Drive down Randall Mill Road this month and you will pass an iron gate that was not there two years ago, a stretch of hardwood canopy thick enough to swallow the afternoon light, and, if you slow down, a glimpse of a low mid-century house set back among the trees. Most of Buckhead has heard by now that the City of Atlanta closed on this 30-acre property on June 30, 2026, ending a long stretch of neighborhood speculation about what would happen to the last unbroken forest of its size inside the Perimeter. What fewer residents have worked out is that this new preserve is not going to behave like a typical city park, and the reason has nothing to do with a planning meeting. It has to do with where the $15 million came from.
The fund that bought it can't cut a single tree
Half of that purchase price came from the city's Tree Trust Fund, the other half from private donations, according to reporting from Rough Draft Atlanta and WSB-TV following the closing. The Tree Trust Fund exists because of a rule that, on its face, has nothing to do with parks: when a property owner anywhere in Atlanta removes a healthy tree and cannot replant enough of it on site, they pay a recompense fee into the fund. District 8 council member Mary Norwood, who represents the area that includes the Bunnen estate, has been direct about what that funding source means for how the land can be used.
"You cannot take out trees when you use Tree Trust Fund."
That single constraint does more to define the next decade of this property than any master plan will. A typical city park takes its shape from a parks department budget and a community input process that can go in almost any direction: ball fields, a playground, a splash pad. This one arrived already legally bound to stay exactly what it is. Officials describing the plan have said as much directly: this will not be a park in the way Buckhead usually thinks of parks, with no ball fields, no playground, and none of the programming that fills a normal recreation calendar.
The blueprint already exists, on the other side of town
Norwood has pointed the parks department toward a specific precedent for how to run it: Cascade Springs Nature Preserve, a wooded tract on Atlanta's southwest side the city has managed as protected greenspace for decades. Cascade Springs has walking trails through hardwood forest, natural springs, and a secured perimeter, and nothing resembling a typical amenity list. Norwood's instructions for Bunnen track it closely: secure the perimeter first, build in restricted ways in and out, and resist adding features simply because the land is now public.
That restraint matters more here than almost anywhere else in the city. Buckhead's neighborhood association president, Sally Riker, described the usual pattern in the surrounding blocks in blunt terms: homes that sell, all the trees are cut down, and a McMansion is thrown up. The Bunnen estate was on a plausible path toward that same outcome before the Conservation Fund stepped in two years ago and held the land until the city was financially ready to close.
A useful comparison sits three miles north
Buckhead already has a 30-acre nature preserve, and the contrast is instructive. Blue Heron Nature Preserve, tucked into North Buckhead along its Blueway Trail, covers almost exactly the same acreage as the new Bunnen tract. But Blue Heron runs a produce subscription through a partner farm, hosts environmental education programming, and is currently planning a new visitor gateway at Roswell Road with help from Park Pride. None of that kind of infrastructure comes easily to the Bunnen preserve, not because the city has ruled it out, but because building it would likely mean clearing trees, and the fund that bought this land cannot pay for that. Two nearly identical acreages, a few miles apart, are on track to feel like different places entirely, and the difference traces back to which fund wrote the check.
What Lucinda Bunnen already built here
The forest did not arrive empty. Lucinda Bunnen, known in Atlanta's arts community as a defining figure in Southern photography, spent close to 50 years quietly acquiring the woodland parcels around her home before she died in 2022. She and her husband, an oral surgeon, had commissioned architect Cecil Alexander, who also designed Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, to build a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home on the site in 1956. That house still stands: seven bedrooms, six bathrooms, more than 7,000 square feet, ringed by a swimming pool, a tennis court, and the trees Bunnen spent a lifetime protecting.
She also laid the two miles of trails the city now inherits, and the origin story is very Buckhead. Bunnen had once been arrested for walking her dog off leash at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, and rather than fight the rule, she built her own trail network where she would not need permission again. The trails she carved out of frustration with public rules are the same ones about to open to the public she was avoiding.
How big this actually is
For scale, the tract occupies more land than Centennial Olympic Park and Woodruff Park put together, in a part of the city where undeveloped acreage of any size rarely reaches the market intact. Stacy Funderburke, the Conservation Fund's Georgia director, framed the acquisition around the importance of saving 30 acres in an area under tremendous development pressure. Buckhead has historically had among the fewest parks per resident anywhere in Atlanta, which is part of why an intact forest this size shifted the math enough for the city to commit Tree Trust Fund dollars at this scale for the first time.
What residents can actually plan for
The most concrete detail as of this month comes from Rough Draft Atlanta: the forest will stay a forest, and the trails are expected to open to the public as early as 2027. That is a real date after two years of vague ones. What remains open is the house. City officials have floated more than one idea and settled on none of them. One version has a live-in steward, part horticulturalist and part security, watching over the grounds day to day, with Norwood suggesting that same steward might eventually split duties with nearby Chastain Park given how close the two properties sit. A separate and more recent account raises an artist residency inside the home, a use that would track with Bunnen's own place in Atlanta's arts community. Neither has a public timeline, and there is no word yet on whether the preserve will get its own conservancy the way Chastain has.
For now, the gate on Randall Mill Road stays closed, the perimeter fencing is still going in, and Bunnen's private trails remain exactly that. When they open, expect something closer to Cascade Springs than to Chastain's amphitheater lawn: quiet, unprogrammed, and deliberately spared from the pressure that reshapes almost every other large wooded lot in this part of the city.
None of this changes anything about your address today. But it says something about the pressure shaping every other wooded acre nearby, the kind our design-build studio works through on behalf of clients who want to build with mature trees rather than around their stumps. If a heavily wooded Buckhead property is on your mind, for a renovation, a new build, or simply understanding what a lot like this can become under the current tree ordinance, Komar Luxe is glad to talk it through. Request a private consultation or a virtual tour of a recent Buckhead project anytime.
