A few weeks ago, I got to spend a morning on Alan and Denise Jackson's estate, just south of Nashville. It's a gigantic white house on 140 acres, like something out of Gone With the Wind. "Ever since I was a kid, I loved that movie," Alan told me. "I always wanted a big plantation." Of course, Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara never had a garage with 14 cars in it.
The house, which has three floors and 19,000 square feet (and another 7,500 square feet of porch space) is big enough to get lost in, even with a fancy security system.
The Jacksons have a home-automation system – state of the art in 1995, when the house was completed – that controls the lights, the family entertainment center and security cameras. It came in handy when one of the Jacksons' three girls, as a toddler, climbed out of her crib and wandered off.
“I looked on the kitchen monitor, and she was not in her bed,” Denise recalls. “We had a nanny and a couple other people here. We immediately each took a stairway and found her toddling down the hall. I guess that’s the only time we’ve actually lost a child in the house.
“Adults get lost in it, though.”
Find out more about the house - and Alan's first love - by reading my piece in USA Today.
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