Month: August 2016

In this issue, you’ll find a an artist-architect, a symmetrical Fluvanna pool, Vinegar Hill’s second act and more. Here’s what’s inside:

• Jessie Chapman‘s visual approach.
• Vinegar Hill’s second life in film.
• Why your home might benefit from a portico.
• Michelle Adams‘ design influences.
• A pool we love!
• A city home in need of reconfiguration.

This month’s featured landscape (above):

The secondary home of a Washington, D.C.-based couple and their two kids needed to maximize the sense of escape from the city. In his role as both architect and landscape architect, Jay Monroe helped site a cottage for the family that offered a broad, rolling view of fields and woods. READ MORE HERE

This month’s featured home:

When David and Sissy Perdue first glimpsed the property they were interested in buying, they knew—despite some obvious drawbacks—it was their future home. The 1880s farmhouse had undergone multiple renovations and, with the help of residential designer Peter LaBau, was about to undergo one more. READ MORE HERE

This place looks nothing like a hay barn.

Yet there was a time, at some point in the early 20th century, when the Somerset farmhouse now belonging to David and Sissy Perdue was in fact used to store hay. Built in the 1880s as a two-over-two home for a family of chicken farmers, the house has passed through multiple phases, including additions and renovations by various owners.

“There was a big renovation in the early ’80s,” says David. When he, Sissy and their three children moved here from Atlanta in 2003, that 20-year-old renovation was still in place. “There were a lot of things that bothered us,” he says. The kitchen was clearly outdated, and the room next to it was lined with unattractive casement windows.

There were more imperfections, but the full scope of the changes the Perdues wanted to make didn’t become clear for a while. In the meantime, they enjoyed the fantastic Blue Ridge views from their gently elevated site, along with the features that had attracted them to the property: the pool, the pond and river frontage on the Rapidan. David says they knew they loved it the minute they first pulled up the driveway: “We said, ‘I guess we need to look at it, but we know we’re buying it.’”

A similar stroke of intuition seems to have connected them with residential designer Peter LaBau several years later. LaBau, who specializes in historic structures, showed up on a whim one day along with a mutual friend. “I was just a passenger in the car,” he remembers. “Before we knew it, we were talking about the house.”

Once they became official clients and began laying out the program for the renovation, more and more goals joined the list. “The scope got bigger,” says Sissy. With three growing children and several dogs, there was a clear need for practical flow and adequate space.

Windows and doors

Something less obvious needed to happen, too. At the time when the house was built, says LaBau, “People used the yard a lot, for cutting gardens, doing laundry, keeping livestock. Your connection to the outdoors was different.” Additions over the decades had cut the house off from its immediate outdoor surroundings, and LaBau wanted to restore those ties.

That would require comprehensive thinking about inside and out. LaBau took as a starting point those unloved casement windows. These filled the walls of a room that flowed from the kitchen and served as combination casual dining space/living room.

While the west-facing room had great Blue Ridge views, the windows didn’t fit the house, which elsewhere retained original (and impressively sized) double-hungs. Even more importantly, the room opened onto a porch that, LaBau thought, could work much harder to draw people outside and, ultimately, into the yard.

He designed a wraparound porch on both the western and northern sides of the house, making lots more room for the Perdues to use the porch for different purposes, and connected to the interior through no fewer than five different doorways. “To have that flat yard as part of the house changes everything,” says David.

Judicious additions

Other changes to the interior layout made for better flow and more opportunities to enjoy privacy—for example, pocket doors between two living spaces allow the younger Perdues to watch TV without the noise bothering their parents, when they are next door enjoying the fireplace.

David remembers one bothersome detail in particular: Anyone entering the house’s front door used to have an uninterrupted view of a powder room toilet at the end of the center hall. Simply moving the door of that powder room around the corner solved the problem.

Another puzzle was a bit more complicated: how to fit laundry and a mudroom into the existing layout. Ultimately, LaBau proposed a new addition that would carry those functions on the first floor, plus a kids’ playroom on the second, accessed by a back stair that would keep the noise of running feet out of the rest of the house. “We infilled that corner of the house,” he explains. David says that the addition adds huge practical value for his children in particular: “Peter was intuitive about the way they live.”

One of LaBau’s goals was to retain and enhance the original architectural details that he believes made the house special, if not as grand as some of its neighbors. “It’s an Italianate—pretty inspired,” he says. “The idea was to make it feel like a whole organism so the design elements flow from room to room.”

Using original windows wherever possible—often moving them from one spot to another—contributed to that effect, and so did the replication of original molding and trim pieces. All the authenticity provides a foil to Sissy’s eclectic interior design, which mixes antique furniture, flea-market finds, contemporary art and photography and taxidermy.

Details also serve to make the kitchen more congruent with the rest of the house. “The trick was to work with the profiles and shapes elsewhere in the house,” says LaBau. Honed granite countertops, painted cabinets and a custom painted pattern on the original wooden floor add up to a highly functional but aesthetically serene kitchen.

From the kitchen sink, one has a pleasing view of landscaping surrounding the pool, and a lawn shaded by old silver maples.

“The house has reconnected itself to the landscape,” says LaBau—and this time, not by storing hay.

Outdoor moves

Cars and driveways seemed to surround the house when the Perdues bought it, and vehicles were often parked just a step or two from the home. One of their major goals, then, was to push vehicular activity further away, protecting their views and quietude. Fortunately, the property also came with a number of mature boxwoods that were able to be dug up and relocated, forming visual screens to hide the cars.

Once the cars were out of the way, outdoor living space became a lot more human-friendly. Landscape designer Schatzi McLean dreamed up an outdoor room next to the existing pool, providing needed shade. A large trellis supports a leafy “roof” of akebia quinata vine.

McLean also created a stone terrace and fire pit in a spot where the Perdues had gotten accustomed to making campfires. With flagstone and mature plantings, it looks quite intentional—a far cry from the spot where, as David remembers, “we used to put lawn chairs in the driveway.”—E.H.

The weekend home of a Washington, D.C., couple sits not quite in the middle of their 76-acre property north of Charlottesville. They didn’t choose the most lofty site for their cottage, but instead gravitated toward a spot that snuggles into a treeline and offers a broad, rolling view of fields and woods.

“This was our favorite campsite,” says one of the homeowners, remembering the years that she and her husband would bring their two children here for rustic getaways from their primary home. When they decided to build a cottage in 2002, architect Jay Monroe’s task was to maximize the sense of escape.

“It’s a refuge from the city,” says Monroe. His role as both architect and landscape architect allowed him to enhance the home site his clients had chosen. Off one end of the cottage, for example, a flat yard subtly draws people out onto a shady promontory under an umbrella of four honey locust trees, planted in a simple square. A semicircular stone wall gives the yard a clear boundary and echoes the house’s stone chimney.

“This is the most valuable space in this complex, because it’s a real outdoor room,” says Monroe. He chose honey locust trees for their filtered shade and for the fact that they create little debris on the ground.

Another important move was to place the parking where it would not be seen from the house. A terraced bank planted with daylilies, oakleaf hydrangea and black locust trees hides the cars from anyone standing in the front yard. Serviceberry, Siberian iris and native pachysandra are among the plants that enliven the area immediately around the structure.

“It’s the transition, the edge, where all the action happens in nature,” says Monroe. The house site, too, sits at an edge between woods and fields, and plantings help to delineate the different zones—for example, a sugar maple tree that marks the edge of the yard where it begins to “bleed out into the field,” as Monroe says.

Just visible from the cottage is the property’s newest structure: an infinity pool and poolhouse built in 2008. Here, an interest in formal architecture offers a foil to the vernacular style of the cottage; the poolhouse boasts a classical façade, and from it extends a Tennessee flagstone walkway, covered by a pergola (which is made, in a nod to modernity, from powdercoated steel). At the end of this axis is a covered outdoor dining area with views of two neighboring counties, framed by white columns.

What makes this a pleasant place to eat dinner is the fact that existing trees to the west—basswood, honey locust, persimmon—were left undisturbed. “They serve a wonderful shading purpose,” says Monroe. Fothergilla, dogwood, hydrangeas and ferns fill in the space along the flagstone.

While the buildings represent the clients’ and architect’s most visible interventions into this bucolic landscape, there are many other, less formal, instances of design around the acreage. One of the homeowners is fond of crisscrossing his property on foot, dogs in tow, so one of Monroe’s earliest tasks in their 17-year relationship was to design a network of walking paths.

One of these leads to a faux stream, more than a quarter-mile long, which runs alongside a low, wet wooded area downhill from the cottage. A series of pools is linked by a rock-lined streambed and terminates in a small pond. “It was an opportunity to create a landscape feature,” says Monroe—and to introduce lots of native plants, from Virginiana magnolia to bald cypress. “It’s a really rich habitat” for frogs and other wildlife, he adds.

Heading uphill again, one encounters an intermittent stream that has been transformed by a collection of native plants and something quite unusual—an architectural ruin that was dreamed up by the couple and designed by Monroe. “It’s a reference to childhood fantasy stories,” says Monroe—in this case, a historical settlement that could plausibly have been established, then abandoned, leaving these fragmented stone foundations among the trees.

The “millrace” to the mill that never existed does have a real function: to channel surface water into the drainage, flanked by plantings of false Solomon’s seal, bluebells and trillium.

Nearby, a thicket of native dogwoods, witch hazel, ironwood and hornbeam provides an inviting place for birds. The whole area is shaded by what Monroe calls “tortured” maple trees—multi-trunked, knobby beasts replete with character—and a pin oak. “You can’t contrive these,” he says.

The couple’s appreciation of native plants sometimes means deliberate planting, as in the wildflower garden that lines a fence on the edge of the hayfield, and sometimes means just letting things be, like the native spicebush that fills in the understory below the maples.

Simple mown paths through the hayfield complete the circuit between cottage, poolhouse and streambed, a journey that spans many environments and landscape concepts. Maybe most importantly, it brings human occupants into contact with the land. As the homeowner says simply, “It gives you a place to walk.”