New Southern Classicism
Clients: Mr. and Mrs. Morrell F. Trimble
Reconstruction and renovation: 1974
Garden consultant: Neil G. Odenwald
The ancients knew there could be no phoenix without a fire; so let it be with this sublime country dwelling, which practically rose from the ashes of Afton Villa, a forty-room plantation house built in 1857. A century later a downriver casino magnate bought the property, which lost its centerpiece when the antebellum mansion burned to the ground in 1963, leaving a pile of brick rubble amid terraced gardens, an ancient private family cemetery, an arched allée of live oaks, and much more. While the honeysuckle took over, the 240-acre estate lay idle as if waiting to be cleared by an absentee developer intent on building one more subdivision called something like Tara Manna Manor.
That slick and sorry fate was prevented by Bud Trimble, who had grown up in nearby Natchez, had skippered a PT boat in World War II, and later became head of Merrill Lynch’s office in New Orleans. He and his wife, Genevieve-both of them avid gardeners-bought the plantation in 1972 with the idea of restoring the grounds as part of the region’s legacy. Of course, they would need a place to hang their sun hats and gardening gloves when the workday was done, so they decided to make a weekend cottage out of a little pavilion that had been erected in the 1950s beside the swimming pool, a basic pool house really, with changing rooms and space for Ping-Pong. They brought Barry Fox into the picture, and he brought other ideas.
Gutting the pool house, he turned it into a place with charm enough to make the shelter magazines. Southern Accents called it “Petite Pavilion·, Like Marie Antoinette in the Country.” Using fluted cypress columns rescued from the belvedere at Greenwood Plantation, he placed one row fronting the loggia beside the swimming pool and another in the living room behind a wall of glass. Keeping the peaked roof in the central living room, Barry opened it up as a cathedral ceiling with bare beams and ridge poles – wooden structural members which, to the bemusement of the local carpenters on the job, he ordered re-hewn from beautiful old timbers rescued from obsolete buildings. This was the first time he had utilized this resource, which he had seen used with handsome effect by other architects.
For the floors he laid Mexican terra-cotta tiles – octagons with cabochons in the living room and squares elsewhere. Two bedroom suites and a simple kitchen with cherry cabinets milled from lumber grown on the property completed the little dwelling; then Genevieve Trimble took over. In addition to her talents as a gardener and published writer-Barry calls her a Renaissance woman – Gen has a fine eye for interior decor. She furnished the house with French antiques, and so it became a veritable jewel box, albeit one that has been thoroughly lived in and enjoyed for nearly three decades now.
As for the acres of terraced gardens, Gen and Bud (who recently passed away) saw them richly replanted, while they screened their little hermitage from sight behind boxwood and hedges. Imaginatively, within the brick ruin of the old plantation house, they even planted a parterre, a feature that is particularly popular among visitors, for Afton Villa is now open to the public for half the year in the spring and autumn months. The erstwhile plantation, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has become a cultural and botanical treasure.