Leila Ross Wilburn

Leila Ross Wilburn was born in Macon, Georgia in 1895. She was the oldest of five children and in the midst of the economic depression, her family moved to Decatur when Leila was ten years old. Her family strongly believed in the force of education for their daughters and enrolled Leila in Agnes Scott College in Decatur from 1902 to 1904. While there, she took private lessons in architectural drafting and apprenticed with B. R. Padgett and Son.

At age 21, college degree in hand, Leila set off to tour the country with a notebook and Kodak camera to document her taste in the architectural styles of family homes and the emerging Arts and Crafts movement. She eventually amassed a collection of 5,000 photographs of homes with design elements that interested her.

​Upon her return to Georgia, Leila joined Benjamin R. Padgett and Son again as a trainee. With this move, she joined only one other Georgia woman, Henrietta Dozier, in a field previously dominated by men. An apt student with great imagination and skill, at age 22, Leila was granted her first commission, a three-story building that became a YMCA gym at Georgia Military Academy (now Woodward Academy).

In 1909, Wilburn opened an architectural practice with the understanding that she was entering a male-dominated profession and home design was the only field considered appropriate for female architects.

She secured office space in the Peters Building, occupied by realtors and developers, not in the Candler Building where other architects’ offices were concentrated. She was creative and innovative - she grew her practice by collaborating closely with contractors who bought her plan books and built her houses by the hundreds. Thus, large numbers of clients benefited from her expertise without having to pay the fees of a professional architect.

She insisted that the design and construction of the American home should not be reserved only for those who could afford an architect. In a half-century of work, she left a legacy of homes, apartments and commercial buildings in the southeast. This widespread distribution of her designs through plan books conformed to her intention to broaden the availability of good house design.

“What we most need in America, is a better class of small domestic architecture, one which shall provide us with homes more wholesome in their exterior appearance and more satisfying in their internal arrangement and finish.”

-Brick and Colonial Homes: A Collection of the Latest Designs,
Featuring the Most Modern in Domestic Architecture

Although Wilburn executed few commissioned residences, she established a successful practice and reputation based on the wide distribution of her plan books as her designs projected her vision of family values, hearth and home. To serve this goal, Wilburn spent her vacations visiting other cities, photographing houses, making sketches, and buying books.

Her stock plans were featured in publications such as Ideal Homes of Today and Southern Homes and Bungalows. They were available to carpenters, bricklayers, developers, and builders, who purchased working drawings and erected bungalows, cottages, and ranch houses—in general, as the title of one of her plan books described them, “small low-cost homes” for the South. Wilburn-designed houses proliferated throughout neighborhoods and suburbs of Atlanta and elsewhere in Georgia, where there are more houses by Wilburn than by any other architect from any period. Today, her homes may be seen in Decatur, Ansley Park, Druid Hills and Candler Park in Atlanta. Some of her buildings are listed among the finest examples of 20th Century architecture.

“so as to keep myself well posted on every new feature in home architecture. I feel that being a woman, I know just the little things that should go in a house to make living in it a pleasure to the entire family.”

From the date of her first plan book, Southern Homes and Bungalows (1914) until her death in 1967, Wilburn reflected changing tastes in domestic design and translated practical requirements and sound planning to home design for a mass market. ​In 1961, Leila was welcomed into the Society of American Registered Architects, an honor which is reflected in the fact that the membership certificate at the time still read, “Having given evidence of his qualifications....”

In 2003 Wilburn was inducted into Georgia Women of Achievement after a lifetime of service to the profession and 36 after her passing.