![]() He doesn’t mean “Honey! Did you just feel that?” ghosts – though as it turns out he believes in those, too, having seen one in the old Carolina Trust building where he and his family now live. I realized that my mission in life was to help others. So I had to ask myself: When you die, who have you loved, and who has loved you? Do you leave behind something that does good? Or are you just moving forward without thinking? I decided I had to accomplish things on purpose. I fell into building a really good business and living like I do today. And I realized that I had been in the right place at the right time. “I researched who I was, what I had done. It’s a way of living that began 15 years ago, Olander says, when she took stock of her life. Now, with beau Brian McHenry by her side, Olander devotes herself to giving back. Together with her former husband, Michael Olander, Eliza created a $100-million restaurant business of Applebee’s and Burger King franchises. Olander has the resources to give because she earned them. Also a longtime and substantial supporter of the YMCA, Olander is proud to point out that the Kraft Family YMCA in Apex is named in honor of her parents. She has also had a vital role in turning Raleigh’s Band Together into the fundraising juggernaut it is today, raising more than $500,000 a year for local nonprofits. She and the chef Ashley Christensen, a close friend, have together raised more than $1 million for various charities in the last decade through wine and food events, Olander says. She is the force behind the Triangle Wine Experience, a wine event and auction that has raised millions for Raleigh’s Frankie Lemmon School for children with developmental disabilities. “Charitable work is my heart and soul,” she says. Olander personally gives more than $1 million to charity every year, and she raises more, often with events at her home. It usually involves wine and fundraising. They all come to her, and why not? There is always something to see and something brewing at Olander’s. Olander’s world is substantial in size – 55 North Raleigh acres – as well as in scope, encompassing the universes not only of art and gardening, but also philanthropy, music, wine connoisseurship, and an ever-expanding circle of friends and admirers. The high, the low, and the fanciful live happily side-by-side, bound by one thing: Olander is charmed by all of it, and she wants you to be, too. ![]() She babies many carefully tended gardens where weeds are sometimes considered an unexpected gift, and where sculptures made from oil cans peek from behind the hydrangeas. So do works of art by Picasso and Chagall, and dazzling chandeliers made just for Olander by the artist Jay Strongwater.Īrt of all sorts is clearly at home here, and it’s a good place to be a plant, too. Here, a geometrically precise meditation maze is painstakingly mowed into a shady field, 20-foot whirligigs spin in the wind, and a chicken coop looks for all the world like a tiny Chartres Cathedral.Įdgar Allan Poe’s own gothic bookcase lives here, under the same roof as a sparkling, amethyst-encrusted fireplace inspired by a dream. rex made of scrap metal glowers across a graceful, winding driveway, and classical statuary adorns a rose garden. Seuss-style flower sculptures bloom, and Thomas Sayre earth castings tower out of a sweeping meadow. It’s a place where whimsy and sophistication live side-by-side. Her friends joke that they should have their passports stamped when they enter Eliza Kraft Olander’s universe. Giant whirligigs by North Carolina artist Vollis Simpson dot a meadow at Olander’s 55-acre North Raleigh retreat. ![]()
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