UNC mega-donor left school her Franklin Street home. It’s on the market for $4.7M.
When the namesake of the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health died last year, she left one final gift to the college — her historic Franklin Street home.
The sprawling mansion adjacent to campus is now the most expensive home on the market in Orange County, with a price tag of $4.7 million.
The home was built in 1908 and sits on just over an acre along the northern edge of UNC’s campus. Its gardens are a certified wildlife habitat.
At 9,500 square feet, it has three bedrooms and six bathrooms. The home’s two kitchens share a food elevator. On the lower level, there’s a wine cellar and tasting room, while the top floor boasts an exercise room complete with a skylight and steam shower.
Joan Gillings left the property to the Gillings School of Global Public Health “in support of academic programming” when she died at 75 last February, according to Bruce Warrington, the university’s director of real estate operations.
“As the Gillings School has no programmatic use for the property at 620 E. Franklin St., the property will be sold and the proceeds disbursed to the school,” Warrington said in an email.
The home, which is appraised at $3.5 million, was listed with Viki Pace-Morris in Fonville Morisey’s Chapel Hill office.
Pace-Morris called it a “world-class masterpiece” and “an entertainer’s dream.”
In the historic neighborhood, the average home price is $1.2 million, according to the Orange County assessor’s office. The next priciest single-family home to sell there fetched $2.1 million in 2020.
Gillings was a mega-donor to the university, with an emphasis on the arts and sciences.
She and her husband, Dennis Gillings, gave $50 million to what’s now the Gillings School of Global Public Health in 2007.
Ten years later, the Joan H. Gillings Center for Dramatic Art was named in her honor after a $12 million gift split between PlayMakers Repertory Company and the Department of Dramatic Art.
Joan Gillings worked in the biostatistics department of UNC’s public health school in the 1970s before she turned to real estate and philanthropy. Dennis Gillings founded pharmaceutical giant Quintiles (now IQVIA).
This story was originally published March 31, 2022 at 10:49 AM with the headline "UNC mega-donor left school her Franklin Street home. It’s on the market for $4.7M.."
