High-end History at Graylyn Estate

Spend a weekend at Winston Salem’s magnificent manse

Winston Salem’s industrious past comes alive with a stay at Graylyn. The stately home stands across the street from another well-known estate, Reynolda. The two mansions offer a story of immense wealth fueled by agriculture, tobacco, and the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in the Carolinas.

Today the neighborhood has infilled, partly with homes and partly by the growth of Wake Forest University, which abuts it. Wake Forest was gifted both estates and counts them as part of the university’s footprint; Graylyn is operated as a luxe hotel and conference center and Reynolda, the former home of R.J. Reynolds, is open to the public as a historic home museum with significant gardens and a retail village. 

Bowman Gray was president of R.J. Reynolds and later chairman. In 1925, he and his wife Nathalie purchased 87 acres of cornfields and rolling pastureland from Reynolda to build a 60-room home for their family of four. It would take years to design and build the 46,000-square-foot Norman Revival-style manor. Outbuildings include a guest house and farming structures along with scenic ponds.

European facades were purchased on overseas trips, shipped home to Winston Salem, and installed in living spaces. Rooms are filled with antiques, books, and collections. There are 15th-century French carved doorways and rare Parisian Louis XV paneling.

The many bathrooms were considered state-of-the-art in the 1920s, when they were installed. Every bedroom has an adjoining bath, with features including original decorative tile, wall scales, heated towel bars, and several with marble bathtubs. 

An upstairs maids’ kitchen is a darling coffee and self-serve ice cream station for guests. Ice cream and cookies were Nathalie Reynolds’s favorite treats, and butterscotch cookies make an appearance each afternoon in the grand entry in homage to the Gray family’s beloved pups, Butter and Scotch.

Fifty-five acres of the estate remains, and its pastoral setting is stunning to traverse on foot or by provided bikes. A lawn just past the patio and koi pond is the spot for yard games like croquet, horseshoes, and badminton. The fun continues in the home’s basement with its original pub, billiards room, and Egyptian tapestries.

Graylyn is a member of Historic Hotels of America, which is the official program for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the staff here strives to extend gracious hospitality from the moment you arrive. Butlers offer historic tours of the property, and the dining room is reserved for guests first for both breakfast and dinner. 

Though there are elevators, the central staircase is a feat of early 20th-century engineering set into a cleverly designed turret. This is one of the best places on the property to take note of the immense amount of ironwork created by Joseph Barton Benson of Philadelphia. Throughout the hotel it’s fun to spy little nods to the Gray boys, Bowman Jr. and Gordon, with motifs of dinosaurs and pirates and sailing ships quietly interwoven into the estate’s formal aesthetic.

The tapestry of stone, brick, cobblestone, slate, and varnished wood make Graylyn an apt getaway during wintertime. With every fireplace ablaze, it feels challenging to go off property at all—though with a bounty to experience at Reynolda, you may just muster the energy to have the Graylyn staff deliver you across the lane for a day jaunt.

The Persian Card Room

Upon entering Graylyn, if you turn right, you can stumble into a world from a hemisphere away. Nathalie Gray was enamored with the Eastern world, and while visiting Istanbul in 1928 she purchased what she thought was an intact Turkish smoking parlor. 

In fact, it is a display cobbled together from approximately six private homes originating from Damascus, according to the Special Collections Department of Wake Forest University. “It’s likely that many of the panels were salvaged from damaged houses in the Sidi Amoud Quarter… that was bombed by the French army during the anti-colonial Syrian Revolt of 1925-27,” according to the department’s research.

Though the room looks like embossed leather adorned with religious poetry, the panels at Graylyn are painted wood, with a raised motif created for decoration. It is unknown why the Grays called it “Persian.” Wake Forest chalks this up to the use of the term as a generational catch-all for decor perceived as Middle Eastern. In Damascus, these interior rooms were called ‘Ajami rooms and served as winter reception chambers.

The Grays played bridge here and set it up as a bar for parties. Today, it’s used an event space for private dinner parties or small meetings and was painstakingly restored after the home suffered a fire in 1980.

Mrs. Gray’s Butterscotch Cookies

Butterscotch Cookies, the heavenly tradition served each afternoon at Graylyn Estate.