Henderson, Isabelle Bowen, House and Gardens

At 213 Oberlin Road in Raleigh, a modest turreted Victorian cottage sits within a composed landscape of gardens and small buildings. The house has an older two-room core from the Duncan Cameron Plantation and was moved back from the road and turned to face south in 1937. Isabelle Bowen Henderson, an artist trained at the Pennsylvania Academy and Columbia University, then added a Colonial Revival studio wing and a kitchen and dining porch. She built a carriage house, an herb house and a brick terrace, and laid out front, herb and working gardens on the 1.2-acre lot. The front room holds a hand-painted mural of the colonial Carolinas. Henderson drew on color theory, Arts and Crafts ideas and the garden writing of Gertrude Jekyll, and she kept garden records that a noted North Carolina garden writer cited. The listing recognizes the site as a cohesive work joining building and landscape.