Reynolda House Museum of American Art

Katharine Smith Reynolds was far more than the wife of a tobacco magnate. Educated and ambitious, she conceived Reynolda as a self-sufficient country estate and a model of progressive farming and community, complete with dairy herds, orchards, formal gardens, a village of workers' cottages, a school, and a church. She oversaw the design of the low, white, bungalow-style main house, finished in 1917, choosing comfort and light over the grand mansion style of the age.

R. J. Reynolds died in 1918, only a year after the house was completed, and Katharine died a few years later, still young. The estate stayed in the family for decades before their daughter and her husband established the art museum, which opened to the public in 1967. The land here, like all of the North Carolina Piedmont, was long the home of Native peoples, including groups related to the Saura and Tutelo, before European settlement.

The collection tells the story of American art from the colonial era to the present, and its strength is that you meet it in a domestic setting. A grand landscape by a Hudson River School painter might hang over a fireplace, a colonial portrait watch over a stairway, a modern canvas share a room with the family's own furnishings. The effect is intimate in a way few museums manage.

The holdings include works by John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Frederic Church, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden, among many others, spanning centuries and movements. Special exhibitions rotate through as well, so a return visit often brings something new alongside the permanent favorites.

Beyond the paintings, the house is a time capsule of early twentieth-century American life for a wealthy family. The preserved lower level holds an indoor swimming pool, a bowling alley, a shooting range, and a bar, the recreations of a household that meant to entertain itself in style. Upstairs, the bedrooms and the sunny attic playroom show how the Reynolds children lived.

Katharine Reynolds built the home with modern comforts for its time and a warm, informal spirit rather than cold formality. Walking through it, you get a rare, unguarded look at the private life behind one of the great Southern fortunes, and at the taste and ideas of the woman who created it.

The estate's formal gardens, greenhouses, and woodland trails survive as Reynolda Gardens, open to visitors as a public green space. The formal beds change with the seasons, the old greenhouses shelter tender plants, and paths lead out through fields and along a stream, remnants of the working country estate Katharine planned.

Adjacent Reynolda Village, once the estate's dairy barns, cottages, and service buildings, has become a cluster of shops and eateries, and Wake Forest University sits just across the way. Spring and early summer show the gardens at their fullest, while autumn brings color to the surrounding woods, making any season a fine time to pair the art indoors with a walk outside.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.