A historic North Carolina suburb filled with Victorian-style houses has ordered an architect to tear down his newly built home because it's too modern.
Architect Louis Cherry and his wife Marsha Gordon began building their $500,000 dream home in the Oakwood suburb of Raleigh in September 2013, the Daily Mail reported. But less than a year later the city revoked his building permit, saying his home did not fit in with the town's historic architecture. Cherry has since filed an appeal against the decision, which if he loses, will mean his home will be torn down.
"It was very much our intention to design and build a house that people would really accept," said Cherry, whose two-story home was near completion when he was forced to stop. "It was very surprising to us that there's been this reaction, as if this is some crazy, modernist intervention."
The trouble began in September when Cherry's neighbor, Gail Wiesner, filed a complaint against his home after he already got his permit from the Raleigh Historic Development Commission.
Wiesner said Cherry's home, with large glass windows and a brick porch, was "garishly inappropriate" in a town full of 19th and 20th architecture, the Daily Mail reported. Other houses in the historic district, which was created in the '70s, include Italian mansions, bungalows and shotgun houses.
"It will harm the character of the neighborhood and contribute to erosion of the neighborhood's value as an asset to its residents, to the surrounding communities, to the businesses it supports, to in-town and out-of-town visitors, and to the city as a whole," Wiesner wrote in her complaint, according to the newspaper.
By February, the Raleigh Board of Adjustment revoked Cherry's permit, six months after he started building.
"We were repeatedly assured that Gail's appeal was only procedural in nature," Gordon told the News Observer.
If Cherry and his wife don't win their appeal by this summer, the $500,000 incomplete home will be destroyed.
"They consider what I'm doing an affront to history. But I'm trying to celebrate vitality, and it is sympathetic to the spirit of the neighborhood," Cherry said according to the newspaper.
