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WBM
F“From the street you would just have no clue this gorgeous
spot existed,” says architect Virginia Woodruff of the Figure
Eight Island family beach retreat she and the late Ligon
Flynn designed in 2000-2001.
Jim Farlow of the Farlow Group built the house and
echoes Woodruff’s statement.
“There was such a hill there; from the street, you couldn’t see
over the top,” Farlow says.
Farlow estimates the sand dune, then a tangle of vines
and underbrush, was about ten feet tall. He says his team
removed the front face and built a retaining wall to hold
the earth in place, and then replaced the first wall with a
masonry wall and filled behind it to elevate this foundation
to the first floor level.
“That was the hardest part about the whole job,” Farlow
says.
Leaving the live oaks on the creek side intact, the house is
elevated one full floor from the top of the tree-covered dune.
It was the second Figure Eight Island home that Flynn,
Woodruff, Farlow and landscape designer David Erwin had
designed and built for these clients. The first was on the
oceanfront.
Following the damage from Hurricane Fran in 1996,
Farlow says, “The husband got more and more nervous. So
they had Ligon design this house. It was a totally different lot;
it was a wide and skinny lot. You were limited to how close
you could get to the road and how close you could get to the
creek. It’s a different plan in a lot of ways.”
may 2013