Month: May 2017

In this month’s Abode, learn about Charlottesville kit homes’ past, present and future; see why lighting is better in threes; explore an Ivy landscape that matured over 30 years and—we saved the best for last—peek inside V House, a palatial Albemarle estate designed in Jeffersonian tradition. And then some! Here’s what’s inside:

• A dank downtown home gets a facelift.
• A swank student center on the Corner.
• Frank talk about kit homes.
• Three’s not a crowd when it comes to lighting.
• Four UVA grads tell us where they’re headed.
• Can changing a kitchen’s functionality increase your home’s value?

This month’s features:

Home: Built for the centuries

An ode to Jeffersonian architecture, this 21st century home is one for the ages—both in durability and design, thanks to architecture firm Dalgliesh Gilpin Paxton. Read more here.

Kitchen: New York state of mind

To spruce up her Crozet townhouse kitchen, homeowner Ashley Jewell asked Southern Development to create an exposed brick wall. The hip design flowed from there. Read more here.

Landscape: Total change

Over more than 30 years, a county homeowner (and master gardener) develops a native landscape filled with unfussy flowers, décor and peaceful garden zones. Read more here.

A kitchen can get outdated while you’re looking the other way. Beth and Greg Morris built their house south of Charlottesville in 1999, and lived there for many busy years as their son was growing up. And although they made a couple of cosmetic changes to the kitchen during that time, it essentially remained the same. Before they knew it, it was 2016 and the kitchen suddenly seemed to be crying out for renovation. “It looked very 1999,” says Greg.

An angled peninsula with a two-level countertop was probably the main offender. The workspace was cramped, and the peninsula was like a dam stopping the flow of traffic. “The kitchen was cut off,” says Beth. “To get upstairs, you had to either go through the dining room or all the way around the peninsula.”

Not only that, the cabinet layout left a large amount of space unused. The couple compensated by placing a shelving unit on one end of the main wall of cabinets, but that made things look cluttered and still wasn’t offering a lot of storage.

It was this problem—a simple matter of “not enough cabinets”—that started the Morrises down the path that eventually led to a total renovation (plus new floors throughout most of their first story).

Amy Hart at Albemarle Cabinet Company says that Beth Morris came to her knowing she wanted a new kitchen layout, and that exchanging the peninsula for an island would be a key move. “It made sense that the sink would go into the island,” she says. “ The plumber perth jack-hammered the floor to run the plumbing to the sink. Moving a sink is not always an easy task, but the end result is beautiful and functional.” The old peninsula had space for four barstools, where the couple’s son used to sit and spread out homework on the upper level of the countertop. Now the Morrises were ready for more workspace and less visual interruption—a one-level island that lets eating and cooking happen on the same plane. It’s better for entertaining, they say, which is more relevant now that the homework years are done.

Beth points out one other advantage: The island doesn’t “catch everything,” as in clutter. Bread and snacks have their own cabinet drawers rather than living on the countertop, and things feel more tidy.

As the island runs the length of the kitchen, it creates two lanes for traffic that flow right into the living room and the staircase. “It opens up traffic and sightlines,” says Beth. During the design process, it also opened up a need to unify the flooring in what was now becoming an open-concept first floor. The Morrises chose 5-inch oak planks, wider and more sophisticated than what they’d had before.

Hart saw the potential to make deeper changes, too. “We didn’t even think about moving the refrigerator or pantry,” says Beth. But Hart figured the room would look sleeker if the fridge and pantry swapped places. “Guests would rather look at a nice run of cabinetry than a large stainless appliance, so I always do my best to tuck the refrigerator behind a corner,” she says.

Along the main wall of cabinets, the new arrangement adds lots of storage space by extending cabinetry to the ceiling and nearly to the exit door. Hart even helped the couple add mudroom-type functionality along a section of wall that, says Beth, “used to be an area of wasted space. The mudroom now provides a place to hang coats, scarves, etc., as opposed to hanging them on the barstools as we had done in the past.” Now there are proper hooks, cubbies and benches.

The inspiration for one last layout change came about by chance. While moving furniture around to accommodate workers, the Morrises temporarily put a loveseat in the spot where they’d always had a dining table. “We thought ‘Wow, that’s cool!’” says Greg. Now it’s a breakfast nook, with two comfy upholstered chairs where the pair enjoys weekend coffee.

As for colors and materials, the Morrises say, “We wanted bright.” White cabinets made for a big change from the old oak, and the couple chose semi-custom cabinets with solid wood Shaker-style doors. “We wanted nothing too elaborate, just a simple clean surface,” says Beth. Updated features like soft-close hinges and pullout drawers in the pantry make things more convenient.

Backsplash tile is just barely off-white, providing a transition to gray and white granite countertops. Brushed bronze hardware echoes the finish on the two large pendant lights that hang over the island, which itself is a darker hue to match dark leather furniture in the nearby living area.

“The new palette is peaceful with pops of red, which keeps the eye moving around the room,” says Hart—the “pops” being bench cushions, the two chairs in the nook and patterned window blinds.

The Morrises praise Hart’s company (soon to change its moniker to Dovetail Design & Cabinetry) as well as contractor Justin Pincham of Halcyon Construction, and say the kitchen is functioning as beautifully as they’d hoped. “We take great pleasure in sitting in the nook and enjoying our new kitchen,” says Greg. “It is difficult now to imagine what it used to look like.”

How much to spend?

According to homeadviser.com, a kitchen remodel should cost between 5 and 15 percent of the home’s total value, especially if you might sell the house soon after the work is finished. You want to be able to recoup your costs, so serious splurging may not be in order. Ditto highly quirky or personal design decisions.

But, if you plan to stay for a while, give yourself as nice a kitchen as you can. It’s probably your most heavily used room, and its functionality counts for a lot—so smart changes will have value for you every day that you live in the house.—E.H.

Of course the house takes advantage of the views; on this spot, even a campsite would do that. But the formal, palatial home that Dalgliesh Gilpin Paxton Architects designed for an Albemarle hilltop is about more—much more—than what’s outside the windows. The “V House,” as it’s known, sits not only at a physical high point, overlooking a magnificent vista, but at the culmination of its owner’s admiration for building as an art form.

The house is designed as an exercise in the practice of classical architecture beloved by Jefferson, and it is built as a monument to craftsmanship: a “house that can last for 300 years,” in the words of the project motto adopted by owners, architects and builders alike.

That timelessness is impressive, and it informs every detail of the structure. Yet there is a surprising quirk in the story of how this house came to be. It begins with an antique circular dining table the owners acquired in Wales.

“The table set the size of the dining room,” says architect Bob Paxton. Because classical architecture is predicated on specific rules of ratio and proportion, the footprint of the dining room became the key to many other measurements. “That dictated the height of the ceiling and the scale of the rooms around it,” says the owner. “The scales of structures at the furthest corner of the property is related to the size of that [table].”

The round dining room sits within a cube forming the central volume of the house, and it doubles as a library holding thousands of books, many of them relating to Virginia architecture. “The spark of inspiration was to make the dining room and the library the same room,” says the owner, recalling one of the many contributions of architect Jay Dalgliesh, who passed away during the three-year construction process.

From that central core, the house is arranged with total symmetry, as two arcades curve away from the main structure to connect with dependencies on either side. It’s a scheme that the owner had specified after extensive study of historic classical forms found in his book collection. In two thick, neatly organized binders he gathered for 30 years prior to construction thousands of images of “prime examples of what we wanted to do”: everything from stone facades to interior window trim.

Yet one key element in the design could never have been employed by Jefferson or his forebears: a two-story wall of glass on the rear. “Not everybody has the willingness to try something as contemporary as this in a classical house,” says Paxton.

The huge southwest-facing windows let in the views of fields and woods that unroll to the feet of the mountains. And they allow for something even more timeless than classical proportions. At sunset on the summer solstice, the sun shines through the rear windows, along the central axis of the interior, and exactly out through the front doors.

Hidden volumes

Though the main house is plenty dramatic—suddenly appearing, as it does, at the end of a pin-straight drive just as one’s car rounds a bend—it’s even more impressive considering that that initial view actually obscures the house’s true size. Sited on a slope, the structure has hidden wings below the curving arcades.

“That allowed the house to read as a cube,” says the owner, “but in fact, it is broader on the lower floors than a visitor perceives.”

The house is home to just two people, but they wanted to be able to entertain on a large scale, and one of the hidden wings makes that possible. It contains a catering kitchen and a second living room and it opens onto a multi-level garden that permits guests to access the grounds and entertainment areas without going through the front door.

That’s the south wing, and although its twin on the north has an identical footprint, it has a very different function. Here, the owners themselves enjoy back-door access via a lower-level entrance meant for people wearing boots rather than black tie. “This is an active working farm,” says the owner. “[From here], you can go hunting and fishing and working on the farm without interrupting the formality.”

Larger than life

Materials at V House were chosen for their durability. “The exterior materials have extremely long useful life,” says the owner: limestone walls and trim, slate roof, bronze windows and doors. “Nothing on the exterior has a square inch of paint.”

Some interior floors are limestone, too, while others were crafted from white oak salvaged from the roof rafters of a 150-year-old barn on the adjacent family farm. Walnut trees taken down on this property provided many interior doors and, says one owner whose family has been on this farm for a century, “make the house personal.”

The interior rooms were designed not only to enact classical ratios but to house the owners’ collection of antique American furniture. The elaborate rooms—with their ornate moldings, heavily cased openings and luxurious finishes—demanded the highest level of craftsmanship from those involved in construction. In an engineering sense, too, there were unusual challenges, like the enormous curving stone staircase supported by a structural steel core.

“Projects like this don’t happen without passionate people,” says Paxton.

Stonemasons, to name another example, delighted in meeting the challenge of building two tall, slender pyramids at either end of the front courtyard. Dalgliesh had designed these just weeks before his death, and they solved the puzzle of how stone walls on three different levels could gracefully intersect.

Finished in 2013, the home seems to exist in a realm beyond the everyday—a plane on which beauty and achievement are larger than the scale of any single person’s lifespan. The enormity of the landscape outside is the only possible match for the ambition of this project, and was crucial to its inspiration. “I had identified the site many years before,” says the owner. “You could not see the view, but I knew it was there.”

The breakdown

Structural system: Steel frame with precast concrete plank floors and thermasteel composite wall panels

Exterior material: Limestone

Interior finishes: Plaster walls, reclaimed wood ceilings, limestone and reclaimed wood floors

Roof: Buckingham slate

Windows: Brombal thermally broken bronze windows

Mechanical system: Geothermal heat pumps with supplemental hydronic radiant heat

Construction: Alterra Construction Management

Thirty-six years is long enough to watch a forest grow. And it’s long enough to establish an enchanting garden beneath the tree canopy—a magical realm on what was once considered a neighborhood’s least desirable property.

“It was the cheapest lot,” says Fran Boninti of the two-acre place she and her husband, Andrew, bought in 1981. An Ivy cattle field was being developed for housing, and this lot—mostly bare then, and trampled by decades of cows—was priced lower because it was at the bottom of a hill. Boninti, though, could see its assets: two streams (fun for her young daughters) plus plenty of moisture for gardening.

“I knew the potential of the riparian area,” she says. The house she and Andrew built looks over a graceful bowl of land, and they loved the few trees they did have—a pecan and several mature oaks.

They didn’t dive right into large-scale gardening (“We were growing the girls,” she says), but she did have an interest in native plants even in those days, and was involved with the Jefferson Chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society. She started planting trees—tulip poplars, hemlocks, buckeye, redbud and dogwood—and small ornamental beds, and worked around the brambles and multiflora rose.

“We woke up one day and all these trees were behind the house,” she says. No longer was the land a cattle field; it had become a young woods. And as their daughters became teenagers, the Bonintis found themselves beginning to garden much more ambitiously.

The guiding lights were to prioritize native plants and remove invasives, mostly by hand. Boninti’s mentor Ted Scott taught her how gardening can enhance the ecological web that connects plants to bugs and birds, and she made herself a student of plant taxonomy (and Latin, to help her understand the taxonomy).

Gradually they created a grand sweep of beds and groves, filling out the borders of the slope and the flatter area at the bottom, with tall straight poplars presiding over smaller trees and shrubs. Paths divide the gardens into rooms and spill down steps made, in some cases, of chunks of salvaged concrete. They’re surprisingly attractive, doing a fine imitation of flagstones in some patio-like areas. “Andrew would break them into big pieces and I would drag them where I wanted them,” Boninti says.

It’s a haven for native plants, with Boninti diligently rooting out interlopers and adding shredded leaves to the beds every year to build rich soil where once was red clay. “The plants propagate themselves,” she says, believing that natives can be self-sufficient as long as they aren’t outcompeted. The leaves give the beds a more natural look, too; she uses mulch only on the paths.

On a spring visit, daffodils, bluebells and wood poppies carpeted the ground under the poplar trees. Spring beauties provided a delicate scrim of white over the ground. Peonies were growing and deciduous azaleas were still bare, while Japanese maples—not native, of course, but beloved nonetheless—were beginning to leaf out.

Under the big pecan tree, still a focal point, a large bed is home to serviceberry, Virginia rose and hellebores. Boninti was a longtime garden guide at Monticello, and it shows when she mentions another name for that serviceberry, shadbush, and connects it to Jefferson’s birthplace, Shadwell.

Around the property are places that feel secretive and separate from the garden at large. The “Steps to Know Where,” one of the longest-established zones in the garden, lead down through a cleft in the land, perhaps an abandoned roadbed, bordered by a row of cedars. Wildflowers amply cover the ground, spilling over low-profile walls built with salvaged stone.

A certain thriftiness is at play here, in yard-sale benches and in the old door with flaking paint that opens into a tall, skinny garden shed. Nothing seems fussy, not even the formal geometric garden that hosts Boninti’s daffodil collection and borders of boxwoods. In one spot, a remnant of barbed-wire fence is deliberately left as a reminder of the property’s agricultural past.

Yet clearly there is great effort involved in planning and caring for such extensive gardens. “We garden all winter,” says Boninti. “We prune and put leaves down.” When she has a stem or branch from a shrub—boxwood, azalea, rhododendron, fringe tree—she habitually roots it to replant or give away.

Change is a constant. As the trees have matured, the beds at ground level below have gradually transitioned to shade gardens. Some invasives are finally eradicated, while others mount new attacks. Boninti’s still learning even as she now mentors others, giving lectures through the Virginia Master Gardener Association.

And every year Boninti fine-tunes her observations about the ways her garden is connected to the larger ecology. One native deciduous azalea with orangey-yellow blooms, for example, is “probably our favorite—it’s extremely fragrant. And it opens when the hummingbirds get back.”

You wouldn’t expect a townhouse in Crozet to have an urban feel. But Ashley Jewell got a jolt of inspiration last year when she looked at a rendering of the townhouse that she and her husband, Tim, were planning to buy in the Old Trail development.

Then unbuilt, the home had a long windowless wall along one side that, unexpectedly, made Jewell think “brick.” Having lived in and renovated a 1920s bungalow in North Carolina, she was ready for a change. “The rendering made me think of a row house, or a brownstone in New York,” she says.

She asked the builder, Southern Development, if the wall could be faced in brick, and they accommodated. From there, the old-meets-new urban look of her kitchen began to take shape.

“I asked them to leave off the upper cabinets,” she says. Original plans called for cabinets and a built-in microwave above the countertop along the brick wall. But Jewell, who has a background in interior design, envisioned something more contemporary. Against the brick would be open shelving made of salvaged wood, plus a modern-style stainless steel range hood.

Finding the right wood for those shelves proved a challenge. Jewell eventually spotted the name Maya Wood Construction on her son’s baseball jersey, and the Barboursville company became her supplier for chunky pine slabs cut from salvaged beams. Saw marks on their edges signal that they’re the real deal.

The kitchen layout stayed as the builder had originally drawn it—a U plus a peninsula for barstools—but Jewell pushed the aesthetic toward a modern look. She was reacting, in part, to her former bungalow kitchen, all done in white. “Our 1920s house was shabby chic, with a lot of things whitewashed,” she says. “I thought black had a more modern feel to it.”

She settled on black Shaker-style cabinets, which she felt tied in better with the rustic and vintage elements than a sleeker cabinet style would have done. White subway tile covers the window wall.

Bright, light quartz countertops completed the crisp look of the basic kitchen elements. “It has such a nice light veining to it,” she says. “It’s got a little bit of gray. A lot of the other choices have a lot of variation; I was looking for a starkness next to the black.”

The real fun was in the details. Those two banks of open shelving, on either side of the range hood, provided a chance to show off an eclectic collection of china and other objects, many of which represent members of Jewell’s family. Antique butter molds belonged to one of her great-grandmothers; a glass cake stand came from another. One grandmother passed down an old recipe book and the other, a winsome zebra toothpick holder.

These things mingle with mostly white dishware and clear glass, along with some vintage cutting boards from Roxie Daisy. The collection’s neutral palette gives the real star of the show its due: the gold-tone cabinet hardware, sink faucet and light fixture.

“I’ve always clung to gold,” says Jewell. She found modern drawer pulls in a warm brass at Schoolhouse Electric, but was even more excited to have a use for a light fixture she’d been carting around, through several moves over a number of years. “I found it in a store in North Carolina,” she says of the piece by designer Louise Gaskill, who refurbishes vintage lighting. “I almost forgot what it looked like; I knew I loved it but it had been in a box for so long. I feel like it’s finally home.” A milk glass globe is dressed up with retro-style hardware and even a bit of gold leafing.

“I’m so thrilled every day when I walk downstairs to that kitchen,” says Jewell, who moved in with her family last summer. Yet she still considers the space a work in progress (she’s trying to source an antique kitchen scale, for one thing). “My brainstorming hasn’t stopped.”

Good things come in threes: primary colors, books in a trilogy and, says designer Kori Messenger, lighting.

“There are three layers of lighting: ambient, accent and task lighting,” she says. “We like to see all three in a space if possible.”

In a recent client’s home, Messenger and her designer partner at Foxchase Design, Nicole Fagerli, reimagined the lighting concept in the dining room, moving sconces from above the hunt board to its sides to make room for lamps, creating accent lighting. For task lighting, the designers replaced the original chandelier with an antique piece they found while traveling, and added hurricanes with candles (“to mimic the circle chain link crystals in the chandelier”) to the table for ambient light.

Lighting, Messenger says, can make a room feel alive and invite people into a space. But where’s a good place to start in your own home? The shades. “Sometimes the lamp shades wear out before the base,” Messenger says. “Replacing [them] can create a different look for the lamp and the space.” And, she adds, consider adding a dimmer, which can help eliminate visual hot spots or dark shadows.

Since its construction in 1896, 1515 University Ave. has been a drugstore, a bookstore, a boarding house, the Cavalier Diner and many more incarnations. The building, which opened in mid-March, now pieces together fragments of all its previous incarnations, giving UVA students a new place on the Corner to call their home away from home.

“From very early on, it’s been a student-centered project,” says James Zehmer, the project manager and one of UVA’s historic preservation managers. In summer 2015, a team of students, many from UVA’s Meriwether Lewis Institute for Citizen Leadership, assembled a plan to revive the former campus bookstore, vacant since 2014. Their idea: an alcohol-free student center that wouldn’t feel like just another building on or near Grounds.

The students “were hands-on with everything,” says lead architect and UVA alum Bob Nalls. He and architectural designer Amanda Mazid worked closely with students on everything from how the spaces would be used to the furniture, flatware and fixtures that fill them.

“It was the type of project where you couldn’t just sit there and design the whole thing and then start working,” Nalls says, “because there was too much that had to be figured out in the field.” UVA crews began to demolish, reinforce and rebuild the interior even as the students worked with Nalls and Mazid to plan out and populate its spaces. If they’d done it the conventional way, Nalls says, “we’d be looking at doing it for next summer.”

The ground floor’s high ceilings and numerous windows create a comfortable study and social space for students, with a stage for musical and other performances at night. Student artwork decorates the walls, and a boutique dessert café, Crumbs on the Corner, serves sweet treats from 5pm until the wee hours.

“I came up with the idea of the dessert bar while brainstorming, based on what I thought the Corner was lacking, but would still draw students in,” says third-year Brittany Hsieh, who drew inspiration from a similar restaurant in her hometown of Richmond.

A prominent open staircase leads to the second floor, once 1920s-era apartments, which now provides open and reservable spaces for students, plus a satellite office for UVA’s career center.

“Our hope as a group was to give the floor an eclectic feel and model each room after a different room in a residential home,” says design team member and fifth-year grad student Dakota Lipscombe. For instance, the studio has mirrored walls for dance and music rehearsals. The mindfulness room’s subtle soundproofing keeps outside noise at bay. In the sunroom, faux boxwood creates a green wall, while the dining room is built around a single long communal table. A garage room, designed as a maker space, offers a chalkboard wall for capturing ideas.

As for the building’s basement, “there was talk of a bowling alley,” Lipscombe says, “but I think the game room worked out much better instead.” Students can play pool, pinball, arcade games or air hockey, watch TV on several large flatscreens, rehearse music in the acoustically isolated back room or just read, sleep or study in a menagerie of couches and chairs. The walls are partly paneled with reclaimed joists sawed out of the floor to make room for the stairwell, lending the space a natural, intimate vibe.

Throughout the building, touches like these connect 1515 to its history. On the ground floor, two different pressed-tin ceilings recall the two stores that once occupied the space. On the top floor, UVA crews tore out interior walls, but filled in the resulting gaps in the floorboards perpendicular to the rest of the planking, to show students where those partitions had been.

The new 1515 proudly shows off its scars, turning those layers of oddities into advantages. “Our vision was that every three or four years, you’ve got a complete change in the student population, and hopefully this building won’t get stale,” Zehmer says. “Hopefully, each class will take it on and give it its own spin.”

“All of it is a little bit of an experiment,” Nalls adds, “and nobody is quite sure exactly how it’ll get used.”

1515, a new student center on the Corner, opened in March.