And Celeste crouched to Piper's eye level and told the girl that her father had seen something that a great many educated and well-paid people had walked past without noticing. Piper considered this and asked if that meant they were all going to fix the house together. And Celeste said she hoped so, and meant it in a way she had not meant many things she had said in boardrooms over the preceding decade. Six months after the auction where a gavel had come down at $99 and a woman in an expensive coat had laughed. Tate House received its official historic landmark designation from the Tennessee State Historic Preservation Office, accompanied by a district survey recommendation covering nine additional properties on Hollow Creek Lane, six of which retain sufficient original architectural fabric to qualify for inclusion in a registered historic district.
Mercer Development Group announced the revised Hollow Creek plan. The resort concept replaced by a mixed-use heritage district, adaptive reuse of the qualifying structures, new infill construction designed to the scale and material palette of the existing fabric, a boutique inn incorporated into two of the larger historic buildings, workshop and retail space for local craftspeople, a community interpretive center in Tate House itself, operated as a partnership between the development company, the city, and the Hollow Creek Neighborhood Association. Vaughn Mercer resigned from the board under circumstances the formal announcement described as a mutual decision. Garrett Holloway's firm was engaged in a civil proceeding brought by seven of the 14 families identified in Delaney's review. With the assistance of the independent arbitration process Mercer Development had agreed to fund.
Celeste remained as chief executive with a board that was for the moment more careful with her than it had been. Warren Tate's name was formally restored on the public record for 11 structures across the Hollow Creek district. And the Nashville Public Library added his drawings to its permanent architectural archive, accompanied by the letter he had written to his son in 1964 about buildings telling the truth to anyone patient enough to listen. The independent appraisal of Tate House, completed as part of the designation process, set a value on the property that Sawyer did not share publicly. And when a newspaper reporter asked whether he felt vindicated by the reversal in the property's fortunes, he said he hadn't bought the house to be vindicated.