From the front, 15 Oak Drive looks like a typical early-20th century Colonial Revival style house. But a surprise awaits in the back garden, which is full of sculpture by homeowner Guy Solie.

Kitty Moses and Ken Soo’s Spanish Colonial Revival home at 1523 Hermitage Court sits in the middle of a wonderfully designed yard and garden. This is due to careful choices and expert planning that have transformed this half acre property into one of Forest Hill’s most interesting and beautiful landscapes.

The Thomas A. Stokes House – one of the finest examples of Tudor Revival architecture in Forest Hills - is situated atop a hill overlooking East Forest Hills Drive and the Forest Hills Park. The sizable parcel of land on which the home sits, and the impressive number of mature trees surrounding it, combine to give the home a feeling of a country home. For the current owners, this sense of living in the country within the city is what lends their home its special appeal.

Allan Gilbert and his wife, Mary, commissioned this quaint Tudor Revival style from George Watts Carr, Sr, because they wanted a similar house to the one they had occupied with their sons Everett and Creighton when they lived in Austria. Gilbert taught English at Duke for many years, was an avid art and antique collector and was considered a true “Renaissance” man. He and his second wife, Beverly, lived in the house until the early 1990s. The current homeowners are the third family to live in the house.

When Mildred and Dillard Teer decided to leave their traditional home in Trinity Park and build on their Beverly Drive lot, they were not wedded to a style concept, but they knew they wanted an open floor plan with public spaces flowing into one another. They took their ideas to architect and friend, Robert Winston Carr. Carr, no stranger to the colonial and other revival styles that were the bread and butter of the firm founded by his father, George Watts Carr, determined that this project demanded something other than a traditional style house. Instead, Carr chose a modernist design that is now called the American International or Contemporary Style. Its emphasis on long horizontals and irregular massing allowed him to fully exploit the dramatic, steeply sloping site.

This steep-roofed Tudor Revival house is an excellent example both of the style - which was based on idealized English Elizabethan cottages – and of the development of Forest Hills as a premier suburb.

Hugh Edward White, an office manager at Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, and his wife Anne Parker purchased the lots at 1506 Hermitage and constructed the grand, Colonial Revival-style house about 1924.