There is a certain kind of home in Atlanta that does not announce itself. It sits on its land with the quiet confidence of something that was built to last, and has. The architecture tells a story, room by room, detail by detail, if you know how to listen for it.
At Dossier, that is exactly what we listen for. When a home like this comes along, with great bones, with original architecture worth honoring, with a history that gives it genuine character, we ask a simple question: what would it look like if everything around its best features was brought forward for the way people live today?
3990 Paces Ferry Road NW in Buckhead is the answer to this question.
Letting the Architecture Speak for Itself
The home was originally designed in 1968 by Francis Palmer Smith and his son Henry. Francis directed Georgia Tech’s Department of Architecture from 1909 to 1922 and shaped a generation of the South’s most celebrated architects. His work carries a clarity of proportion and intention that holds up across decades, and this home is no exception.
When we first walked through it, we saw immediately what made it special. The siting on over two private acres inside the Chattahoochee River Corridor. The bones of the original layout. The way the house related to the land around it. These are the things worth honoring, and honoring them was exactly where we started.
I believe homes have souls. Each has its own story to tell, and we try to let the story and the original architecture of the home shine while making it more functional for how today’s buyer lives.
— Harvin Greene, Founder, Dossier
Four Creatives Who Reimagined This Home
In 2025, the home was taken to the studs in a two and a half year collaboration between Harvin, T2Greene Builders, architect John Plaster, and Field Landscape Design. The goal was never to erase what Francis Palmer Smith built. It was to honor it, and to make it fully livable for a buyer today and for the generations that follow.
John Plaster, whose work speaks to exactly this philosophy, guided the process of preserving what gave the home its character while rethinking how the spaces flow and function. The layout was refined. The systems were replaced entirely. And every finish was chosen with the same care that the original architect brought to the bones of the house.
The result keeps the charm and does justice to the original architecture while making every inch of the home work for how people actually live now. A LaCanche kitchen. A limestone fireplace family room. A fluted formal living room opening to a walk-out pool and cabana. The primary suite on the main level. Four ensuite bedrooms upstairs. A terrace level with a gym, infrared sauna, guest suite, and a Speakeasy wine cellar behind a secret hydraulic staircase.
No detail was left unconsidered.
Land That Cannot Be Recreated
The home sits on over two private, gated acres inside the Chattahoochee River Corridor, protected permanently under Georgia’s Metropolitan River Protection Act. The privacy, the setback, the wooded seclusion around the entire property are not design choices. They are legal protections that predate this restoration and will outlast it.
A position like this is extraordinarily rare in Buckhead. Two protected acres one minute from Lovett and two minutes from Westminster. That part of what makes this home exceptional was already there. Our job was simply to make everything else worthy of it.
The Dossier Difference: Seeing Potential Where Others Don’t
What makes a project like 3990 Paces Ferry possible is a very specific skill set. Tommy Greene is a builder who can walk into a house and assess immediately whether the bones will support a vision. Harvin is a designer who selects every finish with the end buyer in mind. Together, they can see what a home wants to become long before anyone else can.
That combination of construction knowledge and design sensibility is what gives Dossier a perspective that most brokerages simply do not have. Tommy can walk into a home and read its bones the way an architect reads a blueprint. Harvin brings a designer’s eye to every finish, every detail, every decision. Together, they see the full picture of what a property is and what it could become.
That is the eye behind 3990 Paces Ferry Road. And it is the same eye we bring to every property we represent, whether we are guiding a buyer toward the right home, helping a seller understand the full value of what they have, or recognizing a property whose potential deserves to be realized.
3990 Paces Ferry Road is the result of that process, and it is now move-in ready and waiting for the perfect buyer.
