Lee Hall was built as a fashionable plantation house by Richard Decatur Lee. It was conceived as a two-and-one-half-story block, with accommodation for service in the relatively elevated ground floor. The roof was intentionally kept low, and understated grayish-brown brick was chosen to emphasize the Italianate porches and cornice, the latter with jigsawn brackets and turned pendants. Rooms flanking a central passage on all three floors are of a more consistent size and finish than those in eighteenth-century Virginia houses of this scale, illustrating the mid-nineteenth-century penchant for using Greek Revival and/or Italianate millwork with minimal hierarchical distinction among the spaces.