94 Rutledge Avenue
Charleston, SC, USA

Isaac Jenkins Mikell House

The Isaac Jenkins Mikell House is an imposing Roman Revival residence in the style of grand Italian villa that was built in 1853–1854 by Edisto Island cotton planter and slave owner Isaac Jenkins Mikell for his wife, Mary Martha Pope. The house should not be confused with Peter's Point Plantation, an Edisto Island plantation built in about 1840 by Isaac Jenkins Mikell which is also sometimes referred to as the Isaac Jenkins Mikell House. During the time of the construction of the newer house, Isaac Jenkins Mikell kept 154 people enslaved there.

The southern facade (overlooking Montagu Street) is dominated by a pedimented portico with six columns with composite capitals carved from cypress and ornamented with rams’ heads. In addition to the main house, there is a kitchen building and separate coach house on the premises. A 1939 photograph shows the slave quarters.

The house was bought in 1935 by the Charleston Free Library and served as a public library until the early 1960s when it was sold and restored as a private residence. In 2008, the house sold for $4.8 million to Manhattan socialite Patricia Altschul. The house is frequently featured on the Bravo television reality show, Southern Charm; Altschul is the mother of one of the program's regular cast, filmmaker Whitney Sudler-Smith, who is also executive producer of the show. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.

National Register of Historic Places - Isaac Jenkins Mikell House

Statement of Significance:

The Isaac Jenkins Mikell House is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places under Criterion C in the Area of Significance for Architecture at the local level of significance. Built ca. 1853- ca. 1857, the Mikell House is significant as a transitional design, perhaps the first of Charleston's grand classically inspired dwellings to display both the classical Roman temple form that had been in usage and popularity for centuries and the emergent Italianate detailing of the mid-nineteenth century. While other Charleston residences of the period, such as the Robert William Roper House (9 East Bay Street, ca. 1838) and the William Gatewood House (21 Legere Street, ca. 1843) followed the more conventional Greek Revival style that had been in vogue since about 1820, the Mikell House incorporated Italianate architectural elements on the exterior such as heavy corner quoins and belt courses, compass-head entrance doors with paneled flanking pilasters featuring foliate decorative festoons, first floor bi-partite window hoods with prominent projecting keystones and second floor window hoods that pierce the roof entablature, and on the interior compass-head doorways and elaborate marble mantels with horseshoe fireboxes. The Mikell House's bold use of such heavy ornamentation layered upon an otherwise conventional Roman Revival temple form facade heralded the age of eclecticism in Charleston architecture.