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Neighborhood Spotlight: Ardmore, Buena Vista & Reynolda Village

Writer: Jesse Simmons
Jesse Simmons
Sep 10
5 min read

Three of Winston-Salem's most recognizable addresses sit within about four miles of one another, and no two of them ask the same thing of a camera. Ardmore is a dense grid of 1920s bungalows on quarter-acre lots. Buena Vista is Charles Barton Keen brick and formal symmetry. Reynolda is an English-style estate village turned shopping district, wrapped by some of the most heavily wooded residential streets in Forsyth County. Same city, same MLS, three completely different photography problems.


This spotlight is written for sellers deciding how to present a home in one of these neighborhoods, and for the real estate agents who may list across all three in the same week. Winston-Salem homes sold at a median of $295,000 in July 2026, after a median 45 days on market, at 98.7% of list price. That is a market with room to do this right and not much room to waste.



Ardmore — 600 Acres of Bungalow Grid

Ardmore is the largest historic district in Winston-Salem: 600 acres and 2,093 contributing buildings, added to the National Register in 2004. It grew quickly. At least ten platted residential developments between 1910 and 1924, right as Winston and Salem merged into a single city in 1913 and that speed left behind remarkably consistent inventory. Craftsman bungalows and cottages on quarter-acre lots, deep front porches, original interior trim, with mid-century ranches filling the gaps and three postwar apartment complexes on the edges.


How we shoot Ardmore:

  • Shoot the porch, not the front door: a slight angle lets the porch depth read in the frame. Straight-on, the single best feature of an Ardmore bungalow flattens into a wall.

  • Restrain the wide angle: these rooms are modestly scaled by design. An ultra-wide lens makes them look warped rather than larger, and buyers notice the gap the moment they walk in.

  • Include the street: buyers choose Ardmore partly for the tree canopy and the walkable grid. One or two frames that show the sidewalk and streetscape sell the neighborhood alongside the house.

  • Give them the floor plan: in a neighborhood where a 1,400-square-foot bungalow competes with a 1,700-square-foot one two streets over, an ANSI-Z765 Compliant floor plan settles the question.


Agent tip: Ardmore's grid means orientation changes block to block, so there is no single good hour for the whole neighborhood. Send us the address when you set the listing date and we will time the exterior to that specific porch.


Buena Vista — Formal Architecture Wants Formal Framing

Buena Vista is where Winston-Salem's early twentieth-century money built, and the architecture reflects it. Charles Barton Keen, the Philadelphia architect behind Reynolda, and his firm left a run of houses here that still sets the tone for the whole neighborhood. The Alexander S. and Mary R. Hanes House, a ten-bay Colonial Revival completed in 1923 and added to the National Register in 2023, and the Robert M. Hanes House at 140 North Stratford Road, a Georgian Revival built in 1926–27. Tudor and Italian Renaissance houses sit on the same streets, and Stratford Road runs straight through the middle of it.


How we shoot Buena Vista:

  • Dead-on facades, true verticals: symmetrical architecture rewards symmetrical framing. Converging lines on a Georgian facade look like a mistake, because they are one.

  • Twilight is the differentiator: warm interior light against brick at dusk is the single highest-impact frame available at these price points, and it is the one buyers screenshot.

  • Sequence the formal rooms: these homes were built with defined rooms, not open plans. The photo order should walk a buyer through the floor plan logically, entry to garden, so the scale makes sense.

  • Fly for the lot: Buena Vista lots are generous and mature. A low-altitude aerial shows the setback, the canopy, and the rear grounds that a ground-level frame simply cannot convey.


Agent tip: We hold twilight sessions to one property per evening, and fall dusk arrives earlier every week from here to December. If a twilight hero shot belongs in the marketing, book it at the same time you book the daytime shoot not after the listing goes live.



Reynolda Village — Selling the Setting

The Reynolda Historic District covers 178 acres along Reynolda Road, the surviving core of the 1,067-acre estate R.J. and Katharine Smith Reynolds developed between 1912 and 1917 with Charles Barton Keen as architect and Thomas Sears as landscape architect. Reynolda Village itself is roughly 13.5 acres of former estate buildings. Dairy barns, a smokehouse, a blacksmith shop, a school, cottages for the estate's staff modeled on an English village and now filled with more than 40 shops, restaurants, and offices, directly adjacent to Wake Forest University. Twenty-two of those buildings are listed on the National Register.

Almost nobody sells a house inside the village. But the homes on the streets around it trade partly on being there, and that changes what the photography has to accomplish.


How we shoot the Reynolda corridor:

  • Photograph the proximity: a wide aerial that places the home relative to the village, the gardens, and the Reynolda trail does work no interior frame can. Buyers here are buying a location as much as a floor plan.

  • Work with the canopy, not against it: these are some of the shadiest residential streets in Forsyth County. Midday sun through mature hardwoods produces blotchy exteriors, so we shoot earlier or later and blend exposures rather than fight the dapple.

  • Interiors go warmer: heavy tree cover cools the light coming through every window. Left uncorrected, rooms photograph green. We white-balance for the canopy on site instead of fixing it later.

  • Autumn is an asset here: few Triad neighborhoods reward a mid-October exterior the way this one does. If a listing can flex its photo date by a week or two this fall, it is worth doing.


Agent tip: If your listing remarks mention Reynolda, the photo set should back it up. One frame of the village or the trail head in the gallery converts a claim in the copy into something a buyer can see before they ever schedule a showing.



One Week, Three Different Shoots

The practical difference between these neighborhoods is not equipment. It is planning: what hour we arrive, which frame leads the gallery and how much of the surrounding neighborhood belongs in the set. A photographer who shoots all three regularly makes those decisions before pulling into the driveway.



Ardmore, Buena Vista, and Reynolda are three of the reasons Winston-Salem keeps drawing buyers out of pricier metros and buyers arriving from those markets have already been trained by professionally marketed listings. Photographing a bungalow like a Georgian, or a Georgian like a bungalow, gives away the advantage before the first showing. Osprey Imagery shoots across Forsyth and Guilford Counties, including Winston-Salem, Greensboro, High Point, Clemmons, Lewisville, and Kernersville, and we plan every session around the neighborhood we are pulling into.



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