Last year, a squat green home met its maker at 316 East Lake Drive, where Oakhurst meets Kirkwood. In its place, a large plywood structure sprung up, only to stagnate without any sign of progress for months. Now, the under-construction home has disappeared, as the Ruined Decatur blog notes, and the source of the vanishing-house mystery could be Decatur's toughing stance against out-of-context new residences. The partially construct "plywood palace" was deconstructed earlier this month.
City records show the developer is Provenance Construction, an Atlanta-based builder with more than 100 single-family houses and townhomes completed in metro Atlanta since 2003, according to the company's website. So, what went wrong at this 5,000-square-foot plot of red Oakhurst clay?
According to a commenter on the neighborhood association's Facebook page, the builder erred by removing all of the old home's exterior walls, thereby reclassifying it as a new construction — and losing its grandfathered variances for things like lot coverage and setbacks.
What's more, the commenter noted, the home may have violated rules mandating that a home's square footage cannot exceed 40 percent of its lot size. In any case, it's strange to see the skeleton of a home reduced to a pile of boards in building-crazed Atlanta. Records show the property sold last summer for $185,000.
· 316 East Lake Drive [Ruined Decatur]
· Progress Or Pity? $950K Contemporary to Replace '42 Home [Curbed]
[Images via Ruined Decatur, Citywide Historic Resources Survey.]
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