The Thomas Wolfe Memorial is a large, two-story frame house with a gabled roof, clapboard siding, and a two-story porch on two sides. The principle facade has three bays, including a bay window to the right of the front door. When Thomas Wolfe's mother, Mrs Julia Wolfe, bought the house in 1906, there were seventeen rooms. She soon opened it as a boarding house, naming it The Old Kentucky Home. In 1917, she enlarged the house by adding two rooms on the south side (widening the porch in the process) and three rooms to the northwest corner. No structural change have been made to the building since that time.

Thomas Wolfe lived in The Old Kentucky Home until his entry into the University of North Carolina in 1916. The house later provided part of the setting for his two first and most successful novels. Following the death of their mother, the remaining Wolf children set aside the house furnishings as a memorial. In 1949, the City of Asheville agreed to accept the house and administer it as a museum. The furnishings in the house are all Wolfe family items, with the exception of a few objects, added by the city to fill in gaps. One room contains furnishings from one of Thomas Wolfe's apartments in New York, including his writing table and typewriter. South of the house stands the Wolfe children's playhouse, a small, one-story building with a gabled roof, which stood originally in the rear of the (now destroyed) Wolfe family residence at 92 Woodfin Street. - NRHP, 17 October 1972