Piedmont Pit Stops: Exploring Körner's Folly

With its dollhouse-like charm, the brick Victorian mansion known as Körner’s Folly has fascinated visitors for over a century. The Kernersville home was built as a kind of showroom for the work of interior designer Jule Körner who also lived there with his family for decades. It’s now a museum that attracts thousands of visitors each year. For this edition of Piedmont Pit Stops, WFDD’s April Laissle took a tour of the home that guides call the Victorian IKEA.

The tour starts on the porch, with the first of many quirky features of the house.

“We've got to stop at the witch’s corner,” says Suzanna Ritz Malliett, the executive director of Körner’s Folly, standing in front of a brick fireplace with a cauldron tucked inside. She says there are a few superstitions behind it.

“One is that there are sort of evil spirits out here in the world, sort of lurking around. And in order to avoid taking them inside with you, you would throw a penny into the witch's pot," she says.

The Witch’s Corner is one of several elements of the house rooted in childlike playfulness and whimsy, both qualities Malliett says are characteristic of designer Jule Körner himself.  

Jule, a descendant of Kernersville founder Joseph Körner, built the home in 1880, after spending his career traveling the country honing his artistic skills. He wanted the mansion to serve as a kind of catalog for his work. The burgeoning upper class would visit it to pick out furniture and original designs for their own homes. 

“So in the foyer, we can see a lot of the details that make Körners Folly really unique,” Malliett says. “Jule liked to mix up the style. So we've got Baroque and Neoclassical, we've got Rococo and more Colonial, kind of all mashed up together.”

The ornate molding spotlights the room’s stunningly high ceilings and archways. It features a fireplace adorned with bright green ceramic tiles inlaid with a swamp scene, a ceiling mural of Cupid, and dark mauve floral wallpaper.

On paper, none of these elements seem like they’d fit together, but it all works in an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of way. The foyer is just one of 22 rooms in the three-story home. Each has been restored to look as it did at the turn of the 20th Century, even down to the paint color.

Some, like the children’s playroom, feel almost doll-sized, with ceilings just five and a half feet high. Others, like Cupid’s Park Theater on the top floor, are grand and cavernous. The theater, once home to a children’s drama program, features arched windows, vaulted ceilings, and dark muraled walls that give it a cathedral-like feel. In some ways, it feels a little spooky. 

“There has been an investigation performed by the Triad Paranormal Society, and they did discover some interesting activity,” Malliett says. “Nothing scary. It was some very childlike, playful energy. Some orbs were recorded.”

Rumors about hauntings may stem from what became of the house after the Körner’s moved out in the 1920s. It sat vacant for decades, becoming a kind of spooky mystery to the town. Family members eventually stepped in to preserve it in 1970, though major structural restorations weren’t completed until the 2010s. 

“For people that live in the area that have never been in, they know that it's something,” says Allie Smith, Kernersville native and Körner’s Folly visitor’s services associate. “Even if they haven't been in and they don't know the history, it is something that stays in the mind.”

Smith is part of the team that studies the history of the house and furthers its restoration, which is still ongoing. 

“You know, we get people that come back and they're like, Oh, I can't wait to see what you did in restoration since the last time I've been here.”

Over 16,000 visitors toured the house last year. It’s become something of a roadside attraction, with more than 80% of visitors coming from outside the zip code. Many of them, including Anna Charlot, are school age.

“I like the designs,” Charlot says. “Like the wall designs because they're very different, extravagant.” 

Charlot is visiting the museum as part of a field trip, one that’s pretty common among students in the Piedmont. Malliett says it’s one way they try to share Körner’s legacy with the community. 

“Maybe it's art, maybe it's architecture, maybe the restoration aspect of the house, but we try to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to ask questions,” she says. 

As the tour wraps up, I ask her one more: Why is this place called Körner’s Folly?

“So the story is that it was a farmer who was passing by watching the crew work, and he yelled out loud enough for Jule to hear ‘That building will be Jule Körner’s Folly,’ meaning a foolish, expensive mistake,” she says. “But I think for Jule, it kind of had a nice ring to it.”

Folly is also an architectural term – it means a structure that is whimsical, and no longer serves its original function. This folly is open six days a week, Tuesdays through Sundays.