Author: Carol Diggs

Kenny Ball has been finding, buying, and selling European antiques for more than three decades. His showroom on Ivy Road is filled with beautiful furniture, furnishings, and decorative arts. You might assume a background of wealth and privilege…but the road that brought him here began with a pony. 

“I didn’t grow up with these things,” Ball says, gesturing at the antiques around him. He was born and raised on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, in a family of farmers and watermen—“a humble home,” in his words. “But I like pretty things, and I was smart enough to expose myself [to a wider world], through the people I met.”

The pony was a childhood gift from his parents, and horses became his passion. Ball, who’s “been Kenny all my life,” started going to horse shows around the Mid-Atlantic, and through the friends he made in that circuit began attended local auctions. He picked up a few items of furniture, and soon was selling them as well. 

By the 1980s, Ball’s involvement in the horse show world brought him to Albemarle County. His growing interest in antiques led him to the Country Store Antique Mall in Ruckersville, where he shared a booth upstairs and became friends with owner Jean Voight. The next step was a shop called Dovetail Antiques on Water Street in Charlottesville, where he partnered with Voight for the first year. “That was my first real shop,” he recalls. 

Soon he was scouting major antique shows, including the Greensboro Super Flea Market, where he met well-known dealer Caroline Faison—“one of the most important people in my life.” Soon he was accompanying Faison on her shopping trips to Europe, learning more and more about European antiques and décor—“I was absorbing like a sponge,” he recalls. Through those shows and others, he met more people in the antiques and design world—Bunny Williams, Charlotte Moss, and Victoria Hagan among them. Gradually, Ball began to focus on furniture and furnishings from the English, French, and Italian 18th and 19th centuries: “It’s just what I discovered that I like, although it also has to do with the people I’ve met.”

By the early 2000s, Ball had moved into a larger space on Ivy Road, and Kenny Ball Antiques was well known in Virginia and the Mid-Atlantic. Then came the recession of 2008-2009. “We weren’t selling anything,” he recalls, “and a longtime employee said, ‘You’ve been doing design work [advising clients on what to buy and how to use it in their homes]—only you haven’t been charging for it.’” So Ball began consulting with local architects, and grew a separate retail design business that now has its own full-time staff, showroom, design library, and CEO—his daughter Chloe. 

Navigating the pandemic has not been as challenging. Being homebound turned many people’s thoughts to redecorating, and with the explosive growth of Instagram, Kenny Ball Antiques does a large portion of its sales online. Buying antiques sight-unseen might seem like a risky business, but Ball is careful both in describing his offerings and in assuring his clients that no sale is complete until they are satisfied. “I’ve worked hard on my reputation,” he says. “The only customer I want is a happy customer.” (Another side effect of Instagram: “We’re seeing more younger people.”)

In the last year, Kenny Ball Antiques has moved from Ivy Square to a larger, light-filled showroom next to the Market at Bellair. People often come to stroll around and look at the pieces, without buying anything—which is fine with him. “I love having a shop because of the relationship I build with my customers,” he says. And many of those customers have been coming—and buying—for decades.

What brings people in? Ball says his customers are drawn by his style—he knows and loves European antiques, but he has the ability to combine them with objects from other periods. “The market here [in the Charlottesville area] is very broad, and my customers are eclectic—and I like to mix it up.” In his showroom, Ball’s personal favorites (“the Directoire period—I like straight lines, good Georgian, things that never go out of style”) co-exist comfortably with more ornate inlaid and painted furniture, Chinoiserie decorative items, some primitives, and contemporary graphic arts.

Any advice for those just beginning to consider antiques? “Buy what you love,” says Ball without hesitation. “And buy it when you see it—the piece may not be there when you come back.” Those rules have stood him in good stead over his career—“and after 35 years, I still love coming to work.”

Chimney House doesn’t announce itself. Turn onto the gravel road, drive under a few trees and up a short grassy slope, and the house is revealed, silhouetted against the sky and the Blue Ridge in the distance. The exposed hilltop, the almost windowless white brick walls and steep dark metal roof, the rustle of tall grasses—it feels like a beach house on a dune, immersed in ground and wind and sky. 

From this side, the house appears long and low, anchored to the earth by the three 30-foot chimneys for which it’s named. A flagstone path leads to a tall plain black door set in the angle where two long white brick walls intersect.

Inside, the house’s geometry becomes a way of drawing visitors in and through the spaces. The exterior white brick wall extends into the entry, then a short stairway leads down, opening into the Main Hall. This two-story kitchen/dining/living area is centered around a massive free-standing white brick chimney with two fireplaces, one facing the living area, one facing the dining area/kitchen. Along the western wall is a series of huge fixed windows and sliding glass/screen doors framing (and proving access to) a vista of fields, woods, and mountains. 

“This is what we sited the house around,” says architect Thomas Ryan of T.W. Ryan Architecture. “The site is set up so that the mountains are very present.” The owner expresses that feeling in different words: “The sunsets here never get old.”

Three Chimney House was designed to embrace its setting—literally. From the Main Hall, two wings extend westward: the family’s residential wing is angled to the south, while the northern wing holds a guest room and studio. The more private rooms are thus set apart, while still connected visually and spatially to the core living areas.

The owners of Three Chimney House both have roots in central Virginia (one attended UVA), but had lived for years in the New York City area and had seen Ryan’s work there. With professional changes and two young children, the couple wanted to live closer to family and in a more rural setting. 

They moved to Charlottesville in 2016 and were house-hunting when a tract of land in Ivy became available. The listing didn’t look promising—“there was nothing here but a cabin with a porch, built in the 1980s,” says an owner. But when the couple came to check it out, they were stunned by the possibilities of the 44-acre site.

The couple contacted Ryan about designing a new home for their family. They liked that Ryan had grown up in the South, and had an appreciation for the area’s history and architectural traditions. But the couple also knew they wanted “a modern interpretation of a traditional home.” As a result, Ryan combined a contemporary design with materials appropriate to this area, from lime-washed brick and copper roofing to slate and bluestone, white oak and black cedar. 

While Ryan’s design references Virginia’s historic architecture—he especially cites Stratford Hall, the Lee family home in Westmoreland County, with its forthright geometry and distinctive chimneys—his layout draws inspiration from Mies van der Rohe’s 1920s Brick Country House. van der Rohe’s goal was to organize a residential space in such a way that doors were not needed; “I’ve always loved this idea,” Ryan admits. The clients, however, wanted a few doors—so in several key places, pocket doors allow for privacy while keeping the home’s open feel.

At 5,800 square feet, Three Chimney House offers a lot of living space without feeling overwhelming, largely due to its modular organization. In the residential wing, the bedrooms are not large, but each has both a substantial fixed window framing lovely views and a smaller, operable window capturing the breezes. At the end of the wing is a master double bathroom, walk-in double closet, and bedroom with a corner balcony and a wall-sized picture window facing the mountains. 

The joy of a custom house, of course, is the customized touches. Just off the entry is a sky-lighted mud room full of cubbies, coat hooks, and benches—after all, a real family lives here. A glass-lined passage off the Main Hall leads to a sequestered library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a fireplace (Chimney No. 2) and a window seat. The two-story staircase in the residential wing is hand-crafted of white oak. And off the kitchen is a tiny patio with a built-in pizza oven (Chimney No. 3)—“a prerequisite,” the client says, from time spent in France.

While Three Chimney House has won Ryan several national awards, it presented him, and Evergreen Construction, with a few headaches. Ryan says the weather on the site seems to have a mind of its own. One memorable storm tore the newly installed roof off the residential wing (“it lifted up like a sail and flew away,” he recalls ruefully), adding another month to the construction timeline. 

The house, like a family, continues to evolve. Phase II—a driveway/garage, pool and in-law suite downslope from the western lawn—will start this fall; designing plantings and screening trees will be handled by landscape architect Anna Boeschenstein of Grounded LLC. 

But the kids have already added their own design extensions. In the side yard, where the old cabin used to stand, there’s now a treehouse, tree swing, and stumps for chairs around a fire pit. 

ROOM WITH A VIEW

A “must have” item for Three Chimney House was a studio space for one of the clients, artist Cassie Guy. After a career as a fashion designer, Guy has branched out into works on wood and paper, illustrations for children’s books, and multimedia pieces. She’s working now on a series around the theme of motherhood, as well as some commissions and one-off pieces for exhibitions. (Her studio art and design background also made her a good partner for Ryan on many of the home’s design and materials decisions.)

As both artist and work-from-home mother, Guy needed her own space, accessible but away from the bustlwe of family life. Ryan therefore put the studio above the guest room in the northern extension, close to the Main Hall but only reachable via an outdoor stone path and an external fire-escape-style stair. 

Being on the second floor made the studio more spacious, with a cathedral ceiling and a half-attic space for Guy to store her finished work. It has a northern exposure, for the best working light, and another west-facing window, which gives Guy an inspiring view of the Blue Ridge.

Having a studio separate from the house means that Guy can spread out and have her paints and materials at hand. She also gets lots of floor space—“I often do my work on the floor,” she says, since many of her pieces are wall-sized. Which is also why the access stairs are outside—“otherwise I’d never get my work out!”—CD

Jennifer and Wil VanLoh had reached the stage in life where they were thinking about having a vacation home, a small retreat, someplace different from their home in Houston. Their daughter Mary was headed off to UVA, in a charming college town right next to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Wouldn’t it be nice to have their second home close by? And then Mary decided to major in architecture with an eye toward a career in design…

That’s how everything fell into place, and the VanLohs ended up buying and renovating a lovely retreat in the heart of Charlottesville. Once they decided buying a place here made more sense than paying for four years of hotel stays, “we looked at several houses,” Jennifer recalls. “But this one was different, almost like a cabin in the woods.” 

Their choice: a one-story house on a quiet street off Rugby Road. The site is a wooded slope that was the back lot of another house—off the street, surrounded by mature trees—“very secluded,” says Jennifer. Other advantages: It was close to town, for when the VanLohs visited, and convenient to Grounds for when Mary needed a study retreat or a place to host out-of-town friends.

But the 1950s house needed a facelift. Its plastic-shingled exterior was drab. A previous owner had added an odd-looking two-story gable over the front door that was, in Mary’s succinct description, “weird.” And now that the surrounding trees had grown up, the house’s windows were far too small. The VanLohs hired Jeff Dreyfus of Bushman Dreyfus Architects and Steven Luck of Dwell Construction to handle the renovation; Mary put her design instincts and training to work on the interior. 

The VanLohs’ first ask, says Dreyfus, was improving the front elevation. The two-story gable was removed, and the house’s narrow (and awkward) front porch was expanded into a spacious square flagstone patio with a gable roof, resulting in an all-season outdoor sitting area that’s a focal point for the entrance. And the new metal roof and upgraded board-and-batten siding gave the whole house a clean, fresh look.

Building out the patio also allowed Dreyfus to revamp the foyer inside. A narrow interior hall was taken out, opening up the space to the dining room and living area beyond. The wall enclosing the stairwell to the lower floor was replaced with an open wood-and-wire railing. Enlarging the foyer made space for a powder room, which meant the adjoining home office could be turned into a bedroom suite/study for Mary’s use.

The second step was adding a sense of light and space to the interior. All the first-floor windows were enlarged, allowing in more sunlight—morning light for the living area and sun room, afternoon and evening light for the kitchen and dining room. Creating greater views into the surrounding woods added to a sense of calm and seclusion. The dining room and front patio overlook the steeply sloped front yard, where J.W. Townsend Landscapes is currently at work on the beds of shrubs, flowering plants, and grasses. 

Refurbishing the kitchen was mostly cosmetic—square white tile on the walls and refaced cabinets in a simple, contemporary style that mirrors the wood paneling on the bar/counter between the kitchen and dining room, which was lowered to better connect the two spaces. 

While the house’s exterior features and internal flow were being improved, Mary began considering the mood she wanted for the living spaces. Her inspiration, she says, was Scandinavian mountain homes: “I wanted it to be light and peaceful, lots of sun and warmth.” To create that feeling, she lightened the stain on the wood floors, whitewashed the stone walls on the two-sided fireplace, and painted the exposed beams white. The furniture features simple lines, gentle curves, and soft fabrics, in a color palette of white and neutrals throughout the house so that sunlight fills the spaces. 

Mary wanted a mix of old and new in the furnishings: “The chairs in the dining room are Swedish antiques, the light fixtures are modern Danish.” Some of the artwork is hers—but some touches are not. In the short passage between the kitchen and the living area, set into the brick wall, are two small recesses with cast-iron doors. Old cooking spaces? Warming ovens? “I don’t know what they are,” Mary admits, “but I liked them, so we kept them.” 

The renovation was almost completed by fall 2019, Mary’s first semester, but it took nearly a year to fully furnish the house. “I was very detailed about [choosing just the right furnishings],” Mary says, doing most of her research online but buying local when she could. And, since her first year was during the early stages of the pandemic, Mary used the house as a get-away from Grounds—“I’d come here to hang out,” she recalls, “and I loved sitting in the sun room in the morning.”

When Jennifer and Wil come to visit, they have an owners’ suite on the lower floor, with its own door leading out onto the back deck overlooking the woods. It’s a wonderful alternative to hotel rooms on football weekends and holiday visits, and feels like the quiet retreat they were looking for.