According to the Asheville Citizen-Times, The Ivy Building was designed by Willis Irvin, a noted Southern architect who in the 1940s completed the design of Rose Hill Plantation House in Bluffton, S.C., listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

During its days as part of St. Genevieve’s, the building hosted such renowned guests as Helen Keller and Tom Dooley, the humanitarian doctor whose work in Southeast Asia became a model for President Kennedy’s Peace Corps.