moved from the older Piedmont Park section of the city to the new suburban development at the end of the East Charlotte trolley line--then-known as Chatham.

The house is set back from The Plaza and Belvedere Avenue, the main streets, near the center of the site. On three-quarters of the land, along the street sides of the estate, Colyer used an informal, asymmetrical arrangement of plantings. This provided a naturalistic setting for the rustic architecture of the house. A canopy of random-spaced oaks shades the property, interspersed with some hemlocks and spruce and one deodar cedar. A low stone wall with gate posts at the drive entrances ~uns along the street and is lined with Japanese holly. In the 1960s Ralph VanLandingham brought rocks and earth from his summer home at Linville in the North Carolina mountains and created informal rock-ringed beds under the trees, planted with azaleas from the mountains.

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