For 125 years the Rufus M. Rose House on Peachtree Street has been a family home, an eclectic museum and antique store, and a preservation office. It is now on the market for $2.58 million, and what a buyer would really be acquiring is the last physical evidence of a version of Atlanta that no longer exists.
The red-brick Victorian was built in 1901 for Rose, an Atlanta physician who founded the R.M. Rose Distillery in Vinings. It is the only house left standing from the pre-automobile era when Peachtree was the city's Millionaires' Row. Everything else on that stretch is gone.
Its middle chapter was unusual. In 1945 antique collector J.H. Elliot Sr. bought the home and opened the Atlanta Museum inside it, showing off esoterica both local — Margaret Mitchell's wing chair — and global, including an Ethiopian emperor's throne chair. The Atlanta Preservation Center used the building as an office around 1999, after Elliott's son, who had taken over the museum, died. For the past 25 years it has sat empty, passing from owner to owner.
Behind the boarded windows and chain-link fencing, the original woodwork, mouldings and other features are still there. The current owner has spent more than $250,000 replacing the house's wooden structure, according to the listing. The lot is 0.164 acres with essentially no backyard, sitting between the Fox Theatre and the planned first phase of The Stitch, the proposal to cap the Downtown Connector with a park — which means whatever happens here will sit at the seam of downtown's largest public-space project.
David Y. Mitchell, executive director of the Atlanta Preservation Center, argued the framing matters as much as the money. Rare buildings like the Rose House anchor Atlanta to its past, he told Axios: \"Our love affair for real estate in this city should also be governed by the fact that if we know so much, and we can do so much, then a building like this should not be looked upon as a problem, but as an opportunity.\"
The economics are structured to move it. The listing describes a motivated seller — the property no longer fits the owner's portfolio — willing to finance the deal. The building holds city landmark status and sits on the National Register of Historic Places, which opens the door to state and federal tax credits. The open question is whether a buyer arrives with a plan to bring it back rather than simply keep it upright.
Original reporting: Axios Atlanta (2026-07-31)
