This residence was built by George Rust, CEO of Rust Engineering, which eventually became Raytheon Engineering based here in Birmingham, AL. The original house was designed by renowned Mountain Brook architect Henry Sprott Long. After spending about a year and a half designing the house, Sprott Long turned the plans over to George Rust for his review. George spent over a year himself, utilizing his engineering prowess, to “tweak” the design from Sprott Long. Once completed with his “tweaking”, Mr. Rust hired long time Birmingham, AL based Brice Building Company to build his residence and the house was completed in 1966. As originally built, the house comprised 6 bedrooms, 7 bathrooms, a 4 car main level garage, and spanned 21,000 square feet. In addition to the main house, a 3 car detached garage was also built. The house’s design was more of a commercial type construction featuring concrete block foundation walls supporting open web steel bar joists and a concrete on metal deck floor structure. From there up, the walls and roof structure was framed with wood. The house is one long ranch style house with a full basement and featured, at that time, state of the art electrical, mechanical, and plumbing systems including a commercial hot water boiler, 2 cold water chillers, and air handling units to provide heating and cooling throughout the residence. The lighting system was all controlled via a low voltage switching system consisting of relays and switches. The house also includes an elevator. The residence sits on close to 5 acres of land and included a 3 hole golf course manicured to the standards of Augusta National. There were three green with sand bunkers, and each green could be played from three different teeing grounds.
The house was sold to Tom Jernigan in the 80’s and the Jernigan’s lived there until 2009.
With Harris Coggin’s assistance, the new owners of the house made the easy decision to hire Hank Long, Sprott’s son, to design the current additions and renovations to the house and Agnew Interiors was selected to provide the interior design services. Harris Coggin began the renovations in July, 2016. The project consists of a major renovation of the entire residence, and the addition of two bedrooms, two bathrooms of about 1,200 SF, and the addition of about 1,800 SF of outdoor porch structure with two new outdoor fireplaces. The interior renovation will add two indoor fireplaces, bringing the total fireplaces in the house to 9, new kitchen, den, utility room, butlers pantry, master suite, exercise room, new domed foyer ceiling, and playroom areas. The backyard will contain a new swimming pool, spa, and outdoor gathering area. The existing house had a concrete tile roof that was installed originally and we are reclaiming and re-using that tile on the new visible roof areas of the house and a new concrete tile was purchased to use on the less visible roof areas so that the color differential won’t be noticed. This project was completed in September, 2017.
