Buckhead Forest

Located within the triangle formed by Roswell Road, Peachtree Road, and Piedmont Avenue, the Buckhead Forest neighborhood offers safe, friendly intown living for families who desire the convenience of the city and the hometown appeal of the suburbs. Just under 200 stately homes make up the neighborhood of tree-lined streets and shopping is within walking distance. Major grocery chains, natural food stores, shops and award-winning dining are literally steps away.

Two of Atlanta’s most prominent, and architecturally stunning, churches are located in the Buckhead Forest neighborhood. Both Peachtree United Methodist and Peachtree Presbyterian are active and family-centered places of worship.

Buckhead Forest is served academically by Sarah Rawson Smith Elementary school, consistently ranking in the top 5% of Georgia schools. Suttton Middle school and North Atlanta High follow suit with equally impressive test scores and graduation rates.

The Buckhead area has long been desirable for it’s residential appeal. As a safe and secure intown community, Buckhead Forest provides a hearth-and-home environment within a city known for cultural diversity in art, academics, and lifestyle. Navigating the area is easy with the Marta bus lines as well as rail service. All in all, Buckhead Forest provides the best of both worlds.

Thanks to an intensely proud, hyper-involved and uncompromising Civic Association who routinely fights tooth and manicured nail over everything from zoning ordinances to faulty water meters, Buckhead Forest has remained a real, honest-to-goodness, tree-lined neighborhood, despite being fenced on all sides by the gleaming facades and high-brow hustle-bustle of Buckhead’s commercial districts.

Walking its neatly edged, leaf-dappled sidewalks, you expect to encounter men in grass-flecked polos taking a break from mowing the lawn and trimming the azaleas to chat about the Braves’ play-off bid; children in boutique-bought day dresses and smaller versions of their daddies’ polos cavorting in the traffic-less streets; wives in crisp white pants drinking equally crisp white wine on their flower-bedecked porches. And that’s exactly the image Buckhead Forest is going for. Does the fact that the idyllic “refuge in the city” vibe is somewhat contrived – a unavoidable result of years of fighting off urban encroachment, in part by defining exactly and absolutely what the neighborhood is and should remain – detract from the appeal of its tidy Tudors and power-washed brick bungalows? You be the judge. Homes here are not prohibitively expensive for the average upper-middle family, but prepare to devote a sizable amount of income to maintenance, renovation, landscaping, etc. each year in order to keep up appearances.

When you do venture out of the Forest, Buckhead becomes a whole other animal – something suitable for skinning and draping around your shoulders at a black tie gala. Towering sky condos, hotels, high-end retail real estate and “it” bars, restaurants and velvet-rope clubs provide a shimmering playground for the Atlanta elite, splotched here and there with more everyman options like the Rio Grande and Shane’s Rib Shack at the Roswell/Peachtree split, and the nearby Moondogs strip (the last vestige of the base of the Buckhead Triangle’s former life as a rollicking and rather crime-heavy clubbing and rubbing haunt for the grittier urban set).

However, if you live in Buckhead Forest, chances are none of these options will excite you half as much as the fact that Trader Joe’s, Atlanta’s largest Presbyterian church and a handful of highly rated elementary schools are all within walking distance. Cheers!