Also known by its more recent name of Rose Hall, the Francis Land House is typical of the dwellings built by the more prosperous 18th-century planters of old Princess Anne County (now the city of Virginia Beach). Its gambrel roof was a form much favored in the area and imparts a picturesque quality to an otherwise formal and quite substantial house. At the time of its listing in the registers in 1975, it was thought that the house dated from the last quarter of the 18th century or the early 19th century. The Land family lived on the property from the 1630s to the 1830s, many of whom served as vestrymen and county justices. Threatened by encroaching development, the city of Virginia Beach acquired the house for preservation in 1975. It was subsequently restored and opened for exhibition in 1986. Part of the surrounding seven acres of the Francis Land House property had been landscaped to protect a sense of the dwelling’s former rural context.

The Francis Land House is a two-story brick dwelling built in the Dutch Colonial style popular throughout the late Colonial/early Federal period in the lower Tidewater area. Updated documentation was approved in 2024, updating the initial 1975 nomination for the house to provide additional discussion of the house’s architecture and setting, including current research based on dendrochronology that clarifies its construction date as ca. 1805. Although historically at the center of a large plantation estate, much of the land was sold and subdivided over the years so that the Francis Land House now rests on a 7.71-acre property in north-central Virginia Beach, a park setting surrounded by mid-sized roadside commercial and residential development. 
[VLR Approved: 12/12/2024]