gardens of romance
by Peter Loewerphotography by Rimas Zailskas
I am sitting with Marvin and Helen Seibold on the front porch of Teneriffe, enjoying one of the cooler spots in the Southeast. A gentle breeze rustles the ferns hanging across its substantial width. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful home. I’m not alone in this assessment. Ralph Lauren used the grounds of the Flat Rock estate to shoot an ad campaign — an introduction to a fragrance called, appropriately, Romance.
It’s not hard to discern what Lauren’s people saw when they scouted the location. The grounds are expansive, voluminous, and exquisitely sculpted: perfect for a brand built around the iconic American dream.
It wasn’t always this way.
The Seibolds, who had homes in Minnesota and Florida, discovered the estate while motoring between them in 1994. But it was in poor shape, an ugly duckling. Marvin and Helen couldn’t resist. They purchased the property and spent the next year bringing Teneriffe back to its original grandeur.
Now a private residence, the Seibolds ran Teneriffe as a bed & breakfast the first four years. Marvin and Helen loved telling their guests stories from the home’s past. Teneriffe, records show, was built in the 1850s by Doctor J.G. Shoolbred, a seafaring man from Charleston. He named his home, it is said, after the largest of the Canary Islands, off the northern coast of Africa.
“Helen and I still enjoy some of the excitement and most of the history,” says Marvin. “After all, we have a house that is a perfect example of ‘Carpenter Gothic’, a home that was used in some scenes for The Swan, the 1956 movie basically shot at Biltmore that starred Grace Kelly — and who knows who attended the candlelight parties held in our living room back in Flat Rock’s heyday?”
“And don’t forget the ghost,” adds Helen. “Every great house has a ghost. We’ve never seen her but visitors have reported a presence to us. She’s a small silhouette of a figure that just glides into a room — and certainly over the years plenty of other things have happened. ”
“The house was, like many in the area, remodeled by Biltmore’s supervising architect, R. S. Smith,” continues Helen, “and if we walk about the grounds it’s pretty obvious that Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape designer, walked this property and made some solid suggestions about the layout of the grounds.”
Marvin pointed in the direction of the hemlocks that line the driveway to the home. “I certainly believe,” Marvin says, “that Olmsted had a hand in laying out some of the resurrected grounds because it’s just too well planned for a time in America when lawns and gardens were rarely approached by such a road.”
We walked past the elegant croquet court, with its well-designed arbor supporting very old Concord grape vines, then down a woodland path shaded by more hemlocks and black pines, down to a small area that overlooks the tennis court.
“You can see,” Marvin says, “by the rocks used to edge this sitting area that the hemlocks and the rock edges were put in at the same time. Then look out on this English-style meadow, again lined with stately trees and there’s no evidence of any stumps or tree seedlings to break up the grasses.”
We continued to walk, circling about the marvelous pit green house, its protected roof pointing to the southern sky, then through another beautifully built grape arbor. The arbor supports green muscadines and purple Fredonia vines, which the Seibolds use to make estate jams and jellies.
As we crest the top of a gentle rise, I notice what looks like a medieval castle’s turret. It is, in fact, a cistern, the South’s version of a northern icehouse. Water from the estate’s rooftop would run off and gather in the cistern. In the old days, the servants would use the water to do the laundry and other sundry chores.
We come upon the stables. At the turn of the 19th century, fox hunting was a popular sport. The carefully built stables, beautifully fashioned of tongue-and-groove wainscoting, housed not only prized hound dogs but carriage horses as well.
“Some scenes from The Swan were also filmed here,” says Helen.
Marvin launches into a story about one of his favorite topics on the estate: the bats. “The bats of Teneriffe actually get a chance to spend sunny days and chilly winters in our barn. Each colony has about 25 to 30 individuals. Our barn supports a couple of these groups. I suspect one of the reasons we have so few insect pests results from the bats eating one-half of their own body weight in a day — or about 2,000 bugs.”
As we walked back to the house, we passed the donkeys grazing in the open field below. It is here that I learn of the one thing Ralph Lauren’s people did not care for at Teneriffe. The camera crew, apparently, didn’t much like the Seibold’s donkeys. “They didn’t set the correct tone,” says Marvin, “so they brought some horses in for the photo shoot.”
