Author: Carol Diggs

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.” 

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. 

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.”

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. 

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.

There’s nothing like a pandemic shut-down and virtual school to show you that your kitchen just isn’t working. 

For one family who moved into the Rugby Road area in late 2018, the “new normal” showed that their eat-in kitchen, while large, didn’t have a good working space for their grade-school daughter’s remote learning, and didn’t function well for the husband-and-wife cooking team. Besides that, the room didn’t have nearly enough storage—or outlets.

So the owners asked Bushman Dreyfus Architects to give them “a space that promoted connection,” says lead designer Kirk Webb. Integrating all the kitchen’s functions in a cohesive way—and keeping the space in context with the rest of the house, which had been substantially renovated by the previous owners—meant “the scope of the project felt much larger than a single room,” Webb says.

Another part of the challenge: Because the 1910 house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, any changes that would affect its exterior (like pushing out a wall, or adding/moving windows) were a non-starter. Luckily, relocating the cooking area (gas stove and two below-counter ovens) to the exterior wall, under a line of windows overlooking the terrace, revealed a faux-stone backsplash which, once removed, made the kitchen a foot wider.

Webb’s design also significantly lengthened the center island. The longer counter not only provided more working space for the two cooks, but also created a seating area where the family now has breakfast every day. 

Once the kitchen’s design was finalized in August 2020, the owners posed the next challenge, for contractor Alexander Nicholson, Inc. and cabinetmaker Worthington Architectural Millwork in Gordonsville: Have the kitchen ready by Thanksgiving. With hard work and some luck, the deadline was met—“just in time,” says the owner with a laugh.

The new kitchen is well-organized, with enough comfortable space for cooking, working, and gathering. The island, counters, and backsplashes are a white lightly veined marble, which—with the white walls and east and south exposures—fill the space with light. In one of the touches that makes everyone dream of someday having a custom-built kitchen, the east-facing windows all have switch-controlled retractable shades to make sure there’s no early morning glare. (The south-facing window over the porcelain undermount sink is already shaded—by the decades-old paperbark maple outside.)

The new custom cabinetry along the walls and under the counter is a soft, blue-gray that warms up all that white. The kitchen’s interior wall is an uninterrupted expanse of cabinets and closets for the refrigerator, a full-size freezer, appliances, and the family’s dishes and glassware. Above that, the upper cabinets have doors with brass diagonal-mesh screen insets, matching the brass fixtures on the drawers and doors. 

On the kitchen’s north end, the space that held a settee and table now has a corner banquette upholstered in a teal-and-slate-striped faux leather; an oval table provides plenty of space for family meals, school work, or (as the pandemic eases) a gathering of school buddies. On one end of the banquette is a cabinet with shelves for cookbooks or school supplies. On the opposite end, where there was empty wall space, is a small wet bar beside the stairway down to the TV room-cum-kitchenette where the family had meals during the kitchen renovation. (“Microwaving and lots of take-out,” says the owner. “Making school lunches was a real challenge.”) 

Getting a custom kitchen right requires a good deal of pre-planning, thinking through exactly what items are needed where. The drawers in the island hold “everything needed to cook a meal,” says the owner, “and then the cabinets along the wall hold everything needed to serve it.” 

But going custom also means getting those little details that suit just your family. There’s now a storage closet right next to the door to the terrace, for whatever’s needed outside: umbrellas, bug spray, sunscreen, etc.

And, in a touch of genius, there’s a little pop-open compartment that holds a kitchen step-ladder. How else does a woman who’s 5’2″ make use of all those beautiful upper cabinets?

You would think a black box the size of a large living room, set amid the rolling hills of Albemarle County would stick out like…well, a huge black box. But Ivy Levien’s studio, perched on a rise with a view towards the Blue Ridge, rides on the land like it’s always been there.

A year ago, the only building on the Leviens’ land at Bundoran Farm was a condemned log cabin, which they had restored after buying the site 10 years ago. During the pandemic, Ivy and her husband Jeffrey (who are also partners in real estate development—600 West Main is one of their projects) were happy to have an alternative to their Manhattan home. But after a few months, the one-bedroom cabin felt a little small; Ivy, who is also a professional multi-media artist (as Ivy Naté), says, “Even during COVID, I needed to work—it’s my living.” So the couple got Bushman Dreyfus Architects started on designing a new house—and a free-standing studio. 

Ivy already had a mental image: a simple black structure set into the farm landscape. Lead designer Aga Saulle looked to Scandinavian barns and horse run-in sheds for inspiration, and created a simple gable-roofed building that fit both the site and Ivy’s concept. To achieve a clean, minimalist outline, the roof and exterior walls use the same cladding system: panels of vertical wooden slats laid over a black, UV-stable waterproofing membrane. 

For contractor Mike Ball of Element Construction, that paneling was the job’s biggest challenge. The two-inch by two-inch slats are Cambia-treated poplar (“We’ve used it before, and knew it wouldn’t warp,” Ball says). The vertical slats were laid across horizontal supports and secured from behind, so the screws wouldn’t show on the finished panels. Ball’s subcontractors, Kring Carpentry of Staunton, took pains to assemble the panels precisely and ensure the walls slats aligned perfectly with the roof panels. 

To achieve the color Ivy wanted (“almost black”), the panels were stained rather than painted. The resulting matte finish helps the building recede into the natural background, and complements the dark-gray metal roofing on the nearby cabin. Landscape architect Anne Pray, who designed a meditative garden terrace for the log cabin, helped integrate the building into its setting. 

The studio’s interior is one big white working space. Large windows on three sides pull in the surrounding pastures and hills. Along the south wall is an open-ended walk-in closet (storage for Ivy’s art supplies and the found objects she works with) and the entry door, but no windows; south light would be too intense for a studio space, Saulle notes.

The building’s precision and purity of line make it feel sculptural—appropriate to Ivy’s work as a three-dimensional artist—and create a calming atmosphere, like the zen garden at its exterior. Ivy says working in this new place has given her a different perspective. “My studio in New Jersey is in an industrial, urban environment. Here, when I come into the studio, I clean, clear the space, get quiet, and listen. That’s the beauty of having a dedicated space.” 

Ball, who drives by the finished studio every time he comes out to work on site preparation for the Leviens’ new house, says, “I still love to see it.”