When she’s called a serious decathlete, May Kelly demurs. “I just love to be in the outdoors,” she says. “But I have to be moving—I enjoy it more.”
“Moving” for Kelly means lap swimming, bicycling, running, and hiking. When she and husband Jim bought a Whitehall-area house on a knoll overlooking Shenandoah National Park in 2017, Jim says they knew right away the “postage stamp-sized pool” in the back yard wasn’t going to work.
Figuring out how to revamp the property to fit their needs took about a year, says Jim. A lap pool was a large part of the ask, but May also wanted to turn the existing backyard pool area into a formal garden. They decided to add a master bedroom suite on the home’s north end. And their family enjoys bocce, so there also had to be a bocce court in the mix.
In 2018, the Kellys hired landscape architect Anna Boeschenstein of Grounded LLC to take on their project. The first challenge: The couple wanted the lap pool to take advantage of the spectacular mountain views. “That meant a long element on a steep topography, and finding flat spaces that fit around the existing [house] layout,” Boeschenstein says.
Boeschenstein and project manager John Gendreau of Abrahamse & Company solved that by building retaining walls along the western and northern hillsides, allowing them to place the lap pool along the home’s long axis and then wrap around the extended master bedroom end with a hot tub and a small patio with a fire pit. On the eastern façade, Boeschenstein converted the former sunken pool area into a parterre garden bounded by the drive, the existing guest house, and a new pergola with the bocce court behind it.
There’s no question the salt-water endless-edge lap pool is a stunning addition to the Kellys’ hilltop home. Because its narrow patio runs the length of the living, dining, and family rooms, the feature draws the eye out into the surrounding mountain vistas as the land drops away. The patio’s bluestone paving encloses three sides of the pool—at each end is a bed of native grama grass and ornamental Mexican feather grass, which is decorative, but not intrusive to the views. The pool installation was handled by Charlottesville Aquatics (the Kelly’s master bedroom addition provided a basement space to install the pool equipment out of sight).
Adding the spa area posed some challenges as well. The square hot tub and its seating area were set down a few steps, tucked into the hillside to keep clear sight lines around the pool. Boeschenstein planted green mound boxwood, a low-growing hybrid perfect for borders, around the spot. To help hold the slope below, she added more forsythia to the existing mix—“it’s fast-growing, and holds a slope well”—as well as Mount Airy dwarf fothergilla, with its showy and aromatic flower and multicolored fall foliage.
The small patio on the house’s north end provides the master suite with a private outside space. Paved with the same bluestone as the pool and spa areas, the patio has a stone cube firepit that allows year-round use.
The bluestone paving continues around to the east-facing terrace overlooking the new sunken garden. “I had seen formal gardens at the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago and loved them,” says May, who with her husband lived for years in the Chicago area. “Anna is the one that told me what I wanted was a parterre.”
Two existing large boxwoods and two coral bark Japanese maples that Boeschenstein added frame the steps leading from the terrace into the square parterre garden. Each corner has a triangular planting of little lime hydrangea enclosed by green mound boxwood. Crushed gravel paths outline four angled triangular beds bordered in Morris dwarf boxwood. The beds contain a mix of narrowleaf blue star, Japanese anemone, coneflowers, Siberian iris, dense blazing star, purple Joe Pye weed, peonies, bee balm, and mountain mint for changing color and foliage through the seasons. The central focus is a crystal sphere water fountain that the Kellys found; it adds a soothing sound, and catches light at all times of day.
Shaping the entire landscape took about a year. Fortunately for May, the pool was finished in 2019—just in time for the pandemic. Pre-COVID, while swimming at the ACAC pool, May got to know a couple of women who are national-level senior swimmers. When gyms in town were shut down, she invited them to practice in her new lap pool.
The garden, as gardens do, is still maturing. May gives credit to head gardener Alfredo Martinez and his crew—“they work really hard”—and to Boeschenstein’s plan: “The garden looks better every year.”