Photograph by David Walter Banks
If the house itself wasn’t still standing as proof, the entire history of Briarcliff Mansion would sound like a tall tale. Where to even begin? The baboon who escaped the on-site zoo and devoured $60 from a neighbor’s purse? The magician who committed a murder-suicide on the golf course? The visit from the Royal British Air Force that involved a local ham and a prank call from Winston Churchill?
Wherever you stick your nose around the sprawling grounds of Briarcliff Mansion, you’ll find a story as eccentric as the man who built it. Asa Candler Jr., known as Buddie, was the second son of Coca-Cola magnate Asa Candler, Sr. and one of the most unusual millionaires to ever call Atlanta home. He squandered his fortune on a series of business ventures, all wildly extravagant and most of them unsuccessful; nevertheless, they shaped the city we know today, from Zoo Atlanta to the Hotel Clermont.
Photograph by David Walter Banks
Perhaps his most enduring contribution to Atlanta is Briarcliff Mansion itself, the 42-acre estate he built for his family in 1922, which survives despite decades of unuse. After Candler Jr.’s death, the mansion and surrounding property was restructured as a state-run mental health facility, shuttered in 1997. Emory University has stewarded the estate since then, keeping the house standing through a sort of benevolent neglect, chasing away would-be vandals and renting it out to film crews, whose repairs have helped stave off greater collapse. Shows like Doom Patrol and Vampire Dairies have filmed inside the house, while across the property, the sinister “Building A” is readily identifiable as Hawkins Laboratory from Stranger Things.
Now, after years of searching for a redevelopment partner willing to preserve Briarcliff Mansion as part of their plan, Emory has finally brokered a long-term ground lease with Galerie Living, who will turn the property into a senior living community. Galerie will restore the mansion to its original design, to be used as an events space open to the public. “We loved the historic nature of the property,” says Kelly Panter, Vice President of Construction for Galerie Living.
Galerie Living begins renovations this spring; before handing over the keys, Emory let Atlanta inside to see what remains of the estate the press once called Asa Candler Jr.’s, “40 Acres of Fairyland.”
Photograph by David Walter Banks
What remains of the eccentric millionaire’s estate
“You’ll want a mask and gloves from here,” advises Sara Butler, author of a new biography on Asa Candler Jr., who is moonlighting as the group’s tour guide. She dons her own half-mask respirator (hot pink) and begins picking her way down a narrow hallway cluttered with debris, including an elegant brass chandelier.
What eventually became Butler’s book, Fortunate and Folly: The Weird and Wonderful Life of the South’s Most Eccentric Millionaire, began with the same curiosity that drives many people to the ruins of Briarcliff Mansion. “My friend and I were both into urban exploring,” Butler says. “We’d read there was an old house near Emory, and we were like, What is this place?”
She and her friend decided not to trespass illegally inside the house—“We were good friends, but we weren’t going-to-jail-together friends,” she jokes—so instead, Butler struck up a relationship with Emory, who allowed her to tag along on site visits. She began piecing together some of the house’s mysteries, identifying which parts were original and which had been stuck on during the hospital renovation, and finding the foundations of the ill-fated zoo. Before she knew it, Butler was writing a book about the peculiar Coca-Cola heir. She also started an Instagram account, @asasbriarcliff, which gives the curious public a safer, legal view of Candler’s ruined home.
Masks and gloves in place, we climb the grand staircase to explore the capacious bedrooms above, home to Candler, his wife and their five children. “Buddie,” like his brothers, worked for the Coca-Cola company, but he had a rebellious spirit that chafed at the white-collar desk job. Instead, Buddie spent most of his time—and his inheritance—on serial entrepreneurship, each venture wilder and less successful than the next. These included the Atlanta Motor Speedway, which fizzled out after one blockbuster season, and a failed school-meets-world-cruise for boys. (One venture survives today, albeit in different hands: the Hotel Clermont, which Buddie converted from an apartment building and named for his favorite sportscar, is still operational.)
In 1911, he purchased a tract of farmland north of the city, near his brothers’ properties: their houses, Lullwater and Callanwolde, are both still in use today. The elaborate, eight-bedroom house was finished in 1922, but Buddie—ever competitive—constantly added lavish new features to outdo his brothers. The land included an artesian well, a stroke of good luck that inspired yet more business ventures, like the zoo, which was dismantled after a few years. Most of the animals, which included elephants and Barbary lions, were sold to the new Grant Park Zoo. Buddie’s neighbors were relieved: The zoo smelled bad and animals sometimes escaped. In 1935, the Georgia Court of Appeals ordered Buddie to pay a $10,000 settlement to a woman “who charged that a baboon jumped over the wall of the zoo, devoured $60 in currency out of her purse.”
On the third floor of the house we reach the ballroom, its ceiling caved in from water damage. Butler steps over debris to show us a small passage behind a secret door: “My theory is that this is where they performed their disappearing acts for the magic soirees,” she says.
Around 1925, Buddie became obsessed with magic tricks, accumulating an enormous private collection of trick props. While on a trip to the Philippines, Buddie met a magician named Jose Cruz, who he invited back to Briarcliff Mansion to work as his butler and magician tutor; Cruz’s apartment behind the mansion is still standing. In 1931, Cruz made headlines across Atlanta when a groundskeeper found him and his girlfriend shot to death in a car parked near the estate’s putting green. Police found a note claiming the couple had died in a mutual suicide, but a coronary jury determined that Cruz had murdered her and then killed himself. The pistol he used belonged to his boss: Asa Candler Jr.
Photograph by David Walter Banks
Briarcliff Mansion gets a facelift
Buddie spent the last years of his life obsessively designing a different property—his elaborate mausoleum at Westview Cemetery. In 1948, short on funds, he sold Briarcliff Mansion and the 42-acre estate to the state of Georgia. He and his second wife, Florence, lived the rest of their years in an apartment complex Buddie owned; he died in 1953 of alcoholism-related liver disease.
The state converted the property into the Georgia Mental Health Institute, using the mansion as a treatment center for alcoholics. They also built a series of other facilities, including “Building A” with its formidable mesh grating and underground tunnels, which appears in the Netflix show Stranger Things as the mysterious Hawkins National Laboratory.
When the facility closed in 1997, Emory bought the property, intending to turn it into a biotech hub. After those plans stalled, the university began renting out the buildings to film crews. “Over the years, different film crews have made investments to maintain the mansion,” explains David Payne, Emory’s associate vice president of planning and engagement.
Those repairs have helped protect the house from further decline, though Butler notes that Buddie’s use of high-quality building materials has kept the mansion in remarkably good shape. “They don’t make houses like this anymore,” she says.
The good condition was good news for Galerie Living, who agreed to restore the mansion to its original glory as part of their conversion of most of the property into a senior living community (Emory will continue to operate a research library on ten acres). “Our intent is to take out everything that was done post-1950s and really honor the original design intent of the structure,” says Panter, Galerie’s VP of construction. The house will be open to the public for events like weddings and retreats. Galerie has partnered with the architecture firm Lord Aeck Sargent, which has experience in historic preservation.
The other hospital facilities will be torn down and replaced with Corso Druid Hills, a senior community with nearly 500 residences, outdoor space, and amenities, many of which, including restaurants and a floral shop, will be open to the public. Galerie expects the community to be operational by the end of 2026.
Butler believes Buddie would be pleased to know his house will survive into the next era, and that it will once again invite public visitors to the property. “Everything he did was for Atlanta,” she says. “He wanted the city to come here; he always wanted people to come and see what he’d built.”
Photograph by David Walter Banks
