Month: March 2010

SEE MORE Click here for a gallery of more photos from Cox and Galfione’s home.

 “Our kids have left. Why are we doing this now?” That’s what local architect Giovanna Galfione says she and her husband, Maurice Cox, asked themselves repeatedly before embarking on a two-year, two-phase project to renovate their 100-year-old home in the Ridge Street Historic District. In phase one, they opened up the kitchen and added a bathroom on the first floor; in phase two, they reopened the first floor back porch and replaced an awkward second floor sunroom addition with a master bedroom, porch and bathroom. Aside from the obvious factors—time and money—the simple answer was this: “The house deserved to be preserved,” says Galfione. 

And for Galfione and Cox, living in the home at its best would be the ultimate luxury. They’d already completed a lot of restoration work to floors, walls and moldings—the house had operated as a funeral parlor for years before the couple purchased it in 1994—and resided there for 15 years.

Giovanna Galfione and Maurice Cox

The couple has a design pedigree as impressive as their home’s broad brick facade. Cox is a UVA architecture professor and former Charlottesville mayor who just finished a two-year stint as Design Director at the National Endowment for the Arts; he and Galfione have partnered on many design and planning efforts, including a community planning project that earned national recognition.

Return to roots

For this close-to-home project, Galfione took the lead on the design plan. Her contractor was Sugar Hollow Builders, a firm that specializes in sustainable and energy-efficient construction and one of Galifione’s preferred contractors for her professional work. Galfione says she and the builders paid special attention to improving the home’s overall thermal performance by increasing insulation, replacing windows and doors and upgrading heating and cooling systems. They also utilized FSC-certified lumber and local and recycled materials as much as possible, plus low- or no-VOC paints and adhesives.

“The renovation’s overall purpose was to improve functionality, natural light and aesthetics of the spaces in the rear volume—in some ways restoring them to their original status,” says Galfione.

Over the century, earlier renovations had carved up the rear of the home, separating the kitchen from several windows now lost behind walls making up a laundry room, bathroom and pantry. By removing those partitions, they made the kitchen the large nerve center of the more modern home. They also incorporated the functional aspects of the home’s original open floor plan. Back then, a wide span of windows would have been necessary for light and ventilation.

Laundry facilities moved to a detached garage and a tiny replacement bathroom was added underneath the main staircase. Historically high ceilings allowed for extra tall kitchen cabinetry to replace pantry space, but custom cabinets were too expensive. Galfione instead chose Kraftmaid plywood box cabinets with solid cherry doors. Marmoleum with radiant heat was an economical, sustainable and energy-efficient choice for flooring. 

Above: At the rear of the couple’s house, the first floor had been carved into a number of small spaces while the second floor held an awkward sunroom addition. Below: After renovation, double porches and more open interior spaces make the most of light.

Though original foundation problems revealed during demo led to other budget compromises, Galfione and Cox did not skimp on windows. They chose Pella Architect Series, aluminum clad, exterior windows with low-E insulated glass for both upstairs and down. Energy efficiency was a main consideration as was the historic integrity of the house. Particularly with historic homes, the quality of the replacement windows is the most obvious detail, says Galfione.

Taking it higher

The couple also didn’t add much square footage to the second floor renovation. It would have been rational, from a design perspective, to match the rectangular footprint up and down, but in putting on her homeowner hat, Galfione says, “We didn’t need the space.”

What they needed (well, wanted) was a view. With Monticello and Montalto directly visible from the back side, Cox says, “We knew there were gorgeous views up there. The novelty was in taking advantage of them.” 

When the house was built, Cox says that an upper level terrace on the back side would have served utilitarian purposes—clothes-drying and ventilation—almost exclusively. By adding the porch off the master bedroom as a space for relaxation and aesthetic pleasure, Cox says they infused their modern sensibilities into a renovation that otherwise responded very carefully to tradition: “You want to do right by a house like this.” 

Galfiones adds, “Although we are modernists, we like to show the home’s honesty.”

 

 

 

Not a fan?

Let’s face it: A major design issue in a lot of rentals is lighting, whether it be dated, unattractive fixtures, or a complete lack thereof. Many of us spend our days in offices with harsh, fluorescent lighting that makes us look like the before photos on makeover shows; we shouldn’t have the same experience at home. In my case, I wrestle with a house full of old ceiling fans. They’re functional, yet dated, and don’t provide the best overhead lighting. 

If this were my house, I would simply take the fans out, but instead, I found a way to easily mask them—from fan to fabulous in five easy steps! 

Materials: A large drum lampshade of your choice (you want to use a shade that attaches to a harp and finial, not the kind that attaches to the base of the lamp—available at The Shade Shop & Lighting Gallery), any malleable stainless steel wire (at least 19-gauge) that’s easy to work with.

Tools: screwdriver, ruler, good pair of shears or utility scissors to cut your wire.

Before you dive right in, take a few preliminary steps that will save you a lot of heartache. 

1. As I start any project that will later involve returning the fixture back to its original state, I take pictures. Photograph the fan and fixture, so you can remember exactly what it looked like when you moved in. 

2. Turn off the power to the fan with the pull chain. Basically, you want the fixture set so when you flip the wall switch, the light comes on, but the fan does not. 

3. Using the necessary screwdriver, remove each of the fan blades from the hub. Put all eight of the screws in a clearly marked plastic sandwich bag, and store these with the removed blades. 

4. You could stop there, but we can make it so much better. Holding your shade upside down against the fixture and using your ruler, measure the distance from the air grate of the fan to the spokes of your shade. Cut four pieces of wire (one for each spoke) and attach the wire to the spokes. 

5. Using pliers or your fingers, bend the end of wire to form a hook. Holding the shade up to the fixture, attach the hook end of each wire to the grate on the base. Adjust so your wires hang evenly by shortening or lengthening the hook.

Stand back and admire your new fixture. When you move on, you can take the shade with you and return the fan to its original condition. No harm, no foul.—Ed Warwick

Playing with pliers

When you graduate from mere painting and demo to more skilled DIY home improvement projects—hardwiring a new light fixture, for example—you’re going to need precision tools. Pliers are one such tool where a specific type is needed for a specific job and shouldn’t be used for other purposes. Otherwise, you risk damaging the tool and possibly yourself (I once attempted to use needle-nose pliers to loosen a stubborn nut and ended up with a puncture wound and a ruined tool). 

All pliers—too many types to list here—have two basic parts: jaws and handle. Pliers differ in size and shape depending on whether their purpose is to grip, cut, bend or crimp. The needle-nose or “long nose” pliers are the most common and useful for small home projects. They’re what you’ll need to bend wires into loops, hold them in place or skin or splice them. To cut steel, iron, brass or copper wires you’ll need diagonal pliers with short jaws that cut by indenting and wedging the wire on an angle. 

If you’re getting into sophisticated wiring projects, you’ll want what professional electricians use—combination “lineman’s” pliers that can both grip and cut. They have insulated handles to prevent shock.—Katherine Ludwig

 

 

 

 Three years ago, Kevin and Beverly Sidders left San Francisco to move into a big house on Rugby Road. They didn’t know much about its history when they arrived. But, as they embarked on a multi-year renovation, the past gradually emerged. 

With the help of Daniel Bluestone—UVA professor and an expert on Eugene Bradbury, who designed the house—the Sidders learned that their house is the second of two nearly identical buildings to stand on this spot. The first, probably built in 1909, burned down in 1921. The present one rose on its ashes soon afterward, with slight alterations to the sprawling design. 

Both the home’s incarnations have been rather grand, but it’s doubtful that either ever boasted one particular amenity—a dedicated wine cellar—until a year ago, when Kevin’s 1,800-bottle cellar was completed in a corner of the basement where there had previously been a rock outcropping dusted with soil. 

Though he’s on the board of the Wine Guild of Charlottesville, he’s careful to avoid highfalutin wine talk. Plenty of his 900 bottles, he says, are in the sub-$10 range, and he’s not one to preach the necessity of a cellar. It’s just that it’s nice to be able to access bottles so easily—to browse, to stay organized, to look around at the collection. “The amount of pleasure I get when I’m hanging out with my wine,” says Sidders, “is worth the investment.”—Erika Howsare

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“[Before we built the cellar] the wine was just in boxes. In a cool dark basement, that’s not a bad thing. People get all geeked up about whether your wine should be at 50 or 55 degrees…for years I kept my wine in a closet in San Francisco. And I’m still opening stuff that’s moved twice with me, and it’s still fantastic. 

“That said, when you have [a cellar], it really is nice. It’s mostly about capacity. The racking’s a big deal—how you want it organized, the sizes of the bottles…The lighting is reasonably straightforward. We’re still missing the center [fixture]—I’m thinking a Gothic, black, Rathskeller thing. We had to redo our patios, so the floor is reclaimed 100-year-old brick. 

“For cooling, we have a split system. We keep it at 59. I don’t want my stuff to never age. I want it to age a little and slowly. The natural humidity in here is pretty good. What you don’t want is too dry. Corks dry out and you get leakage, which will spoil the wine.

“In the grand scheme of cellars, this is nice but not anywhere near crazy. You can go crazy. This for me is a place to store wine. Some people will have a dining room table in the next room so they can eat and gaze at their wine. I just want to wander in and think about what I want for dinner, pick something out…

“[I’ll say, for example,] ‘Tonight I’m making salmon. What do I want to drink?’ I drink wine about six nights a week. To me, wine is a very important contributor to the meal. I think of it as another course, or more important than that even. I’ll spend three or four minutes down here—‘What do I feel like? I haven’t had this in a while…let’s see how this is aging…’ I can tell you roughly when I bought everything in here. There are memories attached to a lot of these. There’s a lot of accumulated pleasure and experience; all of that resides down here.”

 

Sarah White has served as a sort of de facto first lady of Charlottesville rock & roll since her first record, 1997’s All My Skies Are Blue. It sometimes feels like there’s not much around town that doesn’t in some way, shape or form, draw on White’s contributions since. But over the past few years White’s local appearances have slowed to a trickle. The rare sighting of White onstage came in the form of the (All New) Acorn Sisters, a duo she formed with Sian Richards, a local actress and founding member of the Performers Exchange Project. 

Sarah White and Michael Bishop’s respective musical backgrounds make them an unlikely pair, but White’s new band is headed in a direction her earlier stuff only hints at: punk.

Through 2008’s Sweetheart EP, White has waited for perfection while being the first to admit that it’s the imperfections—the rasp to her voice, the punk gallop beneath her songs—that make her music so…perfect. 

It begs the question: What is Sarah White waiting for?

The answer, as it turns out, may have something to do with GWAR. Or, rather, Michael Bishop, who spent six years playing bass as Beefcake the Mighty in the Richmond-based band, and another half-decade in Kepone. The unlikely duo joined forces last summer, along with a whole new cast (more on that later), when “I loaned you my nail clippers,” White said to Bishop when we met last week.

“That’s right,” says Bishop, straight-faced.

“And we started hitting it off, chatting and stuff. That’s how it started really.”

As it was with GWAR, you have to fight to get the real story: White picked up Bishop and new drummer Stuart Gunter (also of Richmond’s Wrinkle-Neck Mules) as a sort of package deal. The pair played together in Tom Peloso’s band the Virginia Sheiks, who shared a stage with the Pearls on a few occasions. But The Sheiks isn’t an all-or-nothing deal—Peloso is busy playing guitar for Modest Mouse—so White invited Bishop and Gunter to join her band. 

Bishop agreed, saying, “I liked her stuff a lot.”

“My aura,” White corrects him.

The occasion? Peter Agalesto, founder of Nelson County’s Monkeyclaus music hub, and bride-to-be Sarah Pope invited the Pearls to play at their wedding party. White’s recent guitarist Ted Pitney was out of town, so she asked Swiss Butler (also of Vevlo Eel) to fill in. There was some magic. “I never really thought of the Pearls as wedding party music,” she says. “But they loved it. From 9-year-old girls to 90-year-old women, they were all screaming ‘Fightin’ Words,’” a song from 2006’s White Light. “I was in heaven.” 

When Pitney came back, Butler already knew the songs. There was no reason not to have two guitarists, so the new Pearls started the long process of honing their three-guitar attack, which is the hallmark of the new lineup; Bishop says the electric guitar overkill helps to foreground Sarah’s punk influence. That punk influence belied the formal attire the full band wore at its first proper gig, at Birdlips’ farewell show at The Southern last month. Sources say that Bishop looked as nice in a suit as he did in the colossal legionnaire costume he wore in GWAR. With two electric guitars to contend with, Gunter, at the drums, hammers out the soft strokes that characterized the Pearls of the past.

Encouraged, they packed up a couple days later and brought their act to Richmond, the second with a full lineup. It was “a tough gig.” “Partly because we are who we are now,” Bishop says, talking about feeling old—not having been in a famous band. “It’s a little bit hard to go do shows where you provide the P.A., and you’re playing at a restaurant,” he says. 

White agrees. “I hope we make a record and we hit it, but I’m not going to do it in a stinky, disgusting way.”

“We’re kind of—I don’t know if I would use the word ‘spoiled,’” says Bishop. “Let me put it like this. If we do it, we’re going to have some style, and we’re going to be comfortable.”

So that’s in a sense what we’ve been waiting for. “We’re just trying to get our mechanisms in place, for one thing,” says Bishop. “First you have to kind of articulate what you are.” White and Bishop both seem reinvigorated by the process of polishing the new Pearls. “Everyone’s caught up on all the old songs, and we’ve got some new ones in the hopper,” White says. “Which is exciting, and a long time coming.” They’ve also been recording. Bishop points his finger at an electrical outlet and says the early stages have been like “taking your finger out of the plug.”

While White’s songs don’t at first listen have much to do with the kind of music Bishop made with GWAR and Kepone, he says that he’s got plenty of space to “stretch out his legs” in the Pearls. “This is the first thing I’ve done in six years with any momentum, where I feel like I’m putting my foot back into this pool that involves talking to people, and conceiving of myself as a musician.” 

Whatever the finished product sounds like, there’s fresh confidence in White’s voice. “I change from record to record, and it might be some quiet, creepy solo stuff, or it might be some total pop jewel nuggets with this great band,” White says. “I think that when people are fans they like it all. Maybe because of the heart it’s coming from.”