Even Laurel Smithadmits that having a brand that creates both jewelry and dayplanners is a little disjointed. “I like things to be neat and tidy and make sense,” she says, a sensibility that carries through her line of minimalist bracelets, earrings, and other accessories. But that’s what a planner is for—keeping things tidy. And when it came to designing a tool to help her stay organized, Smith kept her own needs in mind.
“The way my brain works, I need to be able to see everything in order to plan it and keep track of all of the moving pieces,” she says. Her version does just that, allowing users to see their monthly calendar, weekly schedule, weekly and month to-do lists, and notes in one spread.
“If you can’t see it all, you’ll lose track of it and then it doesn’t get done,” Smith says. “That’s the foundation of our planner system at Laurel Denise.”
She launched the first one in 2008, but after starting a family in 2012, she needed to pick a lane for the business: jewelry or planners. She chose jewelry as it was more established, but customers wouldn’t stop asking when she’d re-launch the planner—and she needed it, too!
“In 2020, as we were hosting a family from New York during the lockdown, I was managing my team of five remotely, and my two children were learning from home,” she says. “I realized that my organizational system needed to change and it needed to change quickly. In a conversation with my husband, I commented about how much I could use a Laurel Denise Planner in my life right at that moment.”
The 2021 version sold out and the 2022 version—which comes in deep green or features cover art by local artist Britt Davis—is on its second print run.
“Who knows where Laurel Denise will end up, but for now I’m super happy (and way grateful) to see both of our lanes expanding quite a bit,” Smith says.
Relative newcomer Springhouse Sundries focuses on the accessible—wines at a reasonable price we can all wrap our minds and taste buds around. Springhouse is a side project of the Wine Guild of Charlottesville, so it comes with some serious cred. Industry insiders Priscilla Curley and Matt Hauck pick the poison and offer the recs.
The Workshop
thewoolfactory.com
When you think of the Workshop, you likely think about tasty pastry and jolty java. But don’t sleep on the café’s non-caffeinated bevies. The Wool Factory-based spot specifically excels on local plonk and is in the process of rolling out its own wine line.
Market Street Wine
marketstwine.com
Market Street Wine is the OG, and the downcellar digs ooze historic charm. MSW’s fantastic Friday Night Wine tasting events are still on hiatus, but be on the lookout for occasional virtual events where you can taste along with industry experts. And cross your up-turned pinkies that the tastings come back soon.
Photo: John Robinson
Bottle House
bottlehouse.net
Public Fish and Oyster’s Daniel Kaufman, alongside Guillaume Gasparini, whose family owned the renowned but now-closed Pomme restaurant in Gordonsville, opened Bottle House to help folks select the perfect beverage for every occasion. Having opened during the pandemic, they’ve also focused on delivery, bringing bottles straight to your door. “Local is a big part of it,” Kaufman says. “We are lucky to live in a wine region that is making better and better wines all the time.”
Superette Saison
championbrewingcompany.com
Fun fact: Champion Brewing Company and Superette Saison owner Hunter Smith actually grew up around the vine—his parents own Afton Mountain Vineyards. At Champion Hospitality Group’s newish superette, situated next to beer-focused bistro Brasserie Saison, you’ll find a European-style market and café with an extensive wine selection.
Tilman’s
tilmanscheeseandwine.com
The folks behind Tilman’s say they make “people happy with cheese and wine,” and it’s that straightforward approach that has helped them carve out a niche in the local wine scene since 2017. The Tilman’s wine club, curated by the shop’s self-taught wine director Lizzy Trevor (see page 25), is one of the best in the city.
Beer Run
beerrun.com
Beer Run’s been slinging package bottles and in-bar booze since before it was the cool thing to do, and it’s easy to forget the shop has a great wine selection as well as lagers and ales. On the vine side, the beer mecca focuses on value picks, organic bottles and dynamically produced selections, including a solid list of uber-popular natural vinos.
In Vino Veritas
invinoveritasva.com
Is it worth the 15 minute drive out of town to visit In Vino Veritas in Keswick? Hell yeast. Sommelier to the (Michelin) stars, Erin Scala’s stylish and impeccably organized wine shop and gourmet grocery has it all: carefully curated bottles, hand-selected cases, unique events, and a superb monthly wine club.
Tastings of Charlottesville
tastingsofcville.com
Local fine dining dynamo Vincent Derquenne says it all about Tastings of Charlottesville: “Their knowledge is incredible.” Bill Curtis is a true patriarch of C’ville wine—when he opened Tastings in 1990, the idea of an integrated wine shop and bar was basically unheard of. Tastings ain’t flashy, but its somm cred is second to none.
The Wine Guild of Charlottesville
wineguildcville.com
The university of Charlottesville wine shops, the Wine Guild is where the local vintellectuals come together. With a star-studded staff, the small shop makes up in quality what it lacks in quantity. And its member structure offers a unique way to stay current with what’s poppin’ in wine. Members receive a discount on retail sales, private tastings with winemakers, wine dinners, and local vineyard tours.
There is much to look forward to as the Virginia wine industry matures, and as more and more high-quality wines are produced. Varieties such as cabernet franc and petit manseng are becoming recognized as grapes that flourish in the region. But a growing industry also gives space for smaller producers, new grape varieties, and creative winemaking techniques that result in interesting bottles that may give a glimpse of things to come. Here are five you shouldn’t miss.
Photo: Anna Kariel
2020 Strange Hybrid Moments from Lightwell Survey ($25)
How it tastes: Red fruits and perfumed roses on the nose. The palate carries this forward with strawberries, roses, and a hint of white pepper and tar on the finish. A touch darker and more flavorful than most rosés with persistent acidity on the finish.
Pair it with: Blackened fish, fried chicken, sushi
Notes: A blend of vidal blanc, chambourcin, blaufränkisch, petit manseng, and traminette. Winemaker Ben Jordan is focused on the potential of hybrid grapes (vidal blanc, chambourcin, and traminette) as part of the future of Virginia wine and showcases them here in this singular blend.
2019 Fiano Reserve from Barboursville Vineyards ($25)
How it tastes: Very floral nose leading to flavors of grapefruit, apricot, and pear. Balanced with lingering acidity and a hint of white peaches on the finish.
Pair it with: Grilled seafood, pasta with cream sauce, goat cheese
Notes: Barboursville first released its Fiano in 2015, and was the first winery on the East Coast to produce wine from this ancient variety originating in central Italy. The 2019 vintage was an excellent one in Virginia and this bottle is perhaps the best Fiano from Barboursville to date.
Photo: Anna Kariel
Amélie Sparkling Rosé (non-vintage) from Keswick Vineyards ($25)
How it tastes: A darker rosé-style sparkling wine. Red and black cherry flavors dominate with lingering tartness on the finish.
Pair it with: Stir-fry mushrooms, pork tenderloin, roasted duck
Notes: Made from norton, the only wine grape native to America. Although Missouri claims it as its state grape, Virginia had the first plantings of this variety. Like many, Keswick winemaker Stephen Barnard freely admits that he does not like the flavors of norton as a red wine, but he crafts an enjoyable rosé sparkling from the variety.
Photo: Anna Kariel
2020 Cabernet Franc from Vino dal Bosco ($25)
How it tastes: Fresh, bright flavors of red berries along with plum, green herbs, and a hint of licorice. A medium-bodied wine that would benefit from a slight chill and evokes a walk in the forest during autumn.
Pair it with: Braised pork stew, black beans and rice, roasted quail, burgers off the grill
Notes: A product of Gabrielle Rausse Winery, where sons Peter and Tim are largely responsible for the winemaking. The Vino dal Bosco label highlights wines with no added sulfites. The cabernet franc was aged half in stainless steel and half in clay amphora.
2018 Sly Fox Cabernet Franc from Flying Fox Vineyards ($40)
How it tastes: Aging in used bourbon barrels yields a combination of red fruits and spiciness with vanilla, coffee, biscuit, and smoke. The palate is rich and full of flavor with slight sweetness.
Pair it with: Barbecued ribs, steak, smoked vegetables, your favorite cigar
Notes: Sly Fox is the experimental label of Flying Fox Vineyards and gives the winery permission to play with some non-standard techniques. Winemaker Emily Pelton takes the opportunity here to do something that is perhaps a bit controversial, but unique and creative—and full of flavor.
Vincent Derquenne and Rachel Gendreau. Photo: Anna Kariel
Vincent Derquenne has been at the center of Charlottesville’s fine-dining universe for nearly 30 years. And certainly wine service has been somewhere in his orbit over the decades. Now, he’s bringing it closer than ever with the launch of Crush Pad Wines, a bar and bottle shop across the Downtown Mall from Bizou, the restaurant Derquenne has run alongside Timothy Burgess for 25 years.
To bring Crush Pad to life, the France native rounded up some of the top minds in the local vine game: Rachel Gendreau, Tom Walters, and Wes McCullen. Derquenne and Gendreau recently talked to Knife & Fork about the venture.
K&F: This seems like a bit of a departure for you, Vincent.
Derquenne: Rachel and I have thought about this for quite a while—four to five years. So, I’m not the only one in this. Tom has been in the wine business for 25 years, and Wes has been in it for around 40. Rachel is working on her master sommelier [certification]. We have a very good team. We want to bring our knowledge and sell the right bottles to the right people.
Gendreau: We also want it to be fun. Wine is fun, and I think sometimes that can be a little lost in the sauce. There is this preconceived notion that, as you enter the higher echelons of great wine and drinking with knowledgeable people, it is very serious. We want it to be light and approachable for everyone, whether you are a serious collector or you just love wine and don’t know that much about it.
Do you have some current favorite wines?
Derquenne: They are like kids—they are all my favorites. Now that the season is changing, something that was my favorite a month ago is not going to be my favorite now. But it is okay, because they are going to come back next year. A wine you can drink outside in a courtyard or your backyard might be incredible, but two months later it doesn’t taste the same. Right now, we are going to the reds—the burgundies, the cabernet sauvignons, the pinot noirs from the West Coast. But there are also always a couple little wines that we misjudge, then they come back to you and say, “Hey, I am here.” And you say, “Yes, you are right. That is what you are here for.” It’s a whole relationship. Wine always surprises us.
What are you seeing consumers gravitate toward?
Gendreau: I have been really pleasantly—not surprised—but it has been lovely to see how many of our guests are mindful in their purchasing. We have had many folks ask for female-owned wineries, female winemakers, and I love that.
What can people expect from the food at Crush Pad?
Derquenne: The food is there to match the wine. It is a wine bar and wine shop, not a sit-down restaurant with a chef that only cooks the food and doesn’t understand what is around him. The focus point is the wine. The food is simple and easygoing for people to enjoy. I don’t want them to feel scared about the food we are doing. You’re going to have a good time. Everything is going to be okay.
Do the two of you have some favorite pairings?
Gendreau: I know we are out of tomato season, but I was loving this off-dry riesling with a tomato sandwich. The sweetness of the wine and acidity of the tomato—it is transformative.
Derquenne: We are doing a raclette, and if you take the raclette with a dry white wine from the mountains, it is beautiful. Matching the wines sometimes surprises you. You can take a red wine and find an ingredient inside the recipe and somehow things match. And I will say something about matching. Champagne matches with everything. It has got to be the bubbles.
Gendreau: Yes. It goes with breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
At Lemongrass, Yoshihiro (pictured) and Yukiko Tauchi bring the know-how (and the flavor) from their former posts, from Foods of All Nations to Ten. Photo: Eze Amos
Yoshihiro Tauchi is tough. When he developed back problems decades ago while butchering tuna at a New York fish company, his way of “taking it easy” was to switch to restaurant work. After he healed up he started his own fish company in Washington, D.C. That was only the beginning of his adventures in the U.S.
Tauchi and his wife, Yukiko, arrived from Japan 36 years ago and have been working hard in the food world ever since. They’re warm and accommodating people with a wry sense of humor. As they tell the story of their intertwining careers, Yukiko often translates for Yoshihiro, and they finish each other’s sentences with the ease born of a long partnership.
The two moved to Virginia in 1998 to help Foods of All Nations launch the concept of takeout sushi in Charlottesville. By the time the landmark restaurant TEN opened in 2006 on the Downtown Mall, Yoshihiro’s skills as a sushi chef were recognized enough around town that he was invited to come to TEN as a sous-chef. He spent nearly eight years in that renowned kitchen, while Yukiko stayed at Foods of All Nations.
The couple dove back into entrepreneurship in 2013, buying the sushi spot in York Place then known as Miyako. The Tauchis changed the name to Kokoro—meaning “heart.” But Kokoro turned out to be a popular name, and the couple ended up on the wrong end of a trademark lawsuit. Ever resilient, they changed their name to “Mican”—a tribute to the Mandarin-type oranges popular in Tauchi’s hometown on the island of Shikoku—and served up a sophisticated menu of classic Japanese food, including sushi, donburi, and ramen. Their food earned glowing reviews.
It was hard going in that location, though—so close to the bustle of the mall, and yet oddly quiet. So when their friend Pham, the owner of the Thai favorite Lemongrass, got ready to retire in 2016, he proposed to the Tauchis that they might have an easier time in his well-placed Corner location. They bought Lemongrass and merged the two menus, Thai and Japanese. Pham thought they wouldn’t have to work so hard there.
“But not true!” says Yoshihiro, laughing hard along with his wife as he continues the tale. For one thing, although Pham provided recipes, and one of the Lemongrass chefs stayed on to help, Yoshihiro had never cooked Thai food before. Even as he worked on learning this new cuisine, he faced new competition—the Charlottesville scene saw more and more Thai and other Asian restaurants opening all the time. And then COVID-19 came along, forcing them to survive on takeout only.
The Tauchis just kept on weathering the storm, though, showing the same grit that’s carried them through so many challenges in the past. And things are looking up. “Business is getting better,” says Yukiko, now that in-house dining has returned. They’ve gotten to know their new customer base—largely made up of students, who tend to order pad Thai or panang curry more often than sushi or donburi. And they’ve figured out how to adapt those flavors to American tastes. “South Asian food has very strong fish flavors, but we changed that to be more mild,” says Yukiko.
After 23 years in Charlottesville, these two are as much a part of the local scene as anyone. And they’re still bringing the deliciousness, one Volcano Roll at a time.
Local pizzeria veteran Aaron Hill is pushing the boundaries of pie with mobile kitchen Slice Versa. Photo: Eze Amos
If you want to make Neapolitan-style pizza in Charlottesville and you’re not from Naples, being from Lampo is probably the next best thing.
But let’s back up. Aaron Hill’s pizza-making days started well before he served as the Belmont restaurant’s sous chef from 2016 to 2019. His first serious dough-flinging foray was at another member of the city’s Mount Pizzamore: Dr. Ho’s Humble Pie. Over two separate stints, Hill spent more than five years helping turn out the Doc’s Wonka-like creations, which couldn’t sit further from the strictures of Neapolitan style and its D.O.C. mandates.
“A lot of my style is definitely a blend,” Hill says. “I don’t go out of my way to do anything…by the rules. I think it’s more important to follow your own taste. There is no real point to [D.O.C. certification]. I see it as a racket.”
It’s that perspective that’s led to Slice Versa, Hill’s seven-month-old mobile wood fired pizza kitchen. From his custom trailer-slash-oven, he’s been turning out zingy Neapolitan-ish and Sicilian-style ’zas since spring 2021 and drawing fans around the county at breweries, wineries, farmers’ markets, and beyond.
To top his sourdough-based pies, Hill seeks out local cheeses, cured meats, and vegetables.
“We’re not in Italy, and I’m not going to be importing every ingredient I have,” Hill says. “I can get black walnut oil or hickory oil or olive oil that is just amazing stuff—all from Virginia. I want to represent this climate and our food system and be sustainable.”
Lending Slice Versa another pizza-loving perspective is co-owner Emma Luster. Hill and Luster met and married in 2019, drawn together in no small part by a certain round, mozzarella-topped delicacy. Luster kept a “pizza diary,” both dreamed of running a food truck, and as they probably say in Sicily, the rest was storia.
Hill’s favorite Slice Versa pizza so far has been a black walnut number he hopes to bring back to the menu soon. For those clinging to tradition, he’s also got the Cheesetown—four cheeses, garlic, chili flake, wild oregano, and EVOO over a crushed tomato base—and bestselling margherita.
“Wherever you are, everyone eats different—that’s been one of the coolest parts of this,” Hill says. “Kind of the point is to break the rules and have more options for more people.”
Lucky Blue’s owner Patrick McClure envisions his new bar as a day-to-night kind of eatery. Photo: Eze Amos
Patrick McClure had spent four happy years running Citizen Bowl Shop on the Downtown Mall—“Well,” he says, “not 2020”—when he decided it was time for a change.
You wouldn’t know it from the outside, where the old CB sign still hangs. But the old Bowl Shop’s been reinvented on the inside as Lucky Blue’s, a bar where rock n’ roll, burritos, and killer cheese steaks happily hang out alongside vegan tofu bowls.
“Coming out of the pandemic era—that’s what we’re doing, right?—I felt that what I, and everyone really, needed, was a comfortable neighborhood bar to help us ease back into our formerly normal social behavior,” McClure says. “Lucky Blue’s is intended as that ‘something for everyone’ kind of place, where you can have a civilized lunch with friends or co-workers, a lively dinner of comfort foods and beverages that don’t require lengthy explanations, or blow off steam after dinner, whether you’re a bourbon aficionado or love shots of Fireball.” Lucky Blue’s beverage menu balances variety with simplicity, offering enough beers, wines, ciders, and cocktails to give imbibers plenty of choices, without ever feeling overwhelming.
McClure describes Lucky Blue’s as a throwback to the days of “good bar, great jukebox”—even if it doesn’t actually have a jukebox. Having traveled the country as he wandered in and out of the orbit of his and his brother Andy’s various Charlottesville restaurants, McClure wanted to evoke the old bars of San Francisco, which “feel worthy of reverence, yet look like places your mother might warn you about.” He’s dreaming of live music one day, when health and safety permit, but for now, he’s making do with some truly excellent playlists.
Though cheesesteaks and burritos remain Lucky Blue’s mandate, McClure’s equally proud of the bar’s less artery-clogging offerings. “The Bowl Shop menu lives on, and my amazing lunch regulars that depended on that healthy-eating ethos will not be forgotten,” he says.
So far, McClure says, the Delta variant hasn’t squelched Lucky Blue’s success. “We have to take everything with a grain of salt, dash of Tapatio salsa, and a cold beer these days, but people have really enjoyed our space, and the feedback has been tremendous!” he says. “That, despite the lack of a new sign and very little advertising, shows us that we’re on our way to being a Downtown Mall ‘must do.’”
How many badass bakers can one modest hamlet support? Seems Charlottesville is determined to find out.
Christina Martin comes to Charlottesville trailing a wake of Michelin-starred experiences by way of the West Coast and Chicago. She most recently wrapped a short stint at The Inn at Little Washington.
Now, Martin’s putting out pastries under her microbakery label, BakerNoBakery, and stalking the local farmers’ markets while plotting her next move.
K&F: So, you’re a baker with no bakery?
CM: Actually that was an Instagram name that originated in high school, when I was making pastries—mostly cakes and cookies—for birthdays. I’ve just kept it up, through culinary school at Johnson & Wales University, through some internships, and up to now.
Your most recent restaurant stop was The Inn at Little Washington. Where were you before that?
I got a great internship at Grace in Chicago. I moved there in the middle of my junior year and was finishing my bachelor’s degree online. The restaurant closed six days later. It was a hard and fast reset for my career. I helped open two restaurants and closed two in a year and a half and worked at a total of four. It was intense. Then I moved back home to the San Francisco Bay area. When the pandemic hit, the restaurant I was going to work for in L.A. ended up having its opening pushed back. My cousins own Guajiros Miami Eatery here in C’ville, and I was doing bakery pop-ups at the time out of my parents’ house; my cousins said I should come and do pop-ups out of their restaurant.
Photo: John Robinson
And then you just happened upon a job at another three-Michelin-starred restaurant.
I booked all my travel and had a sublet set up, but it was a scam. I needed a job and saw an opening as the pastry chef de partie at The Inn at Little Washington. I had been in fine dining of that caliber, so it was a linear move.
How did you get from there to your own business?
Through my pops-ups I started wholesaling cookie dough to my cousin. Then, because I had worked in multiple cities and met a lot of people, I started shipping bread—sending all these flavors and fun things I was working on around the country. And Charlottesville was drawing me in.
But you left the Inn.
I love the environment of fine dining, but I really believe my path in life lies with being an entrepreneur, as scary as it is. So, currently I’m doing production out of a commercial kitchen from 3-7:30am three days a week. I still think of myself as a baker without a bakery. With the way my creativity is, retail doesn’t really work. I enjoy the free form of the farmers’ market. Then I can spend my weekdays foraging or going to source ingredients.
What’s your baking style?
I like to describe it as Americana-diversity. I work with a lot of traditional American and French techniques but modify them, incorporating the diversity that is this country. I’m half Latin and half white but grew up in the Bay Area, where there are a lot of Asian and Hispanic influences, as well as modern gastronomic techniques.
Speed round: favorite pastry to eat, favorite local pastry, favorite pastry to bake.
I love a perfectly executed kouign-amann. It’s a French pastry that is laminated like a croissant, but the last two folds are done with sugar instead of flour, giving it this caramelly crust. The matcha mint chocolate chip cookie from Bowerbird is ridiculously good. And I love baking caramel buns because laminating by hand is a really fun process, and it’s different every time.
Alana Woerpel began using her imagination to create beauty and comfort as a little girl, helping her mother sew, paint, and hang wallpaper in the houses her parents bought to renovate. These days, the UVA alum has her own business, Alana’s, Ltd., a prize-winning interior design firm.
Creating beautiful rooms has also become her avocation: In her free time, Woerpel buys and decorates houses for resale. It’s a version of the busman’s holiday—“I don’t play tennis or have hobbies,” she says. “I love bringing old houses back to life.”
One day a year ago, a friend looking to downsize asked Woerpel along to check out a 1930s house in Charlottesville’s Lewis Mountain area before it came on the market. And, Woerpel recalls, “I fell in love.”
Photo: Virginia Hamrick
When the house was finally listed this spring, and her friend decided she wasn’t interested, Woerpel snapped it up. For the next four months, she lavished her nights, weekends, and design imagination on bringing out the potential she had seen on that first visit. In the process, she discovered this was a place she couldn’t give up.
One of the house’s attractions is its setting. The half-acre lot, on a not-quite-two-lane side street, is narrow and steep; the two-story fieldstone house is set back from the road, turned sideways and tucked into the slope. Because the house was uninhabited for months, the naturalistic garden and shrubs have a lush, overgrown look that suggests hidden mysteries, like The Secret Garden.
The curved driveway crosses a small stream (“Like a moat!” says Woerpel) and leads up to the basement garage. From the driveway, a stone stairway on the right leads up the slope to the first floor, and a door that used to open into a small—and inadequate—kitchen. The layout there was awkward (kitchen into dining room into office) and cramped. Woerpel, working with her frequent partner Rich Bell Construction, opened up the sight line by aligning the doorways of the three rooms; she repurposed them into a charming entry, leading to a square dining room, with an updated galley kitchen beyond.
Photo: Virginia Hamrick
Off the entry, a stairway gives access to the second floor. Years ago, when a UVA professor lived in the house, that attic space was a student apartment; Woerpel has redesigned it as a second bedroom and guest room (or a potential Airbnb rental, with its own bathroom and laundry).
To the left of the driveway, a path circles up past a huge wisteria to the unique feature that first caught Woerpel’s imagination: a flagstone-paved courtyard. It’s an intimate space, surrounded on three sides by the golden stone walls of the master bedroom suite, the living room with its French doors, and the kitchen. Built into the kitchen wall, and creating an arch over the dining room entry, is an outdoor stone stairway up to the second floor. The south-facing courtyard is screened from the adjoining lot by a bank of azaleas and small trees—and, from some previous owner, a five-foot-tall topiary dog.
“I saw this and thought, ‘Am I in the south of France?’” Woerpel says. “Right away, I knew I had to have this house.”
Photo: Virginia Hamrick
That Mediterranean feel is carried through in the interior as well. The living room, with its white-painted wood paneling (all original), is light and open; opposite the French doors is a wall of windows overlooking a border of shrubs and trees. The white walls, ceiling, and cabinets set off the brightly patterned ceramic tiles around the fireplace in both living and dining rooms. The original oak flooring, now aged to a honey-gold, flows throughout all the first-floor rooms.
Woerpel kept the living room space essentially unchanged, but she turned its coat closet into a powder room, papered with a single panel of a painted garden scene. She incorporated the small bedroom/nursery into the master bedroom, to create a suite with a walk-in closet and modernized bathroom featuring double sinks, corner shower stall, and gray Carrera marble basketweave flooring.
Photo: Virginia Hamrick
As Alana’s Ltd., Woerpel has clients whose needs and tastes figure in to the final design. But “in my personal projects, I have an imaginary client in mind,” she says. “I picture who might live in there, and decorate to that.” Often, that means letting the house speak to her. “If you’re unsure about what to put in a room or a space,” she says, “sit and live with it for a while. Eventually you’ll know.”
But in the case of this Lewis Mountain home, from the start the imaginary client was Woerpel herself. She was so sure she wanted the house that she began ordering kitchen cabinets even before the sale closed.
Woerpel’s style uses warm neutral colors, large comfortable furniture with simple lines, luxurious fabrics, distressed or painted wood, and big abstract wall art to create spaces that are airy without being overwhelming, calm and inviting, ready to live in. That style, married to this house’s features—the setting, the stone, the courtyard, the sense of snug comfort and sunlight—reinforces the intimate charm that attracted Woerpel from the beginning.
As each room came together, the décor was a combination of furnishings Woerpel has gathered from her interior designer “warehouse” and her own personal pieces—including several large black-and-white charcoal sketches produced by her oldest son, now a professional artist. “When you use things with a history, they have a patina,” she says. “It gives the house a soul.” It’s clear this house has captured hers.
Tate Pray doesn’t consider furniture art. But that doesn’t mean his work isn’t artistic.
The classically trained painter, sculptor, and tireless maker began working as a carpenter after earning his art degree. He moved to Charlottesville in 2005, transitioned to concrete formwork and stuck with that for more than a decade.
In 2019, Pray returned to his carpentry roots and launched Poem Furniture to bring handcrafted, solid wood furniture and cabinetry to homeowners with vision. He recently chatted with Abode about his own vision.
Abode: What makes Poem Furniture unique?
Tate Pray: We are antithetical to the throwaway culture that we all reside in, and we hope to basically make a mark in the community by crafting heirloom-quality furniture.
Are most of your pieces made-to-order?
We have a showroom in town and have a number of spec pieces, but the majority of the work is commissioned by architects and designers. They come to us—they know the work I do. Sometimes they want to tailor to clients’ needs or they come to us with a completely different vision of their own we can help realize.
Photo: Eze Amos
What materials do you use specifically?
We work in all the domestic hardwoods, and a lot of it is local. We work with sawyers and people who dry the lumber locally. We also fabricate our own metalwork, and that’s a component that’s been valuable to our clients. We have the capability to do sand casting and all the resources to fabricate in metal.
How did you move from classical art training to furniture making?
In supporting my art habit, I got into the building trades. I really love making things that are practical. I still make art here and there, but with furniture there is that connection that comes from creating things for people to live with functionally. It’s really gratifying. What art and furniture have in common is a desire to create and work with your hands. I have an atelier-type background and learned all the classical techniques in painting and drawing and sculpture. With sculpture, you have a visual, hands-on way to replicate nature, and the mechanical acumen you develop translates almost directly to furniture design and proportion and form. The only difference is the functional component of it—making something useful.
So furniture is definitely not art?
I think the inherent nature of art is that it doesn’t have a function. So yes, there is a hard line. If you are making things of use, they should be useful. Whether it is comfortable or not is part of the form-function debate.
Do you have any favorite Poem Furniture pieces?
Most everything I make, I love. I think I’ve had success working with designers and riffing off of each other to a positive end—creating something unique and different and exciting for both of us. A lot of the things that excite me have some element of whimsy. That kind of thing scratches a certain part of my DNA. I love making things that have different elements: metal, steel, wood, stone.
So, no. No favorite pieces.
In one instance, over at Oakhurst Inn, a designer and I worked together on a bar. The back bar was there for us to kind of respond to, and one idea was to make a replica in wood. I said, why don’t we make the whole thing in steel? The designer said she was thrilled and we worked out the details together—a glass and steel, mirrored upper bar, steel crown moldings, all welded together. It’s something you don’t see often, kind of harkening to a storefront façade. And there was just a unique moment where the place and piece spoke to a certain material. We just went, “aha.”
