Month: April 2020

The wife—a 40-something fitness trainer with a compact build—is standing beside the distressed-wood dining table that serves as the transitional element between the simple, serene kitchen and the airy living room, which has a vaulted ceiling accented by two triangular timber trusses and a pair of mod pendant chandeliers that look like giant bows, made with wide, woven strips of poplar. Behind her, on the far side of the room, stands an elegant mid-century credenza against an eggshell-white wall adorned only by a black rectangle, the TV monitor. The room, and the woman, are bathed in warm sunlight flowing in through big glass panes. She is standing but not still. This person radiates energy and speaks loudly, as if she were talking above the clatter and hum of a subway train. She shifts from one foot to the other and gesticulates as she describes the stylistic inspiration for the interior makeover of her family’s home. 

As it so happens, the man behind that inspiration, Jeff Dreyfus, is in the kitchen with his associate Aga Saulle, of Charlottesville’s Bushman Dreyfus Architects. Dreyfus became a friend of the woman, her husband, and their twins (a girl and a boy, now 12 years old) after working out in her classes at a local health club. One day, after she and Dreyfus had discussed the renovation, she visited his home, which—as you would expect from a contemporary modern architect—was clean, precise, and pared down. At the time, the woman admits, her house was an open-shelved shrine to the gods of domestic clutter. She’s a clothes horse with a taste for very nice shoes: Prada, Louboutin, Jimmy Choo, Charlotte Olympia. Her husband, who works from home, collects sports memorabilia. The walls of his office are an ESPN jigsaw puzzle, with photographs, jerseys, and robes signed by the greats—Larry Bird, Earl Campbell, and even Sly “Rocky Balboa” Stallone. The kids (she’s talking about them now and getting really animated) were also collectors, though less discriminating than Dad: toys, sneakers, and clothes up the wazoo! Things were strewn everywhere! (The woman’s voice rises.) The place was a mess! I mean, her husband and the kids, God love ’em, but they were all drowning in the trappings of their lives. After she saw Dreyfus’ place—so elegant and austere, everything in its place—came her awakening. “I want to live like a minimalist!” she blurts, and everyone enjoys a chuckle.

So, Dreyfus got the job, deputized Saulle as the project architect, and now their client has a home with clean lines, soothing natural surfaces in muted tones, a giant man cave above the garage where the husband works behind a desk the size of Rhode Island, a walk-in closet worthy of Bergdorf Goodman, and a ground floor where the kids and their friends can be as messy as they want to be, because all of their stuff is contained in one place, separate from the rooms upstairs, where Mom and Dad can work and entertain and live unfettered lives, you know, like adults.

 

Addition by subtraction

If all of that sounds a little too tidy, well, you’re onto something. The truth is, good architects are good at hiding things. The late, great designer Michael Graves once told me that his neighbor in Princeton, New Jersey, the wry humorist Fran Lebowitz, visited his house and, after looking around the kitchen, asked, “Don’t you architects have any ‘stuff’?”

In the case of Graves’ kitchen, the outward appearance of extreme orderliness was enhanced by frosted glass panes in the cabinet doors—and as I recall, there were a lot of cabinets. When I opened one, and then another, I saw that the contents were not all perfectly arranged. I’m not suggesting that the architect was secretly disorganized or a closet pack rat. But he knew that clear glass would have revealed too much detail, creating visual busyness. When it comes to someone’s field of view, what they can’t see does not enter their consciousness. Architects are illusionists, deliberately composing scenes. By choosing certain materials and positioning them in a particular order, the designer controls the viewer’s perception of an object, a room, or even an entire home.

When the client uttered the word “minimalist,” Dreyfus and Saulle understood it as a directive, just as Graves knew that frosted glass would enhance the sense of uniformity and simplicity in his kitchen. A guiding principle of minimalism is addition by subtraction. The common phrase “less is more” expresses roughly the same idea. But just because something is minimal doesn’t mean it is not robust. Addition by subtraction leads from one type of fullness to another, not from fullness to emptiness. On the becomingminimalist.com blog (yes, it exists), one writer provided a personal take on the concept: “When we remove the things from life we do not want, we make more room for the things in life that we do [want].”

What the client wanted, in a word, was simplicity. This idea applied not just to the look but also to the circulation from room to room as well as from one floor to another. The kitchen presented major problems. It stood almost immediately inside the front door, connecting the family and living rooms and forming an L shape. By virtue of its position in the entryway, the kitchen also served as a foyer and quasi-mudroom. As if that weren’t enough, the kitchen happened to be at the juncture of the stairs that led up from the basement and connected the first and second floors. It was a 3D version of one of those crazy intersections in Washington, D.C., where five roads converge on one traffic circle. 

“Coming up from the basement,” Saulle says, “One had to literally slip between the kitchen island and the oven to get to the stairs leading to the second floor.”

So, picture this: Mom gets home from the gym and is trying to make the mac ‘n’ cheese. Dad is working the phone in his home office, which is really a guest bedroom. The kids are racing around like maniacs, up and down the stairs and from the family room to the living room. That kitchen was as calm and easy to navigate as the Charlottesville City Market on a Saturday morning. Oh, but there’s more. Adding to the claustrophobia was a small bathroom adjacent to the kitchen, against the east wall. And the place looked like a ransacked Goodwill store. “There was not much storage space at all,” says Saulle. “The kitchen had plenty of open shelves, which was not functional and added to the overall cluttered feel.”

The architects’ primary task on the first floor was to bring order to this chaos. They achieved it by making a small addition—a “bump-out,” as the wife calls it—to the kitchen. The extra space allowed for shifting the kitchen away from the front entry, so that area became a proper arrival area. The next move was to seal the stairwell; a wall replaced the doorway. Access to the basement was achieved via a new staircase beyond the family room, and a spiral staircase leading upstairs was added to a widened hallway extending out of the kitchen, towards the driveway and front yard. That interior space now serves several purposes. It contains a mudroom with a built-in closet, cubbies, and a wide bench—a great place for storage and to change out of your dirt-caked boots. A new water closet accessible from the mudroom took the pressure off of the bathroom near the kitchen.

The hallway is also an axis: To the north, it’s a connector to the wife’s office, a lovely, bright room with multi-paned French doors and sidelights looking out on a small garden beside the walkway to the home’s front entry. A soft, deep-pile rug holds together the furnishings—her desk opposite the glass doors, two low-slung upholstered barrel chairs that look a bit like Pac-Woman emojis, and a couch accented with fuzzy pink faux-fur pillows. Hanging close to the ceiling in the center of the room, a ring-shaped gilt chandelier has an airy feel; its woven metal strands have golden leaves, and the whole thing is punctuated with glistening pointy light bulbs. As noted above, the room is an “office,” but it’s so cheery and comfortable that it would also be a nice spot to sit awhile and chat.

“When my office was finished, I stood in there and just thought, I’ve never been in a room that felt like this,” the wife recalls. “It’s so comfortable, classic, and cool. I love it!”

At the other eastern terminus of the axis, just past the new bathroom, stands a door that opens to an exterior breezeway. This links up with a two-story structure with a three-bay garage downstairs and the husband’s office/sports museum upstairs. The upper floor is cavernous, with a vaulted ceiling and a bathroom with a shower, so it’s easy to imagine it doing double-duty as a guest room.

Secret spaces, magical places

Let’s return now to the architect’s art of hiding things, and the wonderful feeling of discovery that can result from this. Remember the first-floor bathroom with one foot in the kitchen and the other in the family room? It’s not there. Or at least, you wouldn’t know it was there by outward appearances. What you see instead is a single volume formed by three tall walls of rich, blond maple. It looks seamless, like a big box to seal in Houdini and challenge him to escape. Only a single bronze fixture, a doorknob in the shape of a beaker’s rubber stopper, hints at an opening. Regarded only as a form, it complements the large kitchen island, which is also a rectangular box, though shorter and much longer. But when you pull on the fixture, a door glides open, swinging aside to reveal the bathroom, and behind another door, spring-activated by pushing on it, is a closet.

“We introduced the maple box as a portal between the east and the west wings of the house,” Saulle says. “It’s a beautiful spatial feature that also defines the entry area and serves as a coat closet and a powder room.”

Upstairs, another surprise awaits. As you walk down the hall toward the master bedroom (an addition with unadorned double-hung windows looking out on a pasture and woods), the wife’s walk-in closet sits to the left. With two open portals, it’s like an eddy in a stream. Any person who likes to dress well and keep her clothing and shoes well organized would die for a room like this. A crystal-encrusted donut-shaped pendant fixture glitters above a central island with many drawers. Clothes hang in open, recessed spaces lining the walls, and a large cabinet with multiple shelves and glass doors holds the shoe collection.

All of this is wonderful and lavish, and the extreme display of orderliness might lead you to believe that the wife is a neat-freak. But there’s a door in the rear wall of the closet. The wife opens it briefly—just long enough to reveal a storage space that’s a jumble of clothing and shoes in piles on the floor and hung on Ikea-ish racks. “No photographs of that, please!” she declares, laughing. Addition by subtraction, indeed. And also, out of sight, out of mind. It was considerate of Dreyfus and Saulle to add this hidden space.

One more hideaway lies in the basement, the kids’ domain. Beyond the wall of cubbies filled with toys and art supplies, and beyond the wall with the big screen for gaming and watching shows and movies, there’s a bookshelf exactly the size of a door cut into the wall. When you pop open the bookshelf, you encounter a wonderland of Legos covering two sprawling tabletops. Here, in this secret space, which also contains utilities, the twins and their friends have built little villages and street scenes out of colorful blocks. It’s enough to make you wish you were a kid again.

While the outward appearance of the renovation and expansion hews to the elegant, minimal aesthetic that is Dreyfus and Saulle’s métier, and which the client and her family requested, the invisible elements and the basement play spaces provide a counterpoint to the home’s modernist formality. They also indicate something about the client’s personality, which is, on the one hand, very precise and demanding (remember, she’s a fitness trainer), but on the flipside full of humor and joie de vivre—and secretly a little messy.

When I emailed Saulle and asked what she liked most about the project, she wrote: “[The wife] said that we turned a house into a home. I like that we helped create not only a functional home for a family but also dedicated spaces that meet specific needs of each of the family members. [She] is an amazing person, very warm and friendly, easy to work with.

“Every Thursday, after our weekly construction meeting at the site, she would send me back to the office with a box of cookies for everyone. A co-worker once said that this was their favorite project, even though they weren’t working on it.”

She ended the message with a smile emoji.

Whenever craftsman Guery Guzman shops for materials, his imagination races: Is there potential in that old metal gas pump nozzle in a pile of junk at the flea market? (Yes, tons.) What could be done with the cast-iron lamp covered in cobwebs in the corner of the antique shop? (Return it to its former glory.) What about that tattered pulley hanging from the barn rafters? (Turn it into a lamp.)

Guzman has been collecting and restoring antiques for years, and a few years ago, he tried his hand at repurposing the ones that couldn’t be saved entirely. It pained him to see an old wooden dolly collect dust in a flea market or a child’s wagon decay in the weather, when it was clear to him how many hours of labor a fellow craftsman had put into it.

And while Guzman creates all sorts of furniture and home accessories for his Antiques Plus A Twist business, it’s his lamps that really turn his customers on.

With just a bit of electrical outfitting (a skill Guzman learned from his extremely handy grandfather, an airplane body fabricator who also made custom orthopedic devices, among other things) and some light bulbs, Guzman can transform a slatted wooden produce box into a pendant lamp, or an old farm-weathered yoke into a chandelier. He’s combined a wooden coat rack, wrought-iron bracket, and bulbous old Jack Daniels bottle into a single floor lamp. He’s made lamps from ukuleles, toy violins, surveyors’ tripods, sprinkler spigots, and so much more, always attempting to maintain the integrity of the original piece.

“You have to look at things from different angles, from different perspectives, or else you don’t find the beauty in it,” he says.

Guzman’s able to tease humor out of some items, too: That old gas-pump nozzle? He threaded some wire through it and affixed a bulb to the end so that bright light—rather than gasoline—drips out. Recently, he came across an old blow torch, intact but not working, and is thinking about how he might use electricity to evoke the narrow blue flame of a functional torch.

“The reason why I like lights more than furniture or other things,” says Guzman, “is because I know how lights affect life, mood.” Looking to add warmth? Try a lamp. Some history? A lamp can do that, too. Nostalgia? Visual interest? A little absurdity? An art piece? Lamps can do it all. They can transform a space in the way that a new coat of paint, or a new set of furniture, can, but via a lot less effort and money.

Guzman hopes that his lamps will inspire people to try their own hand at repurposing, whether it’s with found items or family heirlooms. It’s a wonderful way to move through life, he says, seeking the potential beauty and artfulness in everything, in part because it sheds light on more than just living room walls. “You can truly turn nothing into something.”

It started small.

When Brad and Cathy Coyle decided to buy a house in the Lewis Mountain neighborhood, they knew it needed some work. But they thought it would be mostly a vacation rental property, plus an occasional weekend pied-à-terre for themselves, and they figured the scope of work was minimal. “It was just a paint job we started with,” jokes Peter LaBau of Goodhouse Design, the Charlottesville architectural firm that ended up overseeing a major renovation on the property.

LaBau’s statement is an exaggeration, of course, but in the beginning the Coyles had cosmetic updates in mind for what had previously been a long-term rental—refinishing floors, repainting, and so on. Still, the couple, who are based in Northern Virginia, found themselves settling into the place more than they’d expected to. “We both went to school here,” says Cathy, “and our kids have all gone here. We always enjoyed spending time in Charlottesville.” 

Attracted to the property by its 1930s character (LaBau calls it “colonial-meets-arts-and-crafts”) the Coyles gradually developed a clearer vision of what the place’s potential might be, and little by little the scope of work expanded. “It’s funny how incrementally it happened,” says LaBau.

There were some real downsides to the house and landscape. One of the biggest was a dark interior, the result of both a closed-off floor plan and untended plantings outside. “The front door was just a door, with no sidelights,” remembers Brad. “It was overgrown with bamboo, and there were bushes that came all the way to the back door.”

“I was impressed these guys could see through it,” says LaBau of his clients. 

Another problem was an outdated kitchen that, like many built in the early 20th century, was quite separate from the rest of the house. “Back then, the kitchen wasn’t something you wanted your friends to see,” says LaBau. Removing the wall between kitchen and dining room would help connectivity, but the rooms would still be tiny. “We took a stab at what could we do within the footprint we had,” says LaBau, “but there wasn’t enough room.”

Thus an addition became part of the project—initially, just a small bump out to make for a more generous kitchen. That led LaBau, Goodhouse co-principal Jessie Chapman, and their clients to start rethinking the entrance to that part of the house. 

“We figured the back door would get used most”—being handy to the parking—“so we considered the sequence to get from the car to the kitchen, through a mudroom,” says LaBau. Now, the door opens into a spacious mudroom with a laundry closet. The refrigerator lives here too, right next to the kitchen doorway.  

Still, the addition—around 300 square feet total—had one more job to do: accommodate a bathroom that would allow an existing family room to function as a first-floor master suite. What’s more, the landscape around the rear entrance started to look inadequate, too. The back door wasn’t particularly convenient, being hemmed in by a retaining wall that held back a steeply sloped yard.

So in the end, the scope of work included removing the overgrown plantings, regrading the backyard, relocating the retaining wall, and adding a patio. While they were at it, the team redesigned the front porch to make it deeper and more usable.

“This is the result of thousands of decisions,” says LaBau: “improving one thing, and the thing next to it doesn’t look right.” 

“I don’t think there’s a square inch of the property that hasn’t been touched,” says Brad.

To achieve the transformation from dreary rental to light-filled home meant plenty of modernizing, of course, but LaBau says the house itself—with its many charming historic details—provided all the design precedent he and Chapman needed.

“All the clues were there,” says LaBau. “We had so much to work with—molding profiles, cabinetry styles…” The Coyles loved the details in the main living area, including a coffered ceiling and arched doorways. Adding a heart-pine mantelpiece to the fireplace was enough to spiff it up. The design called for a small den off the living room, contiguous with the larger space; the little room let in a flood of natural light and gained the Coyles a bar and seating nook.

In the revamped kitchen, the team brought in details from the dining room to make the newly combined space feel like a whole. “We replicated these ceiling beams coming across to make it feel like one space,” says LaBau. New oak flooring matches the old exactly, and wainscoting carries seamlessly into the new kitchen.

A peninsula topped with marble provides space for bar stools, and Shaker cabinets blend with subway tile that travels all the way up the rear wall, which features a symmetrical arrangement of open shelving and operable windows. A former utilities chase, now unneeded, was recaptured as built-in shelving which, with its arched frame, looks as though it could have been original to the house.

“It didn’t need to be gigantic,” LaBau says of the kitchen. Indeed it’s not, but its continuity with the dining room makes it feel plenty spacious.

In the master bedroom, a sophisticated cottage feel prevails—quite a change from its utilitarian origin as a garage. Converted into a family room by the previous owners, LaBau and Chapman took it to a new level for the Coyles by vaulting the ceiling. Cathy suggested adding built-in cabinets above the window in the gable end, and completed the bedroom transformation with a blue grasscloth wallpaper she’d had her eye on for a while.

“We were adamant about keeping the radiators in here,” says Brad, who likes preserving historic details where possible. Still functional, the radiators provide a comfortable heat that makes the HVAC system unnecessary in the cooler months.

Upstairs, a pair of bedrooms stayed as-is, but the shared bathroom got an update in a similar palette to the two downstairs baths: white marble, grays and blues, and vintage materials like hexagonal floor tiles and chrome. “I wanted to keep it bright,” says Cathy.

Though it remains traditional, the house’s exterior is significantly refreshed with new siding—clapboard in places, board-and-batten in others—and new double porch columns that lend formality and “a stronger presence,” LaBau says. The rear patio, which replaced a narrow walkway, has room for a dining table and fire pit.

The Coyles are still in their first year of using the property after the 18-month renovation, and they’re spending more time there than they expected to. “It was a weekend game-day house,” says Brad, “and now it’s expanding into weekdays.”

So you want to put together a home stereo system—but you’re not sure where to start.

Rather than turn to the overwhelming bounty of information on the internet, where gear talk can be confusing, seek the advice of an expert, instead. Ours is Wavley Groves III, of EccoHollow Art+Sound in Staunton. Groves knows what he’s talking about: He took his first steps at a Virginia Beach radio station, worked in record shops throughout his 20s, played in and served as an audio engineer for several bands, and worked in the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s development laboratory where, among other things, he built low-noise cryogenic microwave amplifiers (including some for NASA). At EccoHollow, he and fellow gearhead Matt Bailie repair and sell all manner of audio gear, build custom amps and effects, offer recording services, and much more.

There’s plenty of high-quality (and sometimes affordable) new gear for sale in stores like Crutchfield, but now is a great time to assemble a secondhand home sound system. “We have 60 or so years of hi-fi equipment out there,” says Groves, “and guys like me that can repair stuff.” While it’s true that vintage gear may need to be fixed and top-of-the line pieces can be costly, “there is some really nice stuff that’s being ignored,” he says. And if you nose around yard sales and pawn and antique shops, or click through eBay or Facebook Marketplace, you’ll discover a rich but affordable vein of coveted brands like Marantz, Bose, Technics, Pioneer, Boston Acoustics, JBL, Audiolab, Nakamichi, and others.

Groves advises first asking yourself: How do I prefer to listen to music? If streaming’s your thing, a lot of new stereos are set up for that, either via Bluetooth or A/V cable connection. If you’ve got a hard drive full of mp3 and wav. files, you can set up an old computer as a music server and connect a decent set of speakers.

Things get a bit more complicated with physical media: CDs, cassette tapes, and vinyl. The latter requires the most gear—usually a turntable, a preamp/tuner, and speakers. Groves says that a good rule of thumb is to buy components from the time period when your preferred format was king. For vinyl, that’s the 1960s through the early ’80s and for CDs and cassettes, the 1980s through the early 2000s.

Once you know what you need, it’s time to consider the budget. “If you pay attention and you’re patient, you can build a really nice system for not a ton of money,” says Groves. Before you buy, do a bit of research online about a model that grabs your interest. Pull up Google to see if that particular Technics turntable has a fussy switch, or if it’s a stalwart—or get advice from a gearhead friend. If possible, before you pay for a piece, plug it in, turn the knobs, flick the switches, see if everything works.

If it does, great. But finding a flaw in an item doesn’t necessarily mean you should pass it up, says Groves. For example, if you can get an imperfect Pioneer receiver from the 1970s or a set of Marantz speakers for a steal, it’s well worth your money to foot the repair bill. (Groves and Bailie are happy to advise on these types of purchases.)

What you’ll spend

If you follow the basic rules above, and stick with high-quality brand names, it’s possible to assemble a really nice system for $500 or less. For $500 to-$1,000, “you can put together a really really nice system,” says Groves, perhaps incorporating a set of audiophile speakers (like the Magnepan brand). For upwards of $1,000, you can move into “amazing” territory, he says, though the casual listener probably doesn’t need this level of investment.

“Your system gets better as you become a better listener,” he says. “Some people are going to put [music] on and make dinner, so you don’t need the world’s best stereo to do that. The more you’re going to sit and just actively listen to the space around the notes…the more you listen, the more [you’ll] train your ears, your palate. I suppose it’s a little like wine: There’s a point where there’s a super taster, and a super listener. And even then I have my doubts as to, ‘Are your ears really that good?’”

Particularly where vinyl is concerned, there are some pieces of equipment to avoid, because crappy gear will ruin your records. Typically, the heavier the turntable, the better the quality, says Groves. Steer clear of anything with a platter or tonearm made of plastic, and note that any good tonearm will have a counterweight. Console stereos—the ones built into credenzas, for instance—may have a cool vintage look, but their turntables aren’t usually of very good quality.

Groves says that the most important component of a turntable is the needle, or cartridge. A worn or damaged needle will distort the audio and mess up a record’s grooves. So, if you buy a good vintage turntable, you may want to invest in a new needle.

He also advises those buying a vinyl system to get a carbon-fiber record brush. Boundless Audio makes a good one; Groves bought his years ago at Crutchfield. “The electrostatic fiber sucks the dust right out [of the grooves],” he says.

And he’s emphatic about his final piece of advice: “The most expensive part of your stereo system is your record collection. Take care of your records!”

EccoHollow Art+Sound, Staunton,  (540) 415-9000, echohollow.com

In rotation

Whether you’re new to vinyl or getting back into it after selling (or tossing) your collection when CDs were king, Gwen Berthy
of Charlottesville’s Melody Supreme recommends a few recent releases to kickstart, or reinvigorate, your collection.

Stereolab, Sound-Dust

The 2019 reissue of the seventh album from these English-French avant-poppers is not only remastered from the original half-inch tapes, it’s also been expanded to include demo
versions of the album tracks.

Alice Clark, Alice Clark

Clark is a legend among funk and soul fanatics, and her 1972 self-titled record was officially reissued for the first time in 2019.

Silver Jews, American Water

Silver Jews frontman David Berman, who died last year, lived
in Charlottesville for a time (and attended UVA, where he met bandmates Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich), and DJed on local station WTJU. In 2018, his label reissued this indie rock classic with half-speed mastering from Abbey Road studios.

Echo and the Bunnymen,
John Peel Sessions 1979-1983

Liverpool’s post-punk heroes compile all of the sessions they recorded with legendary English DJ/music journalist/radio producer John Peel.

Cate LeBon, Reward

The latest from a wonderfully quirky, risk-taking folk/baroque pop Welsh musician and songwriter.

Patrice Rushen, Remind Me

The definitive three-LP compilation of this jazz pianist and R&B singer’s music, remastered from the original tapes.

Angel Olsen, All Mirrors

Lush alternative pop from a contemporary master of the genre.

Jessie Chapman is standing in the shower of her Charlottesville home. She’s fully clothed and the water is not running. Architects do this sort of thing when they’re trying to give someone an idea of the scale of a particular place. “It really is very comfortable,” says Chapman, the co-principal of Goodhouse Design.

At a time when digital rendering has all but taken over the design and architecture fields, Chapman is a diehard believer in the power of sketching as a way to visualize her work. She’s on the board of the global nonprofit Urban Sketchers, which has more than 280 chapters in nearly 50 countries. She, like other members, travels widely to connect with and work alongside fellow sketchers.

Chapman was featured in this magazine four years ago, two years before she’d formally joined forces with Peter LaBau—a residential designer who’s worked in Charlottesville since 2005—to form Goodhouse (see page 45). The firm has stuck with LaBau’s focus on home design and building, and Chapman has brought a new dimension to the practice. As an art history major at Wellesley College, in Massachusetts, she spent her third year in Rome, which sparked her interest in architecture. Her twin passions came together in graduate school at UVA, where she earned masters degrees in architectural history and architecture.

Since then, she has burnished her professional bona fides as an architect, but the sketching has never stopped. Her Instagram feed, @sketchwell, reveals yet another interest: food and drink. She renders with watercolors as well as on an iPad using the Procreate illustration app; the latter allows her to animate her drawings, so they take shape before your very eyes. Regardless of the medium she uses, a sandwich with a side of chips looks delicious, and so does a plate of charcuterie, a scattering of olives, a rosy bunch of radishes, and a pinkish-red negroni.

When we called Chapman to ask her to contribute to Abode, she said, “How about my bathroom,” and a day later she emailed an iPad rendering that stretched from the sink inside the door all the way back to the shower. When I visited her house to see the room, I gained a deeper appreciation for the artist’s eye. The sketch presented the elements horizontally, in a landscape view, when in reality the bathroom is about 13 feet long and five feet wide.

“I help clients see what a room will look like,” she says. “A computer-generated architectural drawing can be intimidating—everything appears so technical. It has to be, in order for something to be built properly.”

But the imagination to see the finished product and the skill render it? That’s Chapman’s gift.

Inside a North Downtown live-work space called Timepiece, the groundbreaking firm Parabola Architecture is quietly tackling some of the big design questions of our time. Co-founders Carrie Meinberg Burke and Kevin Burke designed Timepiece 20 years ago as a place to house both their family and the architectural practice, envisioning the building as a “focusing device” for syncing with the world’s basic rhythms. Daily and annual movements of light determine the angles of interior stair walls and the curved roof form.

Then, in 2016, the firm was entrusted with the formidable challenge of designing Google’s first ground-up office building, known as 1212 Bordeaux after its address in Sunnyvale, California. The project expanded the 4D experiential concepts from Timepiece to meet Google’s goal of solving for both focus and collaboration in the workplace. Deeply unconventional in form, 1212 defines distinct zones of light, thermal comfort, and acoustics. Its spaces range from the buzz of a sunny cafe to a vast, softly daylit workspace with sky views.

Parabola’s integrated expertise suggests design maxims that can apply to any scale or typology —including some of the design challenges facing Charlottesville, where they’re excited to be taking on more local projects.

1. Forces evolve form

Parabola’s guiding ethos is “forces evolve form.” The maxim rests on the foundational idea that a building can be a response to forces—natural and human—at a site, rather than a reiteration of a particular style, be it traditional or trendy.

2. Fittingness

For Parabola, dedicated observation of a site, from sun and wind to human context, has to be the first step in designing fitting architecture. “The key is to uncover design drivers from that knowledge,” says Meinberg Burke. This approach preempts “the rush to preconceived form”—the designer’s initial urge to fill the blank page—and instead derives form from site-specific forces of nature and culture. Beauty and cutting-edge performance (1212 is certified LEED Platinum) are the results.

3. Design out, build in

An emphasis on human and ecological health is part of Parabola’s DNA, based on the partners’ extensive background with Cradle to Cradle (the design philosophy of longtime Charlottesville firm William McDonough + Partners, where Burke was studio director) and the Living Building Challenge (a rigorous performance standard for buildings and part of Meinberg Burke’s expertise). Parabola’s approach is to consciously “design out” components with potentially adverse impacts, focusing instead on the presence of essential, authentic materials. In the case of 1212, this meant an untreated exposed steel structure that retains the markings of its manufacture, and innovative prefabricated concrete insulated panels that create both the interior and exterior finish of the building, without layers of additional materials and finishes.

4. Design the ethereal elements

Light, air, temperature, sound, and scale—the intangibles—drove ancient design, and Parabola often draws from this principle. Timepiece is calibrated to daylight through an oculus in the roof, creating a focused beam of light that skims surfaces throughout the interior, the opposite of the shadow cast on a sundial. 1212 admits daylight through an extensive north-facing saw-tooth roof, affording views to the sky and a sense of changing light conditions throughout the day, all within a space that has the soft acoustics of a library reading room. 

 Those intangibles also explain why employees and visitors have remarked that the Google building seems to “have a soul.” Burke notes: “When design focuses on the human senses, there’s an alchemy that occurs well beyond the measurable benefits.”

5. Calibrate experiences

Human scale and senses are among the factors that evolve form. “Human beings are the given,” says Meinberg Burke. Thinking about what occupants would see and hear in the space informed Parabola’s design of daylight, sightlines and acoustical systems at 1212. Windows tilted north disperse light evenly, obviating the glare of direct sunbeams and allowing occupants to glimpse the sky. Absorptive materials and a sound-masking system soften and cancel background noise.

 She and Burke view lighting on the Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall as a feature that could benefit from a similarly experience-focused design. “When you’re sitting in certain places on the Mall at night, you’re blinded,” she says. Awareness of contrast ratio and calibrated placement of light fixtures would mean a better experience. 

6. Constraints enable innovation

Architects can look at limitations—like building codes, budgets, and timelines—not as obstacles but rather as engines for design innovation. Parabola delivered 1212 on time (the process took just 22 months) and within a conventional budget, while still meeting Google’s goals for human and environmental health. “Google gave the challenge back to us,” says Burke, paraphrasing the client thus: “We don’t want to expand the budget or timeline. Within those enabling constraints, what can we get?”

He and Meinberg Burke say that cities, Charlottesville included, can write impactful constraints into building codes—for example, defining zoning envelopes with solar orientation in mind to carve out space to bring light to rooftops and pedestrians. Experientially, the south side of the street is vastly different from the north side, and this ought to be a consideration in urban design, Burke says. 

7. Master builder model

Tight teamwork is the key to succeeding within given limits. Parabola’s commitment to a flowing give-and-take with builders and other collaborators has its roots in their experience as the contractor on Timepiece. The project revolutionized their approach to communicating design intent to those who will enact it.

“That was a profound realization that we’ve carried forward to our subsequent projects,” Meinberg Burke says. “On 1212, our role was to establish the design vision and to communicate the why of a design, all the way through construction. That enabled the builders to infuse their intelligence and experience.” The project has won numerous awards, including California AIA’s Leading Edge award for excellence in design and sustainable performance.

 Similarly, this master-builder design process infuses the builder’s wisdom during the earliest phases of design, and design thinking throughout construction, an approach that could translate well to Charlottesville’s new development projects. 

8. Reveal craft

To “design out” fireproofing, say, not only eliminates unhealthy materials; it allows the building’s steel structure (the “bones of the building”) to speak to its users. 1212 showcases construction markings on its structural frame and makes exposed steel a significant aesthetic element. The work of tradespeople and craftspeople is fully on view.

 “People can tell when something’s been made with care,” says Meinberg Burke. “The only way to do that is to fully engage everyone in the process, and allow them the opportunity to manifest their own work.”

9. Adaptability

A large, open span inside 1212, free from structural columns, not only makes the interior pleasing to users, it means that the building will have great adaptability for different functions in the future. “Look at the Downtown Mall,” says Burke. “Ninety percent of those storefronts and interiors have been adapted and changed. Buildings need to be robust enough to allow for constant change and evolution of use.”

 Within the tech industry specifically, he adds, there’s a persistent need for flexibility, which Charlottesville architecture will have to address in order to attract high-tech businesses. “In the tech workplace there’s a preference for co-locating teams that expand and contract, and open, democratic workplaces supported by a range of private meeting room types,” he says. “Companies will want to continuously evolve the way they’re working, and the architecture needs to support this evolution.”

10. Design for life

“We think design can enhance health and quality of life,” says Meinberg Burke. In Sunnyvale, the native habitat is oak savanna, not the irrigated green lawns of what had become a suburban context. 1212, to which Charlottesville firm SiteWorks contributed landscape design, is “an island of the native,” says Burke.

 If human and ecological health are inextricably connected, Parabola says, then the notion of biophilia—our innate love of nature—is activated by built environments where occupants experience natural rhythms: daylight, weather, and seasons.