Thirty acres of contiguous forest is a rarity anywhere inside the Perimeter. In Buckhead, where mature woodland is routinely carved into palatial estates, it is close to unheard of. So when the City of Atlanta closed on the historic Lucinda Bunnen estate at 3910 Randall Mill Road on June 30, it did more than add a line to the parks inventory — it preserved one of the last great unbroken woodlands in the neighborhood, and, if the city’s plans hold, it will leave that woodland largely as Bunnen kept it: quiet, wooded, and deliberately undeveloped.
This will not be a park in the way Buckhead thinks of parks. There will be no ball fields, no playground, no programming. “It was bought with Tree Trust Fund money,” said Mary Norwood, the Atlanta City Council member who represents District 8, “and you cannot take out trees when you use Tree Trust Fund, so it was very deliberate that this is not going to be something that we all of a sudden come up with these different activities.”
Who was Lucinda Bunnen?
Bunnen, who died in 2022 at 92, was proof that an artistic life keeps no schedule. She came to Atlanta in 1952, the year she married Robert Bunnen, and didn’t take up photography in earnest until her 40s. It was on a 1970 family trip that she discovered her talent behind the camera.
With less than a year of experience, she was invited to participate in the Georgia Artists Show at the High Museum of Art. In 1973, she co-founded Nexus, a photography cooperative that grew into Atlanta Contemporary. She gave the High more than 650 photographs — the Bunnen Collection — before funding a gallery at the museum dedicated to the art form she championed.
Which makes the fate of her land fitting. Bunnen assembled the property piece by piece, in part so her dogs could roam. The city now intends to keep it much the way she left it.
The Sale of the Estate
The path to public ownership ran through The Conservation Fund, the Arlington, Virginia-based nonprofit that purchased the estate for $13.5 million in October 2024 with the intention of holding the land until the city could buy it. According to Fulton County deed records, that handoff came on June 30, when the estate sold to the city for $7.8 million…