This regal Beaux-Arts classical house built for a shipping tycoon during World War I has little to do with the traditional residential building typology of Savannah. The house, its dependencies, and gardens originally occupied two 60 × 120–foot tything lots like a vast estate, eschewing the modest scale of the old city plan. It can also be seen as the fitting if not inevitable spatial and temporal conclusion to the southward thrust of Bull Street. In fact, the asymmetrical, curved colonnade cleverly widens the Bull Street axis to announce its termination at Forsyth Park across Gaston Street. Axial vistas abound in the house’s floor and site plan.
The stately two-story rectangular mass of glazed white brick frames the Ionic limestone frontispiece. Here the bronze front doors open to a wide hall that originally led straight through the rear doors to a fountain in the garden, which once occupied the back half of the double lot. That larger garden was replaced by a large auditorium building (1938; demolished) for Armstrong Junior College, which was established in 1935 through a donation by Armstrong’s widow. The house then served as the central building for what became a “campus” of eight buildings in Monterey Ward. Continued expansion and talk of demolishing the 1919 mansion prompted Mills B. Lane Jr. in 1962 to donate two hundred and fifty acres on the far south side of Savannah to build a modern campus for the college. In 1966 what is now Armstrong State University (21.3) moved to its suburban location. The Armstrong mansion was subsequently restored by Jim Williams (see 8.39) and then sold to a local law firm. Across from the mansion at 450 Bull Street, the Oglethorpe Club (Edmund Molyneux House, 1857) also occupies a double tything lot.