Luxury project overlooking Piedmont Park aims to finally wrap

The new year has brought new pricing and fresh expectations for a prime-time property across the street from Piedmont Park that’s seen a decade-long saga of setbacks and headaches.

Following a snow-induced structural collapse and other unforeseen obstacles in Ansley Park, three-unit townhome project 1204 on the Park has long finished exterior construction and now hopes to offload its final unsold home.

Lot 2, as it’s called, was listed Monday for $1.5 million—as finished to the sheetrock only.

“The buyer then pulls in a designer and provides us with all of their design choices, and then we deliver the completed home,” Allen Snow, the Atlanta Fine Homes Sotheby's International Realty listing agent, tells Urbanize Atlanta.

A corner unit sold for $2.1 million last year, and the other is expected to close this quarter for the same price, according to Snow.

It’s been a long road for 1204 on the Park to reach the closings stage.

Quick history: The site at 1204 Piedmont Avenue was previously home to the historic Craigie House—also known as the Daughters of the American Revolution House—that had stood for a century behind stately Corinthian columns, across the street from Piedmont Driving Club. It had been built in 1911 by DAR, which still exists as a volunteer organization with membership restricted to those who can prove lineage to Revolutionary War patriots.

By 2012, however, the Craigie House was in beyond-ratty shape when it came to market at the fire-sale price of $399,900, making it one of intown Atlanta’s most unique listings of the time.

The home eventually landed private buyers—a husband-wife team who paid $350,000.

They couple began embarking on their dream of renovating it into a grandiose single-family home—until the freak, infamous midday snowstorm of 2014 swept through. Under the weight of so much accumulated precipitation, the Craigie House collapsed overnight, leaving little standing beyond the columns and front porch.

In 2016, new owners PacificPoint Realty demolished what was left of the historic home, as was required by city code enforcement at the time for safety reasons. Karim Shariff, head of the development company, publicly lamented the loss of the structure and vowed to incorporate some of it into a new project on site.   

Two years later, those plans were revealed in the form of luxury modern townhomes designed by Atlanta-based TaC Studios.

Designs called for preserved bricks and marble from the DAR house to be incorporated into the townhomes, in the form of patios and landscape elements.

But according to Snow, the city required “enormous” infrastructure work near Piedmont Avenue that was so expensive it rendered the project unviable, based on what the townhomes would have sold for in 2018. Developers decided to pull back, hold the property, and wait for the market to rise to accommodate the prices they desired.

By the summer of 2022, the trio of townhomes had topped out, with the unit in the middle listed for what was the least amount at the time: $1.4 million.

Snow said in 2022 buildouts for buyers could cost anywhere between $200,000 to $600,000, in addition to the price of the townhomes.

The four-story units range between roughly 2,750 and 2,900 heated square feet, each with three bedrooms and four—yes, four—car garages, to help compensate for a lack of guest parking in the area. The back half of the garages can also be converted to personal media rooms or gyms by owners, per the sellers. 

The rooftops—half outside, half enclosed with flex spaces—include Midtown views and an over-designed truss system engineered to allow for hot tubs.

Head to the gallery above for a closer look.

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