Azurest South was designed by Amaza Lee Meredith (1895-1984), one of the country’s first black female architects, as her own residence and studio in the Chesterfield County town of Ettrick. The compact, clean-lined dwelling, built in 1939, is among the Commonwealth’s few mature examples of the International Style, a style which developed in Germany following World War I and espoused a complete break with traditional architecture. Meredith was a professor at Virginia State University, founding and chairing the Fine Arts Department in the early 1930s. For the bathroom and kitchen of Azurest South, Meredith designed vividly colored and patterned floors, walls, and ceilings. The living room mantel is a stylish Art Deco design. In addition to homes in Virginia, and Texas, Meredith designed Azurest North, a vacation community for African Americans at Sag Harbor on Long Island. Azurest South is now owned by the Virginia State University Alumni Association.

Azurest South was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2024 as a nationally significant example of subversive and innovative modern architecture by Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black (biracial), queer, woman in the Jim Crow South.  This Chesterfield County property, where Meredith lived with her life partner, Edna Meade Colson, for forty-five years, exemplifies the struggle for safety and self-determination by Black Americans, women, and sexual minorities. Azurest South has been identified in the LGBTQ America National Historic Landmark theme study as an African American LGBTQ site, is also significant as an unusual example of modern architecture combining vocabularies of Streamline Moderne, Art Deco, and the International Style in the American South.