Author: erikahowsare-2

The driveway is so steep it seemed like a no-go.

On the day in 2009 when he first visited, “I drove up the driveway and told myself ‘Whatever’s at the top of this I can’t buy it,’” remembers the owner. “But then I got up there and thought, ‘Oh, I do have to buy this.’”

The house is a rarity in Virginia: a midcentury-modern artifact that captivated the owner’s California-honed sensibility. And the view’s not too shabby either. The driveway is so formidable because it switchbacks up a mountainside to a site near Stony Point. The house looks down and across Charlottesville, then out to the Ragged Mountains and the Blue Ridge.

Built in the late ’60s or early ’70s (records are unclear), the house had vertical cladding, inside and out, made of old-growth redwood. “It’s probably two to three thousand years old,” says the owner. Seeing that previous owners had painted every inch of the redwood, he began to see this house not only as a potential home for himself and his family, but as a project. “I’m really a lover of wood. I wanted to get back to that original source of the house,” he says. “It took nine years of slow work to do that.” Local craftsmen Mark Bibb and Robert Chico undertook the painstaking restoration of the redwood siding and woodwork.

Originally designed by Joshua Harvey, an architecture professor at UVA, the house now seems to radiate the spirit of the modernist ideas that birthed it. Long, low horizontal lines define its flat-roofed profile. Large expanses of glass—some of them meeting at corners with no interruption—bring in the outdoors. Ceiling lines and planes carry through from inside to outside. At every opportunity, the house seems to suggest that people and sightlines freely flow between indoor and outdoor spaces, a la iconic homes like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.

“It seems that the original intent of the house was that you’re just surrounded by the warmth of the redwood, and you really want the aesthetic elements of the inside of the house to go away so your eye goes to the view,” says the owner. The restoration, then, would focus on removing interior distractions.

Over the four decades or so the house had been standing, there had been some dubious updates, like the white ceramic floor tile—“very 1980s,” says the owner—which covered the original concrete. Now, 24″x24″ black slate tile, its size mirroring the openings in the wooden trellises outside, recedes from one’s attention to allow the views to come forward.

Other major updates happened in the kitchen and bathrooms. Charlottesville firm STOA designed a new kitchen layout, including redwood-veneer cabinetry built by Dan Hunt, and absolute-black granite countertops—both of these choices, again, being intended as visually quiet.

“The house is really laid out well in that there are public spaces but they feel very peaceful,” says the owner. “And every bedroom has a view and a relationship with outside, so you have your own private world in each bedroom.”

In truth, although the mountain view is a constant presence in the interior—all three bedrooms, kitchen, and dining spaces line up along the west side, drinking in the vista through floor-to-ceiling glass—the structure itself carries plenty of calm, dignified interest.

Zones are lightly defined by changes in ceiling height, a few steps up or down, and occasional redwood-clad columns. A modern wood-burning fireplace flush with the wall offers an elegant sense of shelter and warmth. High, narrow clerestory windows, a contrast with the acres of west-facing glass, create a sense of play between hiddenness and openness.

The renovation lets the house itself shine while improving certain details—like the master bathroom tub, which had been a 300-gallon behemoth. “It was really beautiful, but there wasn’t a hot water heater on the planet that could take that on,” says the owner. Instead, local craftsman Kierk Sorensen made a more modest, but still spacious, soapstone tub.

Anyone soaking there would look out over a newly added pathway that circles behind the house, lined with Corten steel planters. Simplicity reigns outdoors as well as indoors—the owner actually took out some overly traditional plantings that were cluttering the view—but large oak and maple trees, and smaller Japanese maples, provide softening shade for the west-facing patio, most of which is really just a grassy pad.

Two guest houses, a cottage, and a pool beef up the main house’s relatively modest square footage, but the owner—who recently put the property on the market—says that the original house was what he and his family loved. Asked what it was like to dwell on the mountaintop, he talks in detail about watching sunsets and thunderstorms (“Sometimes you can see those storms split in half and go off in different directions…”) and the wildlife—deer, turkey, bear—that regularly wander through the yard.

“When I got there I said, ‘I bet I’ll become desensitized to this view and tune it out,’” he says. “What the truth ended up being was that every night I’d walk outside and say, ‘I can’t believe this view.’”

Mark Graham was actually relieved when he discovered that the first floor of his house was rotting.

He’d planned to add on, not tear down. But when crews prepared to build a second story onto the 1980 brick ranch house in Ivy, they discovered some problems. “It turned out the walls had holes from rodents and water,” says Graham. There was leakage around the chimney too. It became clear they’d have to dismantle the house and rebuild.

“We left the basement and built up,” says Graham, who—along with Barbara Gehrung, his partner in the architectural firm Gehrung+ Graham—had already renovated the basement level. “Now we could know what was there. It was lovely to not have to deal with mystery materials.”

That mattered because the team was aiming to meet stringent energy-efficiency standards: the Passive House criteria, which set a very high bar for reduced energy use. The engineering of walls is key to reaching this goal. The idea is to insulate heavily and not allow air or heat to move between the indoors and outdoors. “Now we could have a 2×6 wall with exterior insulation, as opposed to building inside the siding,” says Graham. They could use the old footprint, but design the energy-efficient structure they wanted from square one.

Graham and his family had been living in the rancher for several years. They’d found the interior dark and overly compartmentalized, so rebuilding would mean completely reimagining the layout and feel of the house. “The driving forces were just connecting outside to inside, bringing in natural light, and using healthy materials,” says Graham. Using the Passive House standards (which originated in Germany) forces designers to reckon with indoor air quality, since the method results in so little air exchange with the outdoors. Nontoxic materials and energy recovery ventilators are key to keeping indoor air healthy and fresh.

“We were early adopters of the Passive House movement here in the U.S.,” says Gehrung. “I think Passive House was attractive to both of us because it empowers the architect. You can test your design in a model, and it helps you set priorities.”

The rebuilt house, which the family reoccupied in 2017, is full of light and closely connected to the outdoors. The kitchen, for example, has exterior doors on both ends: one to a deck, which Graham says his family now uses “all the time,” and one to a courtyard. “The kitchen was dark and dingy before, so we were partially reacting to that,” says Graham. Clerestory windows along the long wall provide light but also privacy.

Base cabinetry runs the length of that same wall, eliminating the need for upper cabinets and ensuring “a flow of space, instead of having a dead wall with a piece of furniture,” says Graham.

A Swiss railroad clock above the deck door symbolizes, for Graham, a “modern and comfortable” European aesthetic that he fell in love with during a stint in Switzerland. It’s something he and Gehrung, a native of Stuttgart, feel they share. “We’re trying to find ways of calming and simplifying,” he says. One strategy in this room is to hide outlets in a gap behind the backsplash, rather than letting them break up wall space. The house also has centralized, programmable panels to control lighting, rather than light switches scattered throughout.

Though the floor plan is more open than in the old brick house, Graham says, it does offer more distinction between spaces than a standard great room. Cooking, eating, and living spaces form an L shape, providing some separation. “The ceiling heights change to suggest spatial differences,” says Graham.

“We also designed for aging in place,” says Gehrung, pointing out the built-in flexibility to turn the current music room and dining room into a first-floor suite if needed in the future.

For now, though, the vibe of the house skews young. Graham’s three kids enjoy whimsical features that friends probably envy: their second-floor bedrooms connect to upper lofts via rope ladders in the closets. Once they’re up there, they can launch themselves onto nets hanging above their bedrooms.

The entire family enjoys the basement media room—the Gehrung+Graham studio is also found on this level—and the kids are actually invited to play indoor soccer in a specially designed basement hallway, where hard paneling protects the walls.

If they get muddy outside, they (or the family dogs) can easily hose off in a basement shower tiled in slate. “It’s extremely durable, with a slot drain,” says Graham. And while they’re in there, they can draw on the walls with chalk.

Upstairs, anyone would feel drawn to sitting in the reading nook in the hallway. “We made it a big feature—a large window with a bench,” says Graham, “a zone where you can hang out and look at the Blue Ridge.” At a certain time of day, automatic shades lower themselves to cover the overhead skylights and prevent too much solar gain.

This one spot in the house symbolizes the transformation of the whole structure. Sitting in the reading nook, one would be surrounded by elements of sophisticated, energy-efficient design. But it’s the view that really captures the attention.

Mike and Isobel Sadler move every few years. They’re the third-generation owners of Charlottesville Area Builders, and they usually occupy a house their company has recently built—both to showcase new features for potential clients and to test-drive floors, appliances and so on. This summer, they moved again, to a contemporary home in Ivy looking toward the mountains. The kitchen takes full advantage of the views.

“When you’re in the kitchen, you don’t feel like you’re confined to a window,” says Mike, thinking of the traditional small-window-over-sink arrangement. “The way we oriented the house, you’re glancing out at the mountains.”

That’s because of the placement of the sink in the 10-foot-long island, and because of the wall of glass (with enormous sliding doors) that runs along the kitchen/dining/living space and before opening onto a deck. The Sadlers calibrated this design to offer both views and shelter, with a privacy wall shielding the indoor and outdoor spaces from nearby neighbors.

While their previous house (and its site) were similar, the couple did make some adjustments this time around. In the kitchen, an island design replaced what had been a U-shape. “We wanted it to have more of a flow around the island, and to be more of a focal point,” says Isobel. The resulting layout is simple and powerful, with the quartz-topped island facing into the common areas, and cabinetry by Vaneri Studio providing a kind of permanent artwork that anchors the whole space.

Inside and out, the house has a warm but minimal style, and the kitchen is no exception. “Even though it’s contemporary, we featured elements that could be included in a modern farmhouse or midcentury Scandinavian style, which are styles our clients are leaning towards,” says Isobel.

Custom cabinetry, built by Todd Leback, is certainly the centerpiece here, with natural-finish walnut on the island. Its horizontal grain goes hand-in-hand with the sense of flow the Sadlers had envisioned. Wall cabinets are built of maple, painted Pratt & Lambert’s African Night. “It’s a moody color that changes. It’s lovely,” says Isobel. “It goes from green to gray.”

The cabinetry features touch-open doors and a hidden refrigerator. A walnut backsplash and floating shelves dress up the back wall. Smooth white quartz countertops on the island contrast with dark leather-flat granite behind. “It has some depth and dimension just like the color of the cabinets,” says Isobel, adding that all the countertops in the house are flush with the cabinetry.

Many of the design choices here—leaning toward the sleek and minimal—are meant to rhyme with materials and forms in the adjacent spaces and, in fact, throughout the house: dark slate for a fireplace surround and bathroom tile, walnut shelving, white oak on floors and paneling. Matte black plumbing fixtures repeat throughout the house, and brass on the globe-shaped pendant lights echoes midcentury elements that appear in other rooms.

The Sadlers, who took over the 36-year-old family business three years ago and recently changed its name from Jefferson Area Builders, find that their kitchen makes cooking and cleaning up feel like a pleasure. “You don’t feel like you’re working in the kitchen,” says Mike, the head chef. “You’re spending time.”