Month: October 2019

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The DIY backyard: How to install a home landscape that’ll make you proud

A wall covered with clematis vines provides a buffer, while the garden bed below—defined with cinder blocks and planted with blueberries and strawberries—anchors one end of the yard. Photo: Virginia Hamrick

We have all seen the perfectly groomed gardens on TV house-flipping shows and in magazines, including this one. Pinterest is a slideshow of landscapes that are intended to inspire creativity but often just lead to feelings of inadequacy. It’s as if these picture-perfect settings were chia pets—just add water and watch them grow!

The truth is grittier. Few homeowners can afford to hire professionals—designers, stone masons, carpenters, gardeners—to make the magic happen. Instead, with a great sense of urgency, they rush to the local Southern States or Lowe’s, where they pick up bags of mulch and topsoil, concrete pavers, potted plants and saplings, and, oh, that beautiful shovel—gotta have that too.

Shaded by tulip poplars and sweetbay magnolia trees, a galvanized tank from Southern States serves as a plunge pool on hot summer days. Photo: Virginia Hamrick

The plan is to spend a few spring weekends getting dirty and sweaty, a small sacrifice for the tidy and colorful yard that will soon materialize.

Hate to break this to you, but no. That old saw about Rome not being built in a day applies to your own half acre. But a yard that works for you, looks good, and provides a sweet spot for you to hang out with friends and family? A place where you can admire the cardinals and monarchs, and curse the mosquitoes and the squirrel that raids your bird feeder? You can have all of that, without maxing out your credit card, if you just slow down.

As an example I present my sister Julie’s yard. It has taken four-plus years to achieve its current state. It has required a lot of hard work—mainly by her, our sister, our niece, and me, but with some professional help. Yes, we have worn out the pavement between her house in town and Southern States and Lowes, and also taken occasional trips to far-flung nurseries for deals on plants and trees. We have paid with strained backs, sore muscles, smashed fingertips, and patches of skin rubbed raw beneath our gloves.

But we’ve come a long way (a garden is never done but rather always evolving), and we intend to stay the course—whatever it may be, because we make a lot of stuff up as we go along and Julie has a restless mind.

Julie estimates the total investment in materials and professional help at about $10,000. And, full disclosure, all of the design work has been free, because she’s a landscape architect, both a UVA professor and private practitioner in the field. Her professional status has also earned discounts at nurseries and garden centers, so I suppose that the total cost without those savings would be about a thousand bucks higher.

A tiny greenhouse—nothing more than a folly—provides a focal point at the end of the concrete-slab path. The pavers rest in a raised bed filled with stone dust. Photo: Virginia Hamrick

But even without those advantages, I believe that anyone with some imagination, a lot of determination, and a vision of how she wants her yard to look and function, could create a similarly pleasing place. The primary requirements are patience, a willingness to make mistakes, and a tolerance for imperfection. Plus, once in a while, a day spent toiling on something that has to be completely redone.

That’s when you crack open a cold beverage and retire to the porch or the air-conditioned living room, and complain about how much your damn back hurts. It’s all worth the effort, I swear, because there are few things greater than the satisfaction of imagining something and then making it real.

Here’s what we did, and by “we” I mean mostly Julie:

Paid to have the yard graded, steps installed, and raised beds for tomato plants built.

When she moved in, the yard was a tumbledown riot of knotweed partially obscuring the ruins of a brick coal shed. Julie’s pal Zoe, a landscape designer and contractor, fired up the skid loader and created two flat spaces separated by a hill that stretches across the middle of the yard. She called in help to build raised cedar-plank beds to plant tomatoes, and cinder block stairs connecting the upper and lower levels. This was a big expense—$2,000 to $3,000—but necessary to establish the yard’s basic form and foundation.

Saved the brick and other detritus, such as old plumbing pipes, to repurpose later.

One of Julie’s core ideas, with any landscape, is that you should use as much of the existing material on the site as possible. Minimize or even eliminate the stuff that goes to a landfill. It saves time and money, and it’s environmentally responsible.

Cinder block steps connect the upper and lower portions of the yard. In the sloping, densely planted beds on either side of the stairs, zinnias provide pops of color. Photo: Virginia Hamrick

Planted the hill to prevent erosion.

First, we grew radishes from seed. They’re cheap, spring up fast, and last a good long while. You can even eat them, and so can the rabbits. Another year we tried clover, which turned out to be a mistake—the roots grew deep and were tough to dig out the following year. On the up side, the plants loosened up the dense clay soil. In years three and four, we planted “zinnia hill.” The low cost and profusion of color turned out to be the epitome of cheap and cheerful, a favorite phrase of Julie’s. Bonus: She saves and replants the seeds the following year, and the butterflies and hummingbirds drawn to the flowers put on a show.

Installed a tree grove on the lower tier.

Sweet bay magnolias and tulip poplars planted in a cluster provide a visual and physical buffer. Julie says the trees “tuck in” the yard. They also block the view of the UVA hospital. The vegetable beds are situated on the other half of the lower tier, leaving open space to let in sunlight and let you see the sky.

Put in the lawn.

We splurged on sod from a farm in Somerset. Instant lawn! But over the years, what was once a perfect green carpet has become a mix of clover, crabgrass, and who knows what else. Who cares? It’s a flat patch of green that anchors the upper tier, and gives Julie’s little white poodle a place to leave fragrant little presents.

Planted the black locust grove.

This was a key move, and one that made me understand Julie’s basic organizing idea: Establish the middle and then “paint” around the edges. In this case, we put in 40 black locust trees along the southern fence line of the upper tier. We used whips, or bare-root specimens, ordered from a nursery in the state of Washington. We amended the soil with compost, peat moss, and mulch. Just one seedling died, and after two years the trees have created a green wall that sways in the wind, provides shade, and increases privacy. Talk about being “tucked in.”

Bricks, stones, and other rubble collected from the site line the bed of the black locust grove. Planted as short bare-root whips, the trees grew nearly 20 feet tall in just two years, providing shade and privacy. Photo: Virginia Hamrick

Created the rubble garden.

The bricks and other “junk” that we’d moved to the side? We lugged them up the hill and scattered them at the base of the locust trees. Saved a lot of money (no need to buy mulch), though all of the lifting and schlepping and brick tossing made me hit the Advil hard.

Realized the dream of a plunge pool.

It’s just a galvanized trough. Julie bought it at Southern States. We laid down a few wooden pallets to form a boardwalk that leads to the tub. It sits in the shade of the poplar and magnolia grove. After a day of working your butt off in the hot sun, a cold plunge is heavenly.

Anchored the north side of the upper tier.

We needed a counterpoint across the lawn to provide balance opposite the locust grove, soften up the northern edge, and add more buffering. The solution is a bed bordered by cinder blocks and filled with fence-climbing clematis, blueberry bushes, and strawberry plants—a tri-level composition. Didn’t get to eat a single blueberry, though. The birds beat us to it.

Paid to fence in the work yard, add stairs off the back porch, and install the outdoor shower.

This was another major move, one that Julie had been drawing (and redrawing, over and over again) for a couple of years. Our pal Don, a skilled craftsperson, built a fence along three quarters of the driveway and closed up the end with a galvanized steel gate. There’s still enough room outside the gate for Julie to park. But now the previously underused driveway has become a work yard, with a potting bench and plenty of room for garbage and recycling cans as well as gardening tools and other stuff. Everyone needs a place to put “stuff.” Don made the outdoor shower, using metal plumbing pipes and connectors, based on a simple design by Julie. She bought a solar water heater online. Don bolted it to a pallet. Next, Julie will make canvas panels to enclose the shower. The back stairs are made of concrete block to match those that lead from the lawn to the poplar and magnolia grove.

Built a small greenhouse.

It’s kind of a folly, but it cost less than $125 in materials, including antique windows I found on Facebook Marketplace. I’m decent at carpentry, but it took a group effort to make the thing. I doff my cap and bow to Don, Julie’s neighbor Edward, and her friend and former student Karl Jon, who also created the CAD diagram so you can see how the greenhouse comes together. It now serves as a focal point at the end of the raised stone path.

Fed by a garden hose, an outdoor shower—with canvas walls yet to be installed—is made of plumbing pipes from Lowe’s and a solar water-heating tower anchored to a sturdy wood pallet. Photo: Virginia Hamrick

Oh, right—the stone path!

This took two or three weekends to build. We dug shallow trenches, installed a wooden border with one-by-six-inch boards secured by wooden stakes, and then filled in the base of the walkway with stone dust from Allied Concrete Co., on Harris Street. The treads were a gift from Julie’s old friend Alexander Kitchin, of Fine Concrete, who was unloading unused inventory before he moved his shop. Julie obsessively positioned the slabs and tapped them into place with a rubber mallet.

Added four more trees and pine straw as finishing touches to the upper tier.

As the school year approached, Julie turned her attention away from gardening to preparing to teach. Our last push really just took a couple of hours, planting four tupelo (also known as black gum) trees along the back of the house and covering the ground with long-needle pine straw. In time, the tupelos will provide shade and a partial shroud for the outdoor shower. After many years, they will grow to 50 to 60 feet, and the garden—including inevitable additions and revisions—will mature. In a decade, the landscape will have changed dramatically, but we’re in no hurry. We’ll be happy to witness its gradual transformation.

Greenhouse build

The tiny greenhouse took a weekend to build. It consists of a square base with a central floor support, slats atop the base, four antique window frames with six panes apiece, and sides cut from a single four-by-eight-foot sheet of 3/8-inch plywood. Construction requires a moderate skill level and a little help from your friends (who might handle a circular saw better than you do). All of the materials—from Facebook Marketplace and Lowe’s—cost less than $125.

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Glass act: A local winery’s new tasting room is all bottled up

With 12-foot-tall walls made of 19,400 bottles, the interior lights up beautifully during the day, with sunlight filtering through the bottles. Photo: Stephen Barling

The empty bottles were piling up at Free Union’s Glass House Winery. The recycling service that co-owners Jeff and Michelle Saunders relied on for years had begun hauling the glass to a landfill, which the environmentally conscious couple couldn’t tolerate.

At the same time, the winery was increasing production, having gone from six acres under vine to 12. “We already needed more space to age wines and store cases,” Jeff Saunders says. “So, we framed out a pole barn. And then the empties started piling up.”

While touring wineries out West, the Saunders’ had seen a couple of buildings with walls made of bottles. The structures were smaller than the barn under construction at Glass House, but Jeff had experience as an architect and builder, so he decided to give it a go.

“It was totally doable,” he says. “You just had to get the right mortar, one that’s on the soft side so it wouldn’t create cracks or pop the bottles.”

As the project progressed, Saunders saw the possibilities. “I thought it could also be a second tasting room or even a little event space,” he says.

The mortar, which he found online, turned out to be prohibitively expense in the quantities he needed. Undeterred, Saunders did a little research and found the formula to make the mortar on-site.

With a concrete floor and foundation in place, and the framing complete, all that remained was building the walls of glass bottles, installing the roof, and finishing out the building. The walls are not load-bearing (six-by-six studs do that work) but they are air-tight, with insulation added in some places inside.

Construction finished up in the spring, and the bottle house—64 feet long and 32 feet wide —opened in May.

With 12-foot-tall walls made of 19,400 bottles, the interior lights up beautifully during the day, with sunlight filtering through the bottles. On cloudy days and in the evening, soft lighting reflects off the glass walls, creating a unique atmosphere.

Visitors are impressed. “They see it from the outside, so I believe they think it’s going to be more rustic, but it’s pretty sleek and cool inside,” Saunders says. “It just seemed like a cool thing to do with a bunch of old bottles.”

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Room to grow: Common House opens annex as business expands

Like Common House, the annex is an older structure, built in the early 20th century, and it’s got the same artsy, rustic, DIY, antique-furnished vibe. Photo: Amy and Jackson Smith

Before it opened in 2017, Common House—the co-working, networking, meeting, dining, and events club on Market Street—sent membership invitations to 100 people, giving the impression that it would be an exclusive place. But not long after it launched, 500 people had joined. Today, with more than 1,000 members and plans to open locations in Richmond and Chattanooga, Tennessee, Common House has clearly become a thing, attracting coverage by national publications including Vogue and the Robb Report.

Common House co-founder Derek Sieg says Little House, the new space on West Market Street that will serve as CH’s administrative offices, is “an older place with some soul and character.” Photo: Amy and Jackson Smith

Just as its popularity and membership have grown, so too has its management team. Co-founders Derek Sieg and Ben Pfinsgraff now count 12 people in various leadership roles, working to keep the Charlottesville location running smoothly and prep for the out-of-town chapters to come online.

Twelve people where there used to be three or four? The office at 206 W. Market St. was getting mighty crowded.

The solution comes in the form of a new space, called Little House, across the street from the mothership. Like Common House, the annex is an older structure, built circa 1910, and it’s got the same artsy, rustic, DIY, antique-furnished vibe.

“We wanted a space that fit with Common House,” Sieg says. “We were looking for an older place with some soul and character.”

What he and his partners found, bought, and refurbished is a stucco house with a porch and plenty of room inside for a conference room, shared office space, kitchen, and lounge-y living room.

As a bonus, Sieg discovered, Little House was once owned and occupied by the family of a current server—one of 50 employees—at Common House. “His grandfather was born and died in that house, and his mother lived there for years,” Sieg says. “It’s nice to have that personal connection.”

Little House has the lived-in feel of Common House, which is intentional and comfortable. The primary feature in the main room is a long conference table that Sieg himself built out of reclaimed barn lumber, with help from a Piedmont Virginia Community College carpentry instructor. “He has a shop out in the county and rents it out for $20 an hour and helps people with their projects,” Sieg says.

The table cuts a wide swath through conference room, which connects to the shared office and living room on the west side, and the kitchen and mudroom to the south.

Sieg says that while the building will mainly be used as Common House’s administrative offices, it has already been rented out by a local business for an off-site meeting and might eventually become an event space.

“We’re just glad that we found such a cool old building that meets our needs as we grow,” Sieg says.

Next stop, Richmond.

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Knock, knock: Lyndsey Brown is at your door, which may end up on Instagram

Long walks in her new neighborhood of north downtown—and seeing the many colors and styles of the front doors there—inspired Lyndsey Brown to start her Instagram feed. Photos: @cvilledoors

The door photography craze can be traced to 1970, when a New York ad exec created a colorful collage of 36 arched Georgian townhouse doorways he shot while on a project in Dublin. As the story goes, the adman showed the assemblage to the head of the Irish tourism office in Manhattan, who commissioned copies with the simple tagline “The Doors of Dublin.” The poster led to a book of the same name, and spawned a tourism boomlet of people who wanted to see the doors in real life.

Today, the list of Instagram feeds riffing on the door theme—including one with 2.8 million followers—is so long that we lost count. But @cvilledoors is near and dear to our hearts. Lyndsey Brown launched the feed in June and had gained 145 followers by summer’s end.

After moving from Preston Avenue to a place on Park Street, Brown and her fiancé, Mike, began taking long neighborhood walks with their dog, Ollie. “North Downtown has such beautiful homes, and many people have put great care into their exteriors,” Brown says. “As we walked, we’d always notice the unique doors and point them out to each other. It became a kind of game.”

The game became the Instagram account, and the rest is history. You may take the photos at face value, or read a little into them like Brown does. “Doors are interesting because they’re interactive and functional,” she says. “Choosing to have a beautiful or unique door says something about the style and character of the people inside.”

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Landmark maker: Architect Stanhope Johnson’s local legacy

The Monticello Hotel, designed by Stanhope Johnson, opened in 1923 and featured a lavish dining room. It is now the 500 Court Square apartment building. Photo: Courtesy Carolyn Gills Frasier

Stanhope Spencer Johnson doesn’t pop to the top of the list for most architectural historians, but the Lynchburg-based designer was remarkably prolific in his seven-decade career, and some of his better work—including two buildings on the National Register of Historic Places—can be found in Charlottesville. No one knows Johnson’s work better than our own Carolyn Gills Frasier, whose exhaustively researched book, Stanhope, Chronologically, came out late last year and would make a solid addition to any architecture aficionado’s collection.

Stanhope, Chronologically: The Work of Stanhope Spencer Johnson, by Carolyn Gills Frasier, is available at New Dominion Bookshop on the Downtown Mall and at The Ivy Nursery.

Johnson (1881-1973) designed the Martha Jefferson Hospital and Gallison Hall, the Georgian Revival estate in Albemarle County. Both landed on the historic register, but the less famous but much more popular Monticello Hotel —now an apartment building at 500 Court St. —endeared the architect to local residents.

Also in the Georgian Revival style, it was built in less than a year—from groundbreaking on March 9, 1926, to completion on April 8, 1926. The opening of the nine-story limestone-and-brick building was greeted with fanfare. It removed a stigma that—with apologies to the Boar’s Head Resort—still haunts the city. “No longer will the community be rendered self-conscious by the repetition of the plaintive wail: ‘if there were only a real hotel in Charlottesville,’” a Daily Progress editorial declared.

The complaint rose from the fact that Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello had opened to the public three years earlier, in 1923, causing a flood of tourists with few places to stay. By the time the Monticello Hotel opened, visitors were arriving here by train (there were two stations downtown) and wealthier travelers by automobile. The fortunate ones stayed at Stanhope Johnson’s opulent hotel.

For a 1992 Daily Progress column, David A. Maurer tracked down Mary Cabell Somerville, a New Yorker who booked into the Monticello weeks after its debut. “It was wonderful, and if we wouldn’t have known better, we might have thought we were back in New York City,” she told the writer. “We registered and went up to our rooms and took a long, hot bath.”

The newspaper clipping was a pebble in the mountain of Frasier’s research, but she shared a copy with Abode—with obvious pride and a bright smile.

Johnson designed The Monticello Hotel, which opened in 1923 and is now the north downtown apartment building 500 Court Street. Photo: Courtesy Carolyn Gills Frasier

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Sense and the city: A Charlottesville developer chooses preservation with a retro-modern twist

The Tenth Street Warehouses project encompasses Peloton Station restaurant and bike shop, a new outpost of the Mudhouse, and a handful of apartments, along with more commercial and residential space in the former Coke bottling factory. Photo: Stephen Barling

The concept of urban placemaking surfaced in the 1960s, when writer and activist Jane Jacobs successfully led the fight to block a planned highway through New York’s Greenwich Village, and urban planner William “Holly” Whyte began the Street Life Project, documenting how built environments shaped the way people behave and interact. Today, Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces are required reading for architects, landscape designers, and planners—and their pioneering work has established the baseline idea that development is more about people’s everyday lives than it is about simply putting up buildings.

Shannon Worrell’s Tenth Street Warehouses project, at the threshold of Charlottesville’s 10th and Page neighborhood, is an exercise in urban placemaking. The pocket of thoughtfully designed commercial and residential spaces is comprised of the historic Coca-Cola bottling facility, a handful of new apartments designed by Wolf Ackerman, Peloton Station restaurant and bicycle repair shop, and a thoroughly modern new Mudhouse coffee shop.

Shannon Worrell has used her new development to create a more open, walkable space between West Main and 10th Street. Here, she sits outside Mudhouse Coffee Roasters, a commercial tenant. Photo: Stephen Barling

If you’re headed west along Main Street and turn right onto 10th Street, you will immediately see the Coke warehouse—with its patinaed red brick and black metal casement windows—and after about 40 paces you will enter an open space that provides relief from the claustrophobic corridor between the monolithic façades of the Flats and Standard apartment complexes. You may also sense that you are in a deliberately composed setting, alive with pedestrians and cyclists, folks enjoying a sandwich and a beer on the patio at Peloton, and people coming and going at the shops, small businesses, and studio apartments of the Coke building.

As the local population continues to grow, Charlottesville is molting its big-town shell and emerging as a small city, creating an imperative for more spaces like the Tenth Street Warehouses. We must commend the developers of Six Hundred West Main Street for preserving the Blue Moon Diner and the building next door. Likewise, kudos to the Quirk hotel designers, at West Main and Fifth streets, for sparing two adjacent 1920s streetfront homes. As a whole, the streetscape between Tavern & Grocery restaurant and Seventh Street presents many pleasant places, including the street-facing dining area outside Public Fish & Oyster and Oakhart Social.

The view from Tenth Street shows anchor tenant Peloton Station, Mudhouse, and the low-rise that contains a handful of modern apartments by Wolf Ackerman architects. The taller building in the background is The Standard, which is not part of the Tenth Street Station development. Photo: Stephen Barling

The Tenth Street Warehouses represent an opportunity for more than commodious living. It is a connector between Main Street and the Westhaven public housing and 10th and Page neighborhoods, both of which absorbed African Americans displaced by the city’s shameful demolition of Vinegar Hill in the 1960s. Worrell is fully cognizant of this history, and also aware that the neighborhood is threatened with gentrification. It could be argued that Worrell’s project contributes to that. But by creating a cohesive, modestly scaled development, she is announcing her commitment not to wall off one of the city’s less affluent communities. On the contrary, she hopes that the Tenth Street Warehouses will act as “soft, connective tissue” between the neighborhood and West Main Street and the university.

We spoke with Worrell, a former poet and musician, about this and much more.—Joe Bargmann

Abode: How did the Tenth Street Warehouses project begin?

Shannon Worrell: You can trace it back to about 20 years ago, when I bought the Coke bottling factory building. That was the company’s original facility in Charlottesville, but they outgrew it and built another one, which is now Kardinal Hall, over on Preston Avenue. The first building became a shirt manufacturing place—maybe not what you’d call a “factory” but certainly bigger than a tailor shop. Since I’ve owned it, it’s been a commercial and residential space, with big lofts and a few smaller spaces tucked in on the ground floor.

How much work have you done to the building?

A lot of the original details were preserved in a renovation by the previous owner, and I’ve continued that idea to this day. The space has been updated—it has to be useful—but I’ve been adamant about keeping all of the amazing old materials intact. It was a large, industrial space, and I’ve stayed true to that spirit and aesthetic. If anything, I’ve opened it up more rather than breaking it up into a bunch of smaller spaces.

What other elements have you added over the years to make what is now the Tenth Street Warehouses?

I bought the building and some land adjacent to what most people remember as the old C’ville Classic Cars shop. It was built around 1930, and for many years it was a machine shop where car parts were made. But it’s always been industrial and automotive.

The transformation into the space that is now Peloton Station and the Mudhouse is night and day. What was your vision in the beginning?

The first thing was just to save the building. There had been a lot of deferred maintenance. There was literally water rushing through it and the roof was falling in, and there were environmental issues because of the industrial use. So, I addressed and mitigated those issues. I was attached to those big, slanted, sort of Art Deco windows and the shape of the building, so I decided to revive it.

What option did you have?

None that I was willing to consider. I could have done what’s going on all over the city, and especially up on Main Street, which is to knock down the old building, put in parking on the ground floor, and then build up as many stories as the city would allow. But I live in that neighborhood, and I’ve been watching the changes over the years, and there’s no way I was going big. I can’t say it was the greatest financial decision [laughs].

I’m sure! And I can appreciate the aesthetic choice, but why was preserving that building so important to you?

I remember when I was a kid, there were all these great old quirky buildings. There are just a few that remain, including a couple on Main Street, that remind me of my childhood. The big box housing developments on West Main Street change the whole scale and feeling of midtown. On the positive side, there are more pedestrians and The Corner is truly being connected to West Main and downtown. The downside is that some of these buildings look out of place in the original cityscape—more suburban and homogeneous in their design and material use. We saw an opportunity to make a project that was more architecturally unusual, while showcasing the old car dealership storefront. The Standard looms over us in a way that urges us to want to create something visually appealing in the shadow of its backside. We are working with them, Westhaven, and The Charlottesville Mural Project to create a park behind the apartment building.

How do you compensate for or counteract that?

We’re looking at our options right now. I’m working on getting a big mural painted that will break up some of that visual monotony of the back of the Standard.

Part of your goal is to improve the way the space looks, but there’s also a practical side to how you’re designing and programming it, right?

I like to describe the Tenth Street Warehouses property as connective tissue. When the classic car shop was in the Peloton building, there were a lot of fences in the space between it and the Coke building. I mean, a whole series of chain link fences were breaking up the space. I had them taken out. It’s important to my commercial tenants and the people from the neighborhood to be able to walk down from, or up to, Main Street.

Playing devil’s advocate, could someone call your project simple gentrification?

That’s fair, to an extent. I have been called a gentrifier. But at the same time, I’ve also deliberately sought out people’s point of view. I suppose I need to do more of that—have a stronger connection with my neighbors. But they’d have to admit that the space is now more walkable and open, a more pleasant place to engage with others. I like to think of it as kinder, gentler gentrification, if there is such a thing [laughs]. I want people to understand my point of view. I could have cleared the land and put up the biggest possible building, in order to make more money in the near term. I’m committed to a different approach. I have an open mind and an open heart. I have to run a business and make money, but I’m confident that if I do the right thing, that will happen in time. That sounds utopian and naïve, but time will tell and I’m just going to keep trying.

What’s going to happen with that lot on the other side of Tenth Street? It would be nice if you could have something there that continued in the vein of the warehouses.

Well, the university owns that land, and right now it’s used as parking for faculty and hospital staff. I think I’m like a lot of people from the neighborhood who have a love-hate relationship with the university. It obviously employs and educates and enlightens a lot of people, and it provides all of us with lots of wonderful diversions and resources. But people also see UVA as a gentrifier that’s encroaching on the city.

But the story isn’t so simple, is it?

No, of course not. And I think [UVA president] Jim Ryan is really interested in having more of a dialogue with the community and enhancing UVA’s relationship with the city. What happens with the land that’s now a parking lot? I don’t know. I guess it could end up being student housing.

Have you spoken with anyone at the university about that parcel?

No, I haven’t. But I hope to. And generally speaking, because of president Ryan and also the aftermath of August 12, I think the university is more sensitive to how it interacts with the city. It’s certainly more sensitive than an out-of-town developer who really has no community connection.

It seems to me that it would be beneficial for the city to leverage some of the talent from the School of Architecture—architects, landscape architects, planners…

That kind of integration would be really great. There are some amazing people in this community who are either at the university now or who have come out of it. I have had professors and students work up plans for sites in the past, but nothing ever seems to get off the page. There’s so much capital here—creative, intellectual, financial—that it would be great to be put it all together to solve some problems. The biggest problem now is affordable housing. It would be interesting to see what could happen if we all put our energy into addressing that.

What connection to the university do you see there?

There’s some student housing on grounds, but a lot of them need to live off campus. I think the relationship between student housing and affordable housing is contentious. We need to talk about that and make sure everyone has a seat at the table. I’m not saying I know how to make that happen. I’m sitting here in my utopian bubble! [laughs] But I am a developer, I have a stake in this, and I like to think I’m conscientious. I’m aware of the housing redevelopment process—I’m part of it in some small way. I do some volunteering for the public housing association president, and I’ve been talking to Habitat for Humanity about some housing initiatives. I’m trying to find a way forward and make a difference. I want to figure out the best way to do that.

What drives you to keep going along that path?

The creative part is what inspires me, and my desire to use that creativity for people in the community. There are a lot of things we could have done with the Tenth Street Warehouses space. We chose to create what you see now.

The apartments above Peloton Station and Mudhouse, designed by Wolf Ackerman, are very modern. How does that style mesh with the other buildings, which are industrial and from different eras?

The Coke building has very large, loft-style apartments. Their size and scale is dictated by the building itself—industrial space with really high ceilings, lots of windows, and wide-plank wood floors. I wanted the new apartments to be similar—with a warehouse-industrial feel and high ceilings—but the architects were like, “Man, there’s a lot of red brick in this town, and I don’t think we want to go there.” I agreed. We were looking at Scandinavian architecture, very spare, and also Japanese. So we coined the term Scandinese industrial. [laughs] It doesn’t mean anything on its face, but it became our shorthand way of talking about the style we were going for. It’s an extension of the industrial history of the site but also contemporary.

There’s a rawness to the whole site. Would you say that the Tenth Street Warehouses are still a work in progress?

Definitely. My tenants all understand that, too. We want to hear from people in the community —we welcome their opinions with open arms—about how the space can work for them and be meaningful to them. There will be changes. I think we’re really just getting started.

Categories
Arts

Bigfoot sighting

Big Fur follows world champion taxidermist Ken Walker as he searches for, then makes his own, Bigfoot. A discussion with Ken Walker and director Dan Wayne follows the movie playing Thursday at Virginia Film Festival. Publicity image.

“The Elvis Presley of taxidermy.” That’s what fans call Ken Walker, the star of the documentary Big Fur.

Part conspiracy theory, part environmental commentary, and part obsession, this “love story” follows Walker’s personal and artistic journey as he sets out on a fact-finding mission in order to build, true to form and scale, a replica of Bigfoot.

Part crazy? Maybe. But Walker is a believer—and an expert taxidermist, a three-time world champion in the field, who’s recreated extinct and endangered animals for the Smithsonian and the National Zoo, and been featured in National Geographic magazine.

Director Dan Wayne, followed Walker through the process of building and unveiling Patty, his entry in the 2015 World Taxidermy Championships in Springfield, Missouri, and says he’s not sure if the animal exists, but the film has a larger message. “I love the idea, but to me Bigfoot is more than a relic hominid. Bigfoot represents true wilderness, or maybe even the guardian of the wilderness. If Bigfoot exists, he shares the same habitat as countless other critters.”

As for Walker, while winning Best in Show at the competition would be great, he has a second agenda in the movie—hoping that putting Patty on display will “prompt some hunter to open his freezer and pull out the proof that Bigfoot is real.”

Big Fur is a wry, funny portrait of an eccentric artist-hero that titillates the imagination. As author and naturalist Bob Pyle says in the movie, “if we allow the land to become so tamed that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of wild hairy apes out there, we will have lost something more profound than Bigfoot.”

Big Fur screens on Thursday at Vinegar Hill Theatre at 10:30pm. Discussion to follow with director Dan Wayne and subject Ken Walker, moderated by Chandler Ferrebee.

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Abode Magazines

Natural high: A mountaintop home in Albemarle lets the outdoors in

The east-facing rear of the house shows the simplicity of the design, large windows and balcony that connect the interior with the outdoors, and in the shadow on the lower right, the overhead door that opens to the basement gym. Photo: Stephen Barling

The couple was living in Boston when they started looking for an architect to build their house on a mountaintop in Albemarle County. It would have to be a unique design, one that meshed with their reverence for nature and rigorous commitment to personal fitness (he’s a serious hiker and outdoorsman, she’s an avid runner). Because their work lives required extensive travel and stretches of time apart, the home must also serve as a sanctuary, a place that would make them feel sheltered and safe, a haven to reconnect and reaffirm their place in the world, together. The structure would also have to feel and look substantial—not necessarily large and certainly not a McMansion, but a building with enough physical bearing and architectural gravitas to crown a prospect that commanded a vast and humbling view of nature’s grandeur.

“Harmony, comfort, healing, health—we wanted our home to promote and express these things,” the husband says. “The connection to nature is deliberate.” Photo: Stephen Barling

As for the style of the house, both the husband and wife had strong childhood memories of design and architecture that they wanted it to express. He was born and grew into his teens in Finland (his father was a university professor there). It was a place where “we thought of good design as a higher thing but also part of everyday life,” he says. “I grew up with kids across the economic spectrum, and every one of them had an Alvar Aalto piece in their house.”

The husband’s mention of Aalto is significant. He was a giant of Scandinavian design who practiced from the 1920s through the 1970s. The guiding concept of his work, on which he partnered with his wife, Aino Aalto, was design as “Gesamtkunstwerk,” which translates to “a total work of art.” In practice this meant that the Aaltos designed not only buildings but many of the objects within them, from glassware to furniture, in shapes that were biomorphic, taking cues from nature.

The wife is Virginia born and bred, a farmgirl who spent much of her youth outside. She recalls summers that included raiding the family garden, picking and eating vegetables fresh off the plants. She also remembers the first time that a work of architecture captured her imagination. It was Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, Fallingwater. “When I saw a picture of that as a kid, I thought it was the coolest,” she says.

With a stream running beneath its foundation and leading to a waterfall, one of Falling-water’s core characteristics is its integration with the site. Large stones bulge up and out of the living room floor, and at one point along the foundation, naturally occurring stone rises a foot above the floorline before conjoining with a built wall, a literal expression of the connection between the natural and manmade. This is a central tenet of both Japanese and organic architecture: harmony between humans and nature. The wife may not have consciously registered this lofty concept as a child, but Fallingwater stuck with her into adulthood.

Building materials like Pennsylvania bluestone and Buckingham County slate enhance the connection to the natural environment. The steel I-beams at the top of the wall support the green roof above the garage, which creates a canopy above the walkway. Photo: Stephen Barling

The husband began the nitty-gritty of the search in the simplest way. “I Googled ‘modern architects, Virginia,’” he says.

A few clicks later he was poring over the extensive portfolio of Richmond’s Patrick Farley, who had earned both his bachelors and masters in architecture at UVA. The husband was impressed by the clean lines and simple geometry of Farley’s work. The buildings, mostly residential, were substantial yet unpretentious, and integrated well with their sites, some wild and some suburban.

After reviewing Farley’s work with her husband, the wife emailed the architect in November 2015. He was the one and only person they interviewed for the job. Their sensibilities and aesthetics aligned, and work on the mountaintop site soon began.

Above it all

How can a home exist so close to town and yet feel so middle-of-nowhere? That’s what I wondered as I drove there on a typically hot summer day, July 3, to be precise. The serpentine driveway climbed steadily for a couple of miles that seemed like five, at least. The ascent was so steep that I feared my car would overheat, which it did, with steam pouring out from under the hood. But when I finally reached the summit and saw the house, I knew the effort was worth it.

Standing on the fresh asphalt, I felt relieved—and not just because my car hadn’t died. I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, enveloped in silence and surrounded by trees. In photographs on Farley’s website, the house looks imposing, but it’s inviting in person. The architect met me at the front door, where I kicked off my shoes (stocking feet only on the smooth wood floors) and stepped into a little foyer adjoining the dining room, immediately noticing the profusion of shiny leaves covering the vertical garden to my left, on the entry wall. I said a few words while greeting the couple and Farley. But when I looked up, I was drawn to the towering windows that form the east-facing wall, speechless. I was in a sort of trance as I backed away from the glass, turned to the right, and stepped down into the living room, scanning the mountainous horizon—again, through huge glass panes—from the north all the way to the southeast. On distant hilltops, I saw clearings around white or red dots that indicated other significant homesites, and I wondered whether if someone might be looking back at me.

“So, what is it we’re doing here?” the husband asked, perhaps a little annoyed by my wandering.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I blurted. “Let’s sit and talk.”

We took seats at the dining room table and dove in.

“We knew we wanted modern,” the husband said. “There’s Miami Vice-modern that’s cool in a Lamborghini kind of way. But we wanted something more in the direction of Scandinavian-meets-the-Pacific Northwest.”

“One of the things we were attempting to do is connect the materials inside and out,” Farley said. “That’s why you’re surrounded by mostly wood surfaces, and the glass, floor to ceiling, provides a connection to the outdoors and the big trees that you see.”

A view from above reveals the expansive green rooftops and photovoltaic panels—both of which help to make the house extremely energy-efficient. The tapered, V-shaped beams were milled from cedar, and the shape is a tip of the hat to Virginia. Photo: Stephen Barling

Those trees, stout hardwoods, were visible mostly to the north. I could see them through a rectangular window, maybe three feet high, that ran along the wall above the kitchen sink and counter. The husband confessed that he had wanted to clear those trees in order to expand the view even further. The wife smiled and shook her head slowly.

She said the trees remained, in part, to preserve the feeling that the house is embedded in the landscape, in nature. “It’s intentional—we tried to hide it,” she said.

“It’s not a triumph over nature, it’s a submission,” the husband said.

We had veered into Zen philosophy, which seemed apt.

No one spoke for a few beats. Farley took the cue.

“Acoustics are important,” he said. “The wood and other natural materials, the deep beams in the ceiling—they all absorb sound. In the Miami Vice version of modern there’s a lot of reverb. Sound bounces off the hard surfaces.”

Foundational to Farley’s architecture is “biophilia,” a rarely used term that draws from the hypothesis first promulgated by the eminent scientist Edward O. Wilson in his 1984 book of the same name. The idea rests on the notion that humans innately seek connections with nature. Farley attended a lecture by Wilson in 2003 and read the book, which the architect—like many in the profession who are dedicated to environmentally conscious design and building—adopted as a touchstone.

The design proportions, inside and out, draw upon the Fibonacci sequence, which is based on naturally occurring patterns like the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower. This is said to bring feelings of harmony and an intuitive connection with the natural world. Nice views also help. Photo: Stephen Barling

Back to the thing about sound. Wright’s Fallingwater is often cited as a prime example of biophilic architecture, even though it was built in 1939, decades before the idea surfaced. Sound is one element of the human connection to nature inherent in biophilic architecture—and one constantly hears the rush of water at the house that Wright built.

I asked the couple why they were sold on Farley from the get-go. The wife immediately mentioned the green roof that is part of the architect’s repertoire. At the couple’s house, above the garage, the expansive roof is thickly planted with sedum and other plants.

“We knew he could pull it off,” the husband said, turning to address Farley. “We just wanted you to channel your inner Wright.”

The architect and his clients smile. The husband’s comment was a good-natured jab, a lighthearted damning with faint praise, because he and his wife know that Farley’s work goes well beyond mere mimicry. The proportions of the rooms, and the built-in interior elements, such as the cherry-wood cabinetry that conceals the television and other home entertainment equipment in the family room, are based on the Fibonacci sequence, a formula invented by the Italian mathematician of the Middle Ages. The simple definition of the sequence is that each number is the sum of the two previous numerals: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on. Its application in design and architecture is more complex, but basically, it is said to produce harmonious spaces and objects, in part because it is the codification of natural phenomena. The spiraling patterns of a nautilus shell’s chambers, the seeds in the face of a sunflower, a pine cone, the growth points of a trees branches and twigs—all are physical expressions of the Fibonacci sequence.

No wall divides the television-viewing space from the rest of the interior, preserving the sense of openness and the views. Photo: Stephen Barling

“Harmony, comfort, healing, health—we wanted our home to promote and express these things,” the husband says. “The connection to nature is deliberate. There will always be something about a close connection to nature that is healing.” (I had noticed that he was walking with a slight limp; turns out he was recovering from a leg fracture sustained in a cycling accident.)

“We’re out here on 200 acres—out here among all the critters,” the wife says.

But the natural setting is just part of it. The live roof—which is technological as well as natural, because it acts as insulation and sucks carbon dioxide out of the air—is one high-tech element that makes the home “green” and energy-efficient. Geothermal wells are used for temperature control. Photovoltaic panels provide electricity.

The conversation peters out, and the day stretches into the afternoon. The couple is anticipating receiving guests and attending an Independence Day party. So, after a quick tour of the house—three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a large home-office upstairs, and downstairs a well-equipped gym, which includes an infinity lap pool—we bid one another adieu.

It has been an extraordinary visit—two remarkable people living in a beautiful home, designed with great care and purpose by an unusual (in the best sense) architect—and I am reluctant to leave. Down at the bottom of the mountain, people are rushing about, stocking up for July 4th barbecues. Up here things are quiet, and a one-of-a-kind house blends with nature. It’s not a bad place to be, even if your car overheats while getting there.

Categories
Opinion The Editor's Desk

This week, 10/23

At my first Virginia Film Festival, back in 2015, my husband and I had two children under age 5, one car, and one 10-ticket pass to the festival (thanks to a winning bid at our daughter’s preschool silent auction). The logistics were stressful, but being “forced” to make it to 10 movies in one weekend proved both exhilarating and, in the end, delightful.

We’ve gotten that pass every year since, and every year, it’s led me to surprising new discoveries and transcendent films I likely never would have seen otherwise, from the phenomenal community health documentary Bending the Arc to the achingly lovely Call Me By Your Name.

As Cullen “Fellowman” Wade, head of the Nine Pillars hip-hop festival, said in our panel discussion last week, “I think a lot of folks in Charlottesville don’t understand how incredibly lucky we are to have what has grown into…a major film festival right in our hometown.”

This year, Wade has curated a hip-hop music video screening in an effort to bring new audiences to the festival, as well as highlight an increasingly respected form of filmmaking. And that’s just one of the more than 150 screenings and events on offer, from talks with top-notch directors, actors, and critics to showings of the most-talked-about films on the festival circuit. So grab a program (or go to virginiafilmfestival.org), and dive in.

Also this week, we’re gearing up for election day on November 5. While there are no federal or statewide races this year, there’s quite a bit at stake, including control of Virginia’s General Assembly. Locally, longtime public defender Jim Hingeley is campaigning on a reform-minded approach to criminal justice that’s a stark contrast to Albemarle’s incumbent Commonwealth’s Attorney Robert Tracci. And there are plenty of other contested races. Check out our election coverage, and mark your calendar now.

Categories
Arts

Homecoming: Filmmaker Ricardo Preve returns with a discovery story of a missing World War II sailor

In the course of telling the story of a sunken Italian submarine, Ricardo Preve brought home the remains of the only sailor who died on a remote Red island. Photo courtesy of VAFF

It started with a chance remark. In 2014, former Crozet resident Ricardo Preve was off the coast of Sudan to film sharks. At the end of his stay in the treacherous shallow waters surrounding thousands of islands in the archipelago, “A guy told me an Italian submarine sank here,” says Preve.

That detail sent Preve on a years-long effort to tell the story of the Macallé, which went down in June 1940, and the one sailor who didn’t make it home.

Because the Macallé was the first Italian sub to sink in World War II, its navy formed a commission of inquiry and produced a 300-page report, complete with interviews of the 44 sailors who survived. That report and those interviews practically became the script for Coming Home, says Preve.

The Macallé was the first submarine to be deployed in tropical conditions, says Preve, and the temperature in the Red Sea topped 100 degrees. Use of a poisonous chemical coolant compounded the disaster.

Preve led an international dive team back to Barra Musa Kebir, a desert island slightly larger than a football field, to try to find the sub, which, after the crew had escaped, according to the report, slipped off a reef into “an abyss,” he says.

From the government account, he knew that one sailor, Carlo Acefalo, had died on the island, and while there, Preve found what he believed was Acefalo’s grave. But it took three years to get permits to excavate it. Because he had rented a dive boat and said nothing about searching for a submarine, “We got into trouble with the Sudanese government,” says Preve.

“I realized we had a film,” he says. “We began interviewing descendants of the crew.” He went to Castiglione Falletto, now an expensive wine-growing area, where Acefalo had grown up at a time when people were very poor, he says.

Before he got the permit to return to Barra Musa Kebir, Preve built a scale replica of the submarine in Argentina. In July 2017, “I filmed a historical recreation of the event in Buenos Aires, where I have my people and it’s cheaper,” he says.

The filming took place as Preve faced his own personal tragedy. His daughter Erika, a Western Albemarle and UVA grad, had died in March 2017 at 29 years old.

“Thanks to cinema,” says Preve, “I was able to overcome my tremendous grief in losing Erika.”

He also took “a huge gamble doing a historical recreation without knowing if we could get [back] on the island,” he says.

Documentaries have evolved since the days they were “didactic and tensionless,” says Preve of his reenactment. He built the submarine and filmed the sailors’ harrowing ordeal seeking rescue from the desert island before they were captured by the British because it’s “more interesting than talking heads,” he explains. “I try to avoid talking heads.”

In October 2017, Preve’s team was able to excavate Acefalo’s grave. It took another year for Sudan to release the remains. On November 24, 2018, “We put him next to his mother”—78 years after he died and on the same day she was born in 1894, according to the marker on her grave, says Preve.

The reaction in Italy, where Coming Home has aired on television several times, has been tremendous, says Preve. “People all over Italy are writing me.” The film has also done well on the festival circuit, with Preve getting the gold at the Los Angeles Motion Picture Festival for best documentary director.

Renowned local documentary filmmaker Geoff Luck met Preve about a decade ago. “What’s interesting about Rick is that he works in fiction and nonfiction,” says Luck. Preve approaches a factual story with an “adroit use of the storytelling techniques of fiction.”

Adds Luck, “He’s constantly finding interesting, intriguing stories.”

Preve has spent the past five years in Genoa. He’ll show Coming Home at the Virginia Film Festival, where he used to be on the board of directors. “It is also coming home for me,” he says. October 24, the day of the screening, is his birthday. “Erika is buried in Albemarle County, and so many friends and family live here.”

Coming Home will screen on Thursday at 6pm at Violet Crown cinema.