Month: June 2007

The arc of the sun reaches its zenith on June 21st, bringing the first day of summer. From then ’til December 22nd the golden orb tracks steadily back towards winter. If you haven’t yet been invited to a summer solstice party, plan one now to celebrate the longest day of the year.

Cocktails at twilight are an excellent opportunity to revel in the sweet scent of Nicotiana alata or N. sylvestris, which wait for sunset to come into their own. Start these old-fashioned annual flowering tobaccos from seed (Thompson & Morgan catalogue has a good selection) or acquire them as transplants from select growers like the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants or Eltzroth & Thompson. Don’t fall for the candy-colored “Nikki” hybrids, which have had their scent bred out of them.

Consider also the moon vine, another fragrant summer treat. They’re a bit tricky to start at home (you need to soak the seeds overnight), but worth the effort as they can be difficult to find in the garden centers. Delectable whipped cream buds open languidly in the gloaming into pure white blossoms that do a respectable imitation of large porcelain sand dollars. Give this special morning glory full sun and entice it along twine strung about the deck posts and railings. It will all collapse with the first hard frost.

Our path around the sun determines the beginning of summer and winter, but many people look to the moon for the best timed garden tasks. A moon waxing towards full reduces the pull of gravity which results in more moisture in the soil, conducive to sowing seeds and putting out transplants.

As the moon wanes, the increased pull of gravity reduces water content and favors a harvest of root crops like carrots and onions that profit from drier conditions. This is also the time to get the best results from mowing the lawn and pulling weeds.

From planets spinning in space to plants rooted in the ground, the garden contains a multitude of cycles. Fine old gardens in France suspend all other activities in order to dead-head lilacs in late spring, so important is this activity to good bud set for next year. Immediately after flowering is the best time to shape and thin any flowering shrub. Along with the lilacs, give some attention now to overgrown forsythia and azaleas before it gets any later, or you risk harming developing flower buds.

Our prolonged cool spring might cause some difficulties with hot weather crops like tomatoes, corn, zinnias, marigolds and okra. There’s not much these plants will do until the ground warms up. Old-timers listen for the first whippoorwill or look for oak leaves the size of a squirrel’s ear before planting their corn. The oak leaves are long enough, but here in the hollow, we have not yet heard the plaintive cry of that increasingly rara avis.

Set the mower on high and cultivate the shag-rug look over an astro-turf buzz to shade out weeds and give your lawn lots of leaf surface to feed its roots. Don’t bag clippings. They’re one of nature’s fastest sources of nitrogen. If they clump up, rake them out and dispose of any excess in the trusty compost bin. Get with your composting, people! Steve Murray, master composter at Earlysville farm Panorama Paydirt, says the largest component of landfills is kitchen garbage.

Through the Garden Gate opens private gardens maintained by their owners to the public for a $5 fee. Saturday, June 9, from 9am to noon, find your way to 1647 and 1641 Oxford Rd. to inspect two city landscapes that take full advantage of their circumstances and sport a variety of specimen trees and shrubs (call 872-4580 for more info).

For the past couple of months, Gini Carl’s mornings have consisted of seemingly endless rounds of bed-making, dishwashing, vacuuming and trailing after her 11-year-old daughter “to pick up everything she drops.”

No, Carl’s not some Type A, neat freak Martha Stewart wannabe. She has, however, been playing one since early April. That’s when she and her husband put their Albemarle County home on the market.

But staying on top of dirty dishes and a messy fifth-grader isn’t the worst of it. That honor goes to cleaning up after two dogs, a pair of cats, guinea pigs and hamsters. Oh, and then there was that unfortunate encounter with a skunk.

Carl awoke early one morning a few weeks ago, knowing that her Realtor planned to show the house later that day. I’m ready, she thought, until she stepped outside and got a strong whiff of something nasty.

What Carl didn’t realize—until she went back indoors and the smell didn’t dissipate—was that one of her pets had a run-in with Mr. Smelly and then decided to spread his bad fortune around. Specifically, a cat, who proceeded to make himself comfortable on beds, a couch and carpeting. Everything he touched reeked, Carl recalls with a laugh. “I was doing laundry at 6am. I called work and let them know I’d be late,” and then she got out the vinegar and Dawn dishwashing liquid.

“I didn’t have any tomato juice, so I used tomato sauce. I opened all the windows, threw down some carpet freshener and sprayed Febreze everywhere.”

Susan Veach, a Realtor with RE/MAX Assured Properties, applauds Carl’s deodorizing efforts. “It’s more important now than ever to have your house show in A+ condition,” she says. “In 2004, the average days on the market—from the time you put your house on the market until closing—was 50 days. Now it’s 171 days.”

Inventory is way up, she adds, “so the way for your home to rise to the top of someone’s list is to have the house in model home condition when you show it. Make the beds, send Lassie to the neighbor’s house, light some candles, bake some cookies and leave.”

When her Earlysville home was on the market, Debbie Philkill says that in addition to “frantic morning clean-ups,” she vacuumed twice a day, every day. She also burned through a lot of vanilla candles, “always wondering if the buyers noticed the just-extinguished smoking wick smell when they walked through the door.”

When you’re trying to sell your house, there’s always something to worry about, Philkill adds. Did the kids remember to flush the toilet? Was it a bad idea to cook fish for dinner last night? Did my husband put that stack of just-washed underwear in his drawer?

Letting your guard down even briefly can be costly, but Veach says if a client is at work and she schedules a last-minute showing, Veach will give the place “a quick once-over and pick up a bit. Everything helps, and our clients expect us to take care of all the little things” they may have forgotten.

But you can’t always count on a volunteer to clean up your messes. So why not have your home professionally cleaned before you put it on the market? A deep, top-to-bottom tidy will last a long time and all you’ll have to do is maintain it. And if even maintenance makes you nervous, pop for someone to come in every week or a couple times a month to help you keep up until your home sells.

As for pets, Carl jokingly suggests that if “you’re going to sell your house, it might be a good idea to sell your animals first.”

Earlysville is one of those picture postcard examples of Central Virginia: Barrels of hay line the main drags through town, grazing cattle dot the rolling hills against a Blue Ridge backdrop and flocks of geese make pit stops in people’s front yards. It’s a place where many residents give directions like: “Take a right at the fork in the road and look for our gravel driveway 500 yards past the horse fence.” And it’s a place with a general store, a dentist office, a pizza shop.

Earlysville’s most notable landmark is the Union Church, an interdenominational meetinghouse built on land deeded by John Early (for whom the town is named) in 1833—it’s on the National Register of Historic Places. Townsfolk still gather in the electricity-free church for community events like the annual “Carol Sing” (enjoyed by oil lamp) each Christmas Eve. The landmark’s front steps are the site of the community vegetable share, where neighbors drop off their excess tomatoes and pick up whatever surplus produce bounty has been left by someone else.

Just where is this mythical Mayberry?

“I had friends I went to high school with who lived in Earlysville, and you would have thought it was the end of the world at that point—it was so far out,” says Kathy Woodson, a Charlottesville area resident since childhood and a homeowner in Earlysville for the past 21 years.

But that’s not the case anymore, she says. Developers have found sleepy Earlysville—and so have retirees from New York and New Jersey.

Woodson, a real estate agent with Real Estate III, says, “It’s amazing how many people have decided to come here rather than go all the way to Florida to retire. We get a lot of people who come from the states up North who find this not to be so expensive.” 

Transplants are attracted by the mountain views and the acreage—most homes in the area, even in the subdivisions, are on at least an acre, she says. People fall in love with Earlysville, says Woodson, because it’s “very private.”

Native daughter

Jodie Webber grew up in Earlysville and was shocked by the changes there when she returned in 1994. She’s shown here in one bastion of tradition: the historic Union Church, which still lacks electricity.

It was the “long vistas over open fields” that brought Jodie Webber back to Earlysville where she was born and raised.  Webber left home after studying architecture at UVA, and she lived in such far-flung places as Manhattan, Venice, Italy and Princeton, New Jersey, before she came back to her roots. “I really missed seeing mountains and open fields, open land,” says Webber, who returned to Earlysville in 1994 with her husband and two children (Webber’s third child is Earlysville-born). Webber and her husband (also an architect) built a home on a 29-acre section of Webber’s family farm adjacent to Broadus Wood Elementary. The home also serves as the office for the couple’s business, Koch & Webber Architects.

Open land is part of what, ironically, is drawing residents and making Earlysville more dense.

But Webber says Earlysville has “changed tremendously” since her childhood.  As for her early experience with Earlysville, she says, “It was really nice how quiet it was back then, how you knew everybody and everyone looked out for everybody else. You didn’t lock your doors.”  That was a time before Earlysville experienced a superfluence of subdivisions, and “that’s the one thing that I hate to see,” Webber says.

“When I was a kid there weren’t many housing developments,” she says. “There were houses and there were farms, fields and trees. It was very bucolic and pastoral, and it was lovely. There’s always a tradeoff, but I hate to see all the open space going.”

A land divided

Earlysville’s rural landscape of farms and one-off homes was first interrupted in the 1960s by the Earlysville Heights subdivision—a neighborhood of 55 modest brick ranch style homes. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that the next major wave of residential progress hit Earlysville with the development of the Earlysville Forest subdivision. That neighborhood is Earlysville’s largest, with 191 homes, all on one to two acres. The houses are contemporary, country style with mature trees and natural landscaping that provides shade and privacy and keeps the larger homes from looking stark or ostentatious.

And then about 15 years ago, residential building began in earnest. That’s when developers came to take advantage of a mass of untouched farmland in the sweet spot south of D.C. and its proximity to the growing 29N commercial corridor and employment centers at the nearby Charlottesville office of GEFanuc and, in 1994, the UVA Research Park. Now, you’ll see several McMansion-type neighborhoods scattered among the fields and hay barrels.

High-end housing, like this home in Claymont, is a big part of the intense residential growth around Earlysville.

“Prices have gone way up and there are a lot of new neighborhoods,” says Woodson. “There used to be a time when if somebody wanted to look at houses under $400,000 you’d have plenty to show them. Now in Earlysville, you might have a few under $400,000. If you want to see up to $800,000, you have a lot more to look at,” she says. And Earlysville now has what Woodson calls the “farmette,”—new million dollar estate-type homes on 20-plus acres. 

“These big homes, you think, ‘Wow’ but they seem to sell”—many to retirees looking to settle down in the country, says Woodson.

Country living for the masses

The irony is that development is bringing newcomers to Earlysville who themselves are trying to escape the crowds. 

“People who have lived in other places that are bigger and more congested come here because they want to escape that, and they are very concerned about growth,” says Webber, who is vice president of the Earlysville Area Residents’ League. And despite the furious residential growth, Webber and Woodson both boast about Earlysville’s strong sense of community, which is centered, they say, around Broadus Wood Elementary (“ a neat little country school” says Woodson) and the preservation of provincial pastimes like the vegetable share and the annual Easter Egg Hunt, Fourth of July Parade and Carol Sing.

Complete with general store, Earlysville is a rural village facing modern pressures.

The newcomers are coming precisely for this modern-day Mayberry, and so there’s hope that the essence of Earlysville will be protected in some way. As for the natives, Webber says, “I think a lot of people who have been here have been lulled into false complacency regarding development. Because there was always so much open space they figured, ‘There’s room for everybody; it doesn’t matter.’ I think, only fairly recently, more and more people have come to realize that if you don’t control it, you will wake and find it’s become like Northern Virginia, and it will go past the point of no return.”

At a glance

Distance (from town center) to Downtown Mall: 13 miles

Distance (from town center) to UVA Hospital: 12.5 miles

Elementary School: Broadus Wood

Middle School: Jack Jouett

High School: Albemarle

Price range of homes currently on market: $234,900-$2.5 million

Median price of homes on market: $669,000

Median price of land on market: $300,000 for 5.8 acres

Source: Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors

It’s hardly news to anybody that the local real estate market has shifted. Whereas buyers a couple of years ago had to be happy with whatever they could find, now it’s sellers who are feeling a little desperate. What’s more, inventory is way up. When I asked Martha deJarnette, an associate broker with Pace Real Estate Associates, to take me on a tour of a few Charlottesville houses currently for sale, she remarked on how many vacant city properties there were in the mid to upper $200s—perfectly good houses, sitting empty and waiting patiently to be noticed.

So what makes one house more attractive to buyers than the next? It’s a complex equation, for sure—everything from paint colors to doorknobs can influence buyers in unpredictable ways. But, given that it’s June and our time spent outdoors is hitting its yearly peak—along with the real estate season itself—I asked deJarnette to focus on how outdoor living spaces might factor in. When does a porch, deck or patio really make an impact on a buyer? What can sellers do to play up these features?

To answer these questions, we visited three very similar houses. All were located within a few blocks of each other in the Locust Grove neighborhood; all were brick three-bedroom homes between 44 and 54 years old; all were between $250,000 and $285,000 in asking price. Yet the three felt distinctly different.

First house: High perch

Year built: 1963

Asking price: $285,000

Site: Dead-end street with a band of woods in back

A high deck is a mixed blessing: great for privacy, bad for little kids. The flagstone patio underneath is a nice extra for hot days.

Interior: This house is a ranch with small bedrooms off a narrow central hallway. The hardwood floors are a plus, but, says deJarnette, they’re hard to appreciate with heavy rugs and dark furniture seeming to fill the space. A big finished basement, and a sense that previous owners have meticulously maintained the house, balance its mostly unremarkable look.

Outdoor spaces: Off the kitchen is a very high deck with no stairway to the ground. Below the deck is a flagstone patio. Both these spaces look out over the steep backyard and the tall swath of trees that defines the edge of all the properties along this street.

The plusses: “The high deck is unique; it might not feel that way on another space,” says deJarnette. “This is like a big playpen.” Emerging onto the deck from the small spaces of the house feels very expansive, and if a buyer were to gaze up and down the row of houses—all apparently built to a similar plan, but with various outdoor configurations—she’d likely feel she was standing on the best deck on the block. “This distinguishes [the house] from other houses on the street,” says deJarnette.

Because there isn’t a similar elevated structure next door, deJarnette says, “It can be pretty private out here. It’s great for entertaining; the leafy green view is really appealing.” The patio beneath, too, is an inviting space—well shaded by the deck and likely very cool in summer with its flagstone surface. “This would be a good place for a porch swing,” says deJarnette. A matching stone sidewalk leads around to the front of the house, lined with tidy plantings.

The minuses: As deJarnette and I found out firsthand when I closed the kitchen door behind us and unwittingly locked us out of the house, there is no way to get from this deck to the ground! What’s more, the relatively open design of the deck railing could present a menace to certain buyers. “Anyone with young children would be horrified by this,” says deJarnette.

Second house: Open field

Year built: 1954

Asking price: $250,000

Site: Secondary street with a small public park adjacent to backyard
Interior: Though the floor plan here is nearly identical to the first house, it has a noticeably brighter feel due to cheery paint colors and a slightly more cottage-like style. The basement is unfinished.

Gardener’s special: The deck acts as a doorway to a big, level yard that practically begs for plantings.

Outdoor spaces: Again, a door in the kitchen leads to a back deck—but this one is only a few feet off the ground. From the edge of the deck, a sizeable, gently sloping yard stretches out toward the park.

The plusses: “It was like being in a bird’s nest [on the first deck],” says deJarnette; “this is more of a continuous sweep. It’s a lot nicer if you enjoy gardening.” Indeed, rather than surveying the landscape from high above, a buyer here would feel more drawn out into the yard. “This is more personal involvement with your land,” says deJarnette.

Next door, the neighbors are obviously avid gardeners, with complex plantings and a tidy grape arbor. That pleasant view is a lucky advantage for these sellers, as is the park. “If someone wanted to retire here,” says deJarnette, “it’s all on one level, and you’d be always entertained by who’s in the park.”

The minuses: Aside from slow but steady traffic on the road out front, the only major drawback to this house’s outdoor space is the amount of maintenance it would need. deJarnette, a gardener herself, says not everyone is interested in the challenge. “I might see something that to me means beautiful landscaping,” she says; “they might see maintainance and time. They might say, ‘I don’t know how to care for that.’ It’s like an exotic pet would be to me.”

Third house: Sheltered nook

Year built: 1953

Asking price: $285,000

Site: Corner lot, roughly level

Everyone loves a screened porch, but this one is awfully close to the road; lattices would help make it more private.

Interior: Square, high-ceilinged rooms have a nicely old-fashioned feel, and there are some notable details: a wall of built-in shelves and an apparently antique vanity in the bathroom. The living space is small, but there is lots of storage in the unfinished basement.

Outdoor spaces: The house has two screened porches, one on each side. One is quite small —just enough room for a table and two chairs —and is right off the kitchen. The other could hold a group of guests and opens off the living room.

The plusses: Standing in the smaller porch, deJarnette says, “It’s amazing how quiet it is here on this side of the house.” This would be the place to put a larger deck or porch, she says, because of the sheltered yard with its big trees: “This is a retreat.” And, whether big or small, a porch here, right off the kitchen, definitely suggests alfresco eating.
Whereas this is an inviting spot to be alone, the other porch is asking for a party. And one more plus: Open both porch doors and a great cross breeze, minus the mosquitoes, would enter the house. 

The minuses: The larger porch feels quite exposed to the street. When the house was built, says deJarnette, traffic was probably slower and less frequent; today, buyers are likely to ask, “I wonder if there’s some way we can make this more private?” Sellers could anticipate the question and install lattices to shield the view of the street, then orient porch furniture back toward the house. Then, says deJarnette, “It would be more inviting just looking at it from inside.”

Yeah, but how do I sell it?

Outdoor spaces, says deJarnette, are tough to value specifically in terms of a home’s asking price. “How much does the color on a dress add to the dress? It’s kind of an intangible thing based on people’s priorities,” she says. Still, these three houses are all clearly enhanced by their outdoor spaces, which add living area and would give potential buyers something to remember the properties by.

Aside from getting lucky with what’s adjacent to your property, what can you do to play up your assets in the outdoor department?

• “The first thing would be cleanliness,” says Liz Blankenship of Stage to Sell. Invest in power washing for a dingy deck; put away hoses and rusty grills, ixnay the old pots and trash cans.

• Repair cracks in concrete.

• Trim and prune plantings and add mulch.

• “Fresh flowers are always nice,” says Blankenship—“pots outside full of new growth.”

• Clean any windows or doors looking out onto outdoor spaces.

• Look for easy ways to enhance privacy when outdoor spaces are next to roads or other houses, such as adding lattices or hanging plants.

• “Indoor/outdoor carpeting that defines a space adds a punch” to a patio, says Blankenship.

• Make spaces more inviting. Add a few lawn lanterns, a series of tall plants along a stairway, or a simple table and chairs.

• Go for a minimal, neutral look: Put away lawn ornaments.

Wage clean air with the peace lily and other houseplants.

Places in a planned utopia
Belvedere development will sell a green vision

Can you create a sustainable community nearly out of thin air? Local development company Stonehaus is betting it can. Its 675-unit Belvedere development broke ground on May 10, beginning a five- to six-year buildout process. And when it’s done, it’s meant to look pretty different than your standard McMansion-lined subdivision.

The Belvedere development is aiming for the Whole Foods crowd with an ambitious green agenda.

Aside from the standard elements of mixed- use development—retail, offices and a range of housing types—are more unusual features, like the organic farm and “civic core.” The ambition for Belvedere is not only to employ new urbanist principles of fostering community (for example, by making it easy for residents to walk to a coffeeshop) but also to meet green-building standards with low-VOC paint, rainwater harvesting and other measures.

Before there was Belvedere the sustainable community, there was plain Belvedere. Stonehaus has owned the location since 1998, and its development plans have only turned green over the last few years as sustainability exploded into mainstream parlance.

Prices for the EarthCraft-certified homes will range widely, from cottages in the low to mid-$200s to single-family homes costing over $600,000. Presumably, all residents would share some desire to live in, as Stonehaus’s Chris Schooley puts it, “a neighborhood, not a subdivision.” Stay tuned to see how Belvedere shapes up.—Erika Howsare

All aboard!
Take the EarthCraft tour and get wise to green

What’s an earth-friendly house look like, anyway? Find out for yourself by joining the Blue Ridge Home Builders Association’s tour of a dozen local EarthCraft homes, June 9-10 and 16-17 from 1-5pm. Though they represent a range of housing types—from Habitat for Humanity projects to custom homes—all are being built to EarthCraft standards, meaning they’re certified as environmentally sound by a third-party organization.

Eyeball this house and 11 other sustainable dwellings on this month’s EarthCraft tour. At many of them, you can peer inside still-unfinished walls.

EarthCraft proponents often insist that their houses look no different than standard homes, so it’s handy that most of the houses will still be under construction—allowing you to peer inside walls at the features that make EarthCraft houses more healthy and energy-efficient (and are often made invisible by the time a house is finished). “It’s all about helping people understand what really goes into the bones of a house” and improves its efficiency, says Jay Willer of the BRHBA. Many of the techniques would be applicable to retrofits or remodeling projects, too, he says—not only brand-new houses.

Don’t consider yourself a tree-hugger? Go anyway, says Willer. “The thing that should strike home for anybody is that an EarthCraft home will deliver 30 to 50 percent greater energy efficiency than standard construction,” he says. “It’s the right thing to do environmentally, but the bottom line is it will save you money for as long as you live in that house.” For more info, visit www.brhba.org or call 973-8652.—E.H.

Building blocks
Workshop series will lay out green building basics

Need to catch up on the green building trend that’s got everybody talking? A new series of workshops has just begun at the Habitat Store—a helpful (and free!) beginning for anyone who’s building or just pondering an environmentally conscious home. The GreenMatters series started up last week with an introduction to the schedule for the next two years, which will include topics like supplies and furnishings, EarthCraft (an eco-building program), solar power, indoor air quality and yard design. Each workshop covers a separate issue, so you can choose a few or hit ‘em all.

Check out the GreenMatters website, www.greenmatters.info, for a detailed listing of topics and dates; next up is an explanation of residential energy audits on July 11. All workshops will be held at the Habitat Store on Harris Street from 6-7:30pm, but it’s not all notepads and pie charts: there’s a social hour prior to the class (5-6pm) and a half hour of visiting time afterwards. Contact Ryan Jacoby, the Habitat Store retail director, at 293-6331 with questions.—Katherine Cox

Easy to be hard
Know your materials: insulated concrete forms

A plethora of innovative building materials are entering the market as green building becomes a hotter topic. One of these is insulated concrete forms (ICFs): blocks of polystyrene filled with concrete and recycled steel, used to construct houses in place of traditional stick-built methods. Ren Angle, a spokesperson for Allied Concrete, says his company has seen the ICF market grow since entering it 8 years ago: “When we started we were doing seven or eight houses a year…We’re doing maybe 30 this year.”

Ren Angle of Allied Concrete shows off the inside of an ICF, an energy-efficient material that’s gaining traction among green builders.

What are the benefits? Angle says that ICF houses save up to half the energy used to heat and cool standard homes, offsetting their 6-7 percent greater construction cost. They have soundproofing properties, do not release harmful substances into the air, and look no different than standard homes.

Too, they save on trees—though they still represent plenty of manufacturing energy in the concrete, steel and petroleum-based polystyrene. John Semmelhack of the Charlottesville Community Design Center says this is probably only an environmental negative if a structure is not left standing for its full lifespan. “[ICF structures] can be incredibly long lasting,” he says. “They can last for hundreds of years”—making the initial energy investment in materials more worthwhile.—E.H.

Leaves of green
Put houseplants to work on indoor air quality

If you‘re like me and check The Green Guide as often as you text your best friend, then you may already have read the green living site’s article on how plants can improve indoor air quality. We were surprised to learn how the leafy ones act as your personal ecosystem’s filter.

The full story can be found in Dr. B.C. Wolverton‘s handy book How to Grow Fresh Air. Here’s the crib notes version: plants can’t reduce indoor air pollution entirely, but they can clean up the minor contaminants that float about—including those from everyday products like paint, grocery bags, computer screens, and gas stoves. Harmful chemicals are also emitted from household materials like carpet, upholstery, and ceiling tiles. Even our breath releases air pollutants. 

Some recommended cleansing plants include the Boston fern, the moth orchid, the peace lily, English ivy and the snake plant. If you have a standard-size home, distribute about 15 houseplants throughout to reduce air toxins.

As long as we’re talking plants and health: Some houseplants can be poisonous if kids or pets ingest them. Ask at the nursery which ones are nontoxic, or call the Blue Ridge Poison Center at 800-222-1222.—Jennifer Pullinger

We have a new dining experience to tell you about: It’s called eating at home. O.K., eating at home is not really Restaurantarama’s forte. If left to our own devices we’d be scarfing down mac ‘n’ cheese in front of the TV every night like the rest of America. We much prefer the more civilized culinary experience provided by, say, Eppies, where macaroni & cheese is prepared for us, from scratch, sans nasty pot of caked-on, processed cheese-like product soaking in our sinks for days on end. Well, what if we told you there’s a place where you can make your own meals—stay with us—but you do none of the menu planning, shopping, chopping or cleaning yourself and you end up with gourmet-sounding entrees like Grilled Honey-Lemon Tilapia and Marmalade-Glazed Pork Chops to enjoy in front of the comforts of your own TV? Such place is called Super Suppers and it just opened on Route 29N. Yes, there’s some hands-on labor involved at this make-your-own-dinner shop, but all of the really unpleasant work is done for you. In less than an hour and half, you can assemble 10 entrees that serve 4-6 people each. Each entree is prepped and ready for you to mix it all together at five little gourmet kitchen stands throughout the shop.

Jill Costello made a business out of her favorite hobby: stacking away frozen meals for friends and family in need. You can create your own stash at Super Suppers on Route 29N

And if you have a smaller family and really want to pack your freezer, you could split the make-your-own entrees in half plus pick up a few of the ready-made entrees prepared by franchise owner Jill Costello and her staff in the Grab & Go or Fresh & Go cases, and you’ll have a month’s worth of meals in less time than it takes Restaurantarama to scrub the mac ‘n’ cheese pot! And it’s all at a savings of about $125 off your monthly grocery bill, Costello says. (We’re not exactly sure how she gets that figure, but it sounds great to us!)

We have no idea what a freezer full of meals looks like what with the package of fudge pops and the hamburger patties circa summer of ’05 as the sole contents of Restaurantarama’s icebox, but we imagine it must be pretty satisfying for those

I-wish-I-were-more-like-Martha-Stewart moments and helpful for those housebound times during a snow storm, for instance, or after you’ve had a baby or when you just—gasp—don’t want to eat out.

Costello tells us that Super Suppers’ mission is to “get families back to the table.” Restaurantarama can get behind that.

Fallen Starr

Just when W. Main Street was getting really interesting again with the recent openings of Maya, Horse & Hound and Zinc, the dining spot that played a major part in the street’s resurgence, Starr Hill Music Hall and Restaurant, is shutting its doors after eight years (bringing restaurant mogul Coran Capshaw’s dining holdings down to seven). We checked in with Maya co-owner Christian Kelly to get his reaction. “It’s a bummer, “ he said. “It’s definitely going to affect everybody on the street.” Kelly says that the music hall has been a factor in drawing people off the Mall and into his restaurant, which has gotten slammed with the “pretheater” crowd before Starr Hill shows.

As for where you’re going to go for your Jomo Lager, well if Starr Hill’s master brewer Mark Thompson has his way, just about anywhere you can buy brewskis these days. Thompson told us about his plans for world domination when the brewery had taken up shop in Crozet in the gargantuan old ConAgra building last year. “We are going to be the next national beer brand,” Thompson said. Still, if you’re looking for a bit more atmosphere than your local 7-Eleven, the brewery plans to open a tasting room by mid-summer to early fall so you can enjoy the views of Jarman’s Gap as you sip your ale. Or you can go to the corner mart and get yourself a chili dog with your Starr Hill brew. Your choice.

Got some restaurant scoop? Send tips to restaurantarama@c-ville.com or call 817-2749, Ext. 48.

Laura Peery

Occupation: Music therapist

Where we spotted her: the Corner

Style sense: Peery describes her style as chic comfort, while trying to remain age-appropriate. Her Sweet Pea shirt is from her favorite online outlet, Bluefly.com. She chose her Old Navy skirt because it was cheap and comfortable. Her Helen Ficalora alphabet charm necklace bears the initials of her three children. Peery does not often wear flats, but she loves these shoes from BCBG.

Jummy Olabanji

Occupation: Reporter for CBS19

Where we spotted her: Downtown Mall

Style sense: As a young professional, Olabanji tries to mix business with trendy. She chose her shirt for its antique-looking lace neckline, and both her blouse and skirt are from Express, where she used to work. To brighten up her black ensemble, Olabanji wears a bright red belt and necklace. Her glasses were only $4 from Forever 21, and her earrings were a gift for her 16th birthday. Her shoes, which she loves for their comfortable low heel, are Nine West.