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WANDERING BILLY

Finding Otto

How stalwarts of justice became stewards of style

By Billy Ingram

For 30 years, beginning in 1950, Otto Zenke was one of the nation’s most respected interior designers. Based in Greensboro with offices in Palm Beach and London, he created spectacular environments for the finest homes along the East Coast including the mansion of the late Julian Price in Irving Park and Reynolda House in Winston-Salem. A year from now, however, a major portion of Zenke’s legacy will be erased forever when his former home and showroom is demolished for a parking lot.

Bridging the lifestyle gap between the old and new South, Zenke lent his 18th-century-influenced stateliness to residences surrounding golf courses in Pinehurst; country manors in Virginia and South Carolina; seaside abodes in Palm Beach; estates in Newport and Los Angeles; and homes appearing on covers and in photo spreads for House Beautiful and Architectural Digest. Elegance and beauty were his trademark,” declared Connoisseur magazine.

Georgian fireplaces, cut-glass chandeliers hung from high ceilings, gabled archways and boldly carved pilasters were just a few of Zenke’s signature touches. For select clients, lavishly illustrated, hand-painted murals of pastoral splendor or sprawling foxhunting scenes and delicately rendered chinoiserie panels adorned dining and living room walls. It’s doubtful most of those murals survive today but I’d heard rumors that one was extant, oddly enough, in the Guilford County Sheriff’s office.

In 1968, Zenke constructed a 3,000-square-foot home and showroom on the corner of Washington and Eugene Streets after the city had appropriated — by eminent domain — his extraordinarily beautiful residence and workspace across Eugene for use as the Governmental Center. The L-shaped English Regency-style complex he developed in ’68 was joined to, and fronted by, a two-story, New Orleans-inspired dwelling built in the late-1800s, one of the oldest houses still standing in downtown Greensboro.

After Zenke’s death in 1984, the county purchased the property and, today, within those hallowed walls, Guilford County Sheriff Danny H. Rogers presides over one of the largest sheriff’s offices in the state with 557 employees split between operations and detention bureaus.

Elected in 2018, Rogers is Guilford County’s first Black sheriff. Growing up in High Point in the 1960s, the few African American law enforcement officers that existed locally were an inspiration to the very young Rogers, who learned by observing them — both how to interact with people and to “be who I am.”

In 1985 Sheriff Jim Proffitt allowed Rogers to work as a non-sworn detention officer. “The county had frozen the positions for sworn officers. Well, on my first day as a non-sworn detention officer, there were two of my white counterparts and they were sworn. I asked, ‘How long have you guys been here?’ Turns out their hire dates were the same as mine. I questioned it. I worked with the sheriff’s office for a little over a year and a half, then I went to the High Point Police Department, where they gave me an opportunity to be sworn and paid me to go to school. I was there for a little over three and a half years before coming back to the sheriff’s office.” After another three years or so, he was released from the department; it wasn’t until roughly 25 years later that he ran for and became sheriff for Guilford County.

During his time away from the sheriff’s office, Rogers earned a master’s degree in criminal justice and a theology degree. An open Bible sits on a shelf behind his desk. “I had a chance to understand the community from a different perspective,” Rogers says about his well-spent time away. “Getting out there, meeting the people and walking the streets was key when I first started.”

Whenever a new administrator takes over an organization, pushback inevitably follows. “There’s always a lot of behind the scenes conversation,” Rogers says about the transition after becoming sheriff. Those who want to stay will stay. Those who want to leave will leave.

“A positive change began within myself,” Rogers says. “But the real positive change began in the mindset of the men and women who work here, so they can go out in the community and help bring about that positive change. And it’s working. It’s not working like a grand slam or the perfect engine, but it’s working at the pace that it needs to.”

Naturally, I was curious to have a look around Zenke’s former showroom, imaging what you might see on modern TV police dramas, when detectives paste photos of hapless victims on the walls with a cat’s cradle of string tying them to some unknown serial killer. I could not have been more mistaken.

Rogers’ office, once the designer’s living room, is enshrined in 130-year old wood paneling embedded with 15-foot high, built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcases framed in intricately carved crown molding. The bathroom is equipped with an unused sunken marble tub.

Zenke’s stylistic fingerprints are everywhere throughout this palatial domain: entranceways topped with half-moon transom windows; individually painted tiles in the kitchen; a restroom swathed in emboldened Asian-flavored floral wallpaper — all in pristine condition after more than half a century. Touring these offices a few years ago, one former North Carolina chief executive remarked that it was nicer than the governor’s mansion.

Surrounding the largest open space, to my delight and surprise, unscathed and perfectly preserved, was a panoramic hand-painted mural replicating the verdant patio of an Italian villa opening to the unspoiled countryside with realistically rendered black urns perched on either side. Nearly hidden in one corner, a peasant boy is relieving himself in the bushes, a naughty detail Zenke no doubt delighted clients with privately.

Atop another room’s mahogany bookcase is a marble inlay centered by a nobleman’s face. It has an unintended design element — a pronounced bullet hole piercing an interior glass door, shattered three years ago after gunfire erupted across the street. Soon after, all exterior windows were made bulletproof.

After visiting Zenke’s former digs, photographer Lynn Donovan and I were chatting as she packed cameras into the trunk of her car. A female detention center deputy stopped to question what a couple of suspicious-looking customers like us were doing meandering in the parking lot. “Oh, we’re here to shoot the sheriff,” I replied. That wasn’t a smile crossing the deputy’s lips as one hand inched closer to her baton. Donovan explained that we just wrapped up a photoshoot with the county’s top lawman. While we had, in fact, shot the sheriff, after the jailer moved on Donovan noted, “we did not shoot the deputy.”

After completion of the new Guilford County Sheriff’s Law Enforcement Administration Building in 2025, Otto Zenke’s former home/showroom next door will be demolished for a parking lot — naughty peasant boy and all.