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“We weren’t looking to move,” recalls Britt Davis. It was April 2019, the Davises had recently renovated the kitchen in their house in Ivy, and Davis had been away on a trip. “When my husband picked me up at the airport, he said he had something to show me and drove straight to this house. We came around the corner, I saw this place, and that was it.”

“This place” is a 19th-century farmhouse on 16 acres in Greenwood. “I’d always dreamed about living in an old white farmhouse,” says Davis, so the house—built in the 1840s, added to in several stages, and still full of rural character—was perfect. 

Well, almost. It did have five bedrooms, helpful since the Davises have four young children. It did have a pool and pool house, built in the 1990s. It did have a barn—Davis’ husband Jared, a pain management physician, has an avocation for farming (chickens, pigs, goats, and bees). The house and yard were large enough for entertaining (the Davises love to have friends over). 

But the layout of the first floor didn’t really work, and the interior “was really stuck in the ’90s,” Davis says. Luckily, she is also a painter and interior designer (her firm is called Art & Adorn), so the Davises began working with architect John Voight and builder Castillo Construction to update the house while keeping its historic character. 

In the farmhouse’s spacious foyer, creamy white walls show off the original beams that have been stripped and refinished, and the oak flooring is original. Along one wall is a 10′-long spindle bench that Davis found in a country antique store in Maine. In the center is a vintage round wood pedestal table, holding one of Davis’ own free-form flower arrangements and a 1935 book about local historic houses—including a page about their house having been a Presbyterian girls’ school and the first farm to grow Albemarle Pippin apples.

The dining room next to the foyer mixes old and new, with original beams and oak flooring, but modern lighting (including a lovely new-old Marigot chandelier from Visual Comfort) that still fits the house’s character. The walls and ceiling are papered with a William Morris tapestry-like design called The Brook, a pattern that is 160 years old, almost exactly the age of the farmhouse.

The next room, originally a bedroom that was then used as a living room, has been converted into the heart-of-the-home kitchen. The front wall features a seven-burner Lacanche stove, framed by two window seats. In the center is a large island made with wood from a walnut tree found on the property, topped with Arabescato Carrara marble (this stone, and the soapstone counters and backsplashes, are custom from Albemarle Stoneworks). The vintage-looking Heirloom Gasolier lights over the island are from Devol, as are other lights and fixtures.

Davis and Voight strove to make sure all this modern convenience and style wouldn’t outweigh the house’s historic character. The kitchen beams, of reclaimed wood, have been milled to match the originals; the reclaimed-wood flooring is from The HeartPine Company. The original coal-burning fireplace (the house has 12 of them) has been fitted with a modern wood stove, and behind the firewood niche some of the house’s original brickwork has been left exposed.

Running along the back side of the original farmhouse was a screened porch that was later enclosed as a kitchen, and renovating this into a working/storage space that Davis calls “the scullery” was her three-year pandemic project. The counters and cabinets are more walnut from their own tree, and the antique terracotta floor tiles are French. While this space is separated from the kitchen with a wall of interior windows, the two areas are unified with the same warm gray-green (Benjamin Moore Sandy Hook).

Built in at one end of the scullery is a floor-to-ceiling storage cabinet, built by Jeff Cherry of Creative Construction. At the other end, just off the back entry/mud room where Davis has her flower-arranging space, is a breakfast area; using another William Morris design called Blackthorn for both walls and ceiling helps create that cozy “nook” feeling. 

On the other side of the house, left of the foyer, is a room a 1970s resident had paneled in a warm dark wood. This room (“the parlor”) shows the eclectic taste that is Davis’ hallmark—a Federal eagle convex mirror over the fireplace, 19th century-style landscape paintings and some of her own abstract oils, a round marble-topped side table from Artful Lodger, and a huge wood-block coffee table from Green Front. 

Beyond is the study, a small room Davis has recently painted with walls and ceiling in terracotta. Past that is the 1990s addition, which houses a bedroom and a fieldstone-walled screened porch; upstairs is the primary bedroom suite. The main house’s second floor has the other three bedrooms and the kids’ bath/laundry room.

The result is a home that feels both of the past and of the present. The house still has its authentic touches: the beamed ceilings, the heart pine flooring upstairs, the cubbyhole spaces under the stairs and in the attic. But the home isn’t meant to be a period re-creation. The rugs on the wood floors are one-of-a-kind pieces from Holdingforth, a local supplier of quality imported textiles. Davis’ go-to décor stores are Eternal Attic and Patina in Charlottesville, Greenwood Antiques, and Revival in Richmond. The artwork comes from the family’s travels, as well as from local women artists and Davis herself. 

And then there are the pieces that tell the Davis family history. The teacups in the larder are from the couple’s respective grandparents; the breakfast table is maple from one of the farm’s trees, mounted on a trestle that has been in Davis’ family for generations; a dainty secretary in the parlor belonged to her great-grandmother. Davis has boxes of large framed black-and-white photos by Amy Nicole Photography documenting their children’s growth—she just needs to find the time to display them in the stairwell, in between painting and decorating and entertaining and school shuttles. But then, that’s part of family history, too.

Charlottesville area homes are selling at higher prices on average this year than they were in 2023, but they’re sitting on the market longer, and total sales are down. That roughly matches what’s happening nationwide, but there’s a key difference, according to local realtor Paul McArtor.

“Charlottesville is so tied to the university, government, and hospitals, so we have a natural churn of people that have to leave and come,” McArtor says. “Our market is just kind of going to follow that cycle.”

According to McArtor, that means both sellers and buyers should feel confident in making moves these days, even as the season comes to a close and many folks around the country look toward next spring to act on their housing plans.

Homeowners going to market today should expect a roughly 5 percent uptick in their selling price from this time last year, according to Zillow data, with current typical home values sitting at $490,890. The local median sales price, per Redfin numbers, is up quite a bit more, to $550,000, a nearly 20 percent increase from August 2023.

Buyers, meanwhile, can expect to see lower interest rates than they did last year (in September, the Federal Reserve lowered key interest rate by half a percentage point). McArtor notes that those rates won’t be anywhere near as low as they were at the start of COVID-19, but they are inching closer to pre-pandemic levels.

Will sellers see the effects of the slight uptick in time-on-market across the local landscape? Maybe, maybe not, McArtor says.

“That is a little bit of a flaw, especially because many buyers and sellers have only been paying attention since the pandemic,” he says. “If you compare us to a year ago or two years ago, homes are staying on the market longer. But if you compare us to five years ago, this is normal.”

McArtor advises sellers to act like they’ve seen it all before. Sure, some homes will sell on their first weekend, but a couple weeks or even months of waiting is no reason to panic.

Critically, inventory remains low locally, as it is nationally. Housing availability is slowly ticking up, but McArtor says we haven’t yet reached a balanced market. Part of the low supply is driven by limited space to build, but the 3-year-old interest rate nadir is also making some buyers hold onto their property when they might otherwise have sold.

One real estate trend McArtor suggests is not reflected in reality is the notion that housing prices are slumping toward the end of the selling season. Observers might see single-unit price drops, he says, but that actually points to higher-than-comp opening prices, rather than an actual market dip.

In McArtor’s experience, sellers do need to be more proactive now than they were when the market was red hot in 2022. “They need to prep their houses to be sold nowadays,” he says. “For that stretch of time, it really felt like a seller just didn’t have to do anything. It didn’t matter if it needed repairs, someone was going to buy it. Because there is a little bit more inventory, prices are still high, and interest rates are coming down, buyers aren’t necessarily willing to just take anything.”

For prospective homeowners waiting to see if interest rates drop further, McArtor says there’s no need. The market is showing signs of pent-up demand, and prices could continue to climb, so buy now and refinance if rates do decline. “If you go ahead and buy now, you could get today’s price with tomorrow’s interest rates,” he says.

Daniel and Meghan Edwards dreamed of building their own home. As committed environmentalists, they wanted it to be both livable and sustainable. Their budget was minimal, their commitment unwavering, and after almost 10 years, they have settled outside Stanardsville on their own little patch of land—in a home built of earth.

“It’s is the first compressed earth block house in the state of Virginia,” says Meghan proudly.

“We wanted to build sustainably,” says Daniel, “to make an impact on the world. We looked at Earthship homes and cob houses, but CEB was the best solution.” Its advantages: Earth block is cost-effective and energy-efficient to construct; contains no toxic materials; reduces energy costs for heating and cooling; and resists rain, rot, and natural disasters. 

Compressed earth blocks are the size of bricks but made of sifted subsoil with a little binding agent, and they are shaped like LEGOs, only larger (the “interlocking” part removes the need for mortar). The Edwardses made all blocks they used out of the soil they excavated on site—so, no carbon emissions from transportation. 

The block walls are reinforced with steel rebar, while the structure’s front and side walls have what Daniel calls “buttresses” (external block columns for additional strength), and the rear of the house is built back into the hillside. The insulation on the exterior is sealed with earth-toned stucco that gives the house a Taos Pueblo look—or, with its grassy living roof and garden of plants and wildflowers, the house could just as easily be in Hobbiton. 

Building this home was not only an environmental statement, but also a four-year DIY project. Daniel, who has a background in project management and is also a personal trainer, did almost all the building himself—during which his training background really helped. He’s also quick to credit the support the couple got from family and friends: “Meghan’s father helped, my father did all of the electrical work, and our mothers watched the kids while we were working.”

Daniel learned how to run an excavator, and how to safely take down the trees that had to be removed. When he couldn’t find a local CEB supplier, he rented a compressing machine and operated it himself. “I absorbed as much from other people as I could,” he recalls, “but doing anything new takes four times longer—all these variables come up, and then of course you make mistakes.” (Early block efforts that didn’t quite make the grade have been used for landscaping.)

Daniel worked with an engineer to make sure the structure was strong enough, and with an architect to make sure the house met permitting requirements. Meanwhile Meghan was running her own eco-friendly swimwear business (she sold it in 2020); helping Daniel on site; and having two children (a great motivator, says Daniel. “It made me want to get the house finished.”) Their third child was born in 2022, two weeks after the family moved into their new home.

Inside, the Edwards’ house is one large central space with exposed earth-block walls, an open structural steel roof, modern appliances, a huge concrete kitchen island (“my command center,” says Meghan); and comfy sitting and dining areas. “Our friends tell us we look like a Starbucks,” she says.

The light tan of the unfinished block walls gives the interior a warm, cozy feeling, and the large windows facing southeast provide lots of light. The hand-rammed earthcrete floor, finished with a cement-based self-leveler, is smooth for bare feet. Decorating was Meghan’s project. Most of their furnishings—soft sofas, colorful rugs and hangings, wooden-slat doors, even the bathroom vanities—are secondhand or salvaged, as part of the couple’s environmental ethic. 

On each side of the main room are doorways to the bedrooms, office, and bathrooms. At 1,350 square feet, the house is not large, but with the open layout and the robust front yard, it has everything the young family needs. While Daniel laid the two patios, Meghan did all the landscaping; the flowers beds are rimmed with tan quartz stones removed in the excavation, and she’s working to fill out the garden with native and salvaged plants. Next year: a rooftop vegetable garden with a chicken coop.

Daniel and Meghan are delighted with their CEB home. One bedroom may eventually be a little small for three children, but “for now, the kids are always in the big room with me—or outside,” says Meghan. They may add another room later, or convert her office space. The couple even talks about what they would do if they were to build another CEB home: “Next time we’d put the HVAC into the walls … next time, we might make the roof a block dome instead of steel beams.” Clearly, they are up for the challenge.

What’s 80 years to a library? The Rotunda itself served as the University of Virginia’s main volumes venue for more than 100 years, after all.

But by 2018, eight decades after a new library took the Rotunda’s place and shepherded in an era of research-driven scholarship, change was necessary. UVA administrators decided they would take on one of the most challenging renovations in school history: expanding, reorganizing, and overhauling Alderman Library.

“From a construction point of view, it had never had a major renovation,” construction project director Kit Meyer says. “There was some discussion of renovating in the ’70s, but the students complained about their main library being closed.”

The $141 million Edgar Shannon Library, as it’s known now, officially opened in January, more than three years after construction began. Led by UVA architect Brian Hogg and Chicago-based HBRA Architects, the project involved gutting the 100,000-square-foot structure, demolishing what were known as the Old and New Stacks, and building a 130,000 square-foot, five-story addition.

A university statement just before the library’s grand opening said the renovation was intended “to create light-filled, easily accessible study space for users” while maintaining the building’s historic interior features. The result is an aesthetically vintage structure with modern conveniences designed to both allow people and books to coexist and match the way we now use libraries.

According to Elyse Girard, executive director of communications and user experience, library-goers in the past entered and headed for the service desk. Now, assisted by online search and navigation tools, they browse on their own. All but one card catalog is gone from the new library, with digital kiosks helping guide bibliophiles. The study rooms have digital amenities as well, like monitors and ample connectivity.

The books, some of which are still finding their way to the library, haven’t been replaced by digitization, of course. “The books on the shelves bring life to the building, and you really notice that as we fill floor to floor,” Girard says.

Meyer says physical books were a driving force behind the renovation. Logistically, UVA needed more space for them, both on site and in climate-controlled, off-site storage. And environmentally, publications and people like different conditions. Modern technology allows the Edgar Shannon Library to balance the dry atmosphere books prefer with the fresh air humans like to breathe.

With an eye for preserving the library’s original design, some of the rooms in Shannon library seem unchanged at first glance. That’s a feature not a bug (book?), Girard says. It makes folks who remember the old library feel comfortable. Some design elements, like the prominent iron railings, are even taken from the university’s original Rotunda library. Other parts of the structure are new and surprising, giving the next generation of Hoos a chance to love the library in their own way.

“We are a public library and a community space,” Girard says. “People think of us as only supporting faculty and students, but anyone can come in and use the library, and we encourage that.”

The HeartPine Company made its name crafting custom products from stuff a lot of people would throw away. It’s that commitment to finding beauty that has allowed the firm to thrive for 25 years.

“I think there are two or three things that make it different,” says Debra Kirschnick, who directs the company’s sales and marketing efforts. “One is that [the owners] really treat you like family. Two, they give you autonomy. They know their employees want to do what’s best for the company, understand what your strengths are, and let you make decisions.” The third thing, Kirschnick says, is how hands-on ownership remains even after a quarter decade. 

Richard Morgan Sr. launched the HeartPine Company in 1999, selling antique heart pine flooring to discerning builders, designers, and homeowners. Operating out of Nelson County, the firm’s one and only product when it launched was heart pine. Richard Morgan Jr. joined his father’s company after graduating from college and dabbling on his own in the wood biz for a few years.

“It just started when I was renovating an old farmhouse,” Morgan Sr. says. “The house was from the early 1800s, and I was trying to find material. I had been farming full-time, and it just mushroomed from there.”

From the beginning, HeartPine was a manufacturing-intensive business, with a focus on milling and kilning products to the high-level specs the Morgans and their customers demanded. The company grew quickly, hiring more people to operate its at-the-time small manufacturing facility. The Morgans hired another sales person and then another, Kirschnick. Today, HeartPine employs 35 people across its 35,000 square-foot manufacturing plant in Amherst and storefront showroom on Market Street in downtown Charlottesville.

HeartPine has received multiple local awards and was recently featured on “World’s Greatest Television,” a series highlighting successful family-owned businesses. In addition to serving clients in the local area, HeartPine ships product nationwide.

With natural wood more expensive than vinyl flooring and other competitive products, HeartPine serves primarily high-end builders and designers, but the company also sells some flooring directly to consumers. While Kirschnick says pine remains the firm’s “heart and soul,” HeartPine moved into reclaimed oaks and hickories early on, then into a line of newly sawn wood. Today, the it sells European and domestic oak in the form of not only flooring, but also custom beams, stair treads, and millwork. A line of French oak—distinct from European oak—is coming online next.

Everything is bespoke, and two products are rarely, if ever, the same. Sourcing is a constant challenge. Consumer preferences make things even trickier for wood-makers. While buyers for years were hooked on gray tones, they are now moving into more organic colors like browns and sandy tans, according to Kirschnick.

“We’re all still really drawn to the antique woods,” she says—the Morgans have it throughout their own homes. “The antique part of the business is complex. The buying is very difficult because people don’t always tell you the truth about what they have.”

That’s where the Morgans and their team excel, verifying every piece themselves with no regulatory authority providing much support, Kirschnick says. HeartPine’s book of business is still about 50 percent reclaimed wood, 35 percent European oak, and 15 percent newly sawn wood (mostly domestic oak). Kirschnick expects the new French oak line to take over about 10 percent of the sales mix. Reclaimed wood, which remained relatively price-stable through the COVID-19 pandemic and is actually less expensive now than it was five years ago due to sourcing efficiencies, shifts in pricing strategies, and competitive pressures, is about 30 percent pricier than newly sawn wood.

Where in the United States does heart pine fare best? In the areas of the country where it once dominated the forests, an expanse stretching millions of acres from the southern part of Virginia, down to Florida, and across the plains to Texas.

“Heart pine actually built this country,” Kirschnick says. “As soon as Jamestown was settled, the king put a mark on the pine trees and said, ‘These belong to me.’”

When Peter Hunter was growing up in Cismont, his father would take him out driving along the back roads in the Southwest Mountains, where the young boy felt drawn to the old derelict houses scattered through those woods and fields. Years later, Peter took his son Blake along on his drives through the Blue Ridge and the Shenandoah, searching for the same abandoned treasures. Now Peter and Blake are the go-to team for reclaiming a taste of the past.

Peter’s love of reclaiming old materials began with salvaging run-down or derelict buildings; “I learned to build by unbuilding,” he says. As a young man, he lived in an abandoned house and fixed it up; over the next decade he worked for a cabinet-maker and a stonemason, and on new construction to gain those skills as well. He bought 20 acres in Batesville, using it to store the salvaged materials he was collecting all over central Virginia. After marrying his wife Debbie, Peter built a home on his land out of an old cabin from a friend’s property and materials he’d salvaged, including a homestead chimney and chestnut logs from a livestock pen on his property. “I was gathering these great materials—unbelievable craftsmanship, and the skills that were passed down. And I couldn’t afford to buy new materials, so …”

By the late 1980s, Peter was becoming well-known for his cabin restorations—and on the side, playing in a band called Cabin Fever. “Back then, there were no restoration stores,” he recalls. “But people had the money [to pay for restoration], and there was a sense … a love for old things.”

Soon Peter was tapping in to a community of people interested in reclaiming and reusing. “Yes, you need the materials,” he says, “but you also need the craftsmanship, and the environment in which you’re allowed to do it.” He could have built a company just doing restorations, but Peter wanted to keep his hands in the work, and train the next generation. “I want to share what I know,” he says, “and I can spot a young person who has the feel for it.”

“He’s constantly training, to pass the knowledge on,” says Blake—who knows first-hand. At age 11, Blake started helping his father out, going on salvage trips and gathering materials. “I remember we had these big piles of slate [shingles],” he says. “We were taking the slate off a UVA frat house roof, getting in before it was demolished.” Blake worked for his father every summer through high school, and during a gap year before college built his first stonework chimney. (“It’s still standing,” he says with a grin.)

But Blake had also inherited another of his father’s passions: “I was going to be a musician.” He went to music school in Boston, coming back every summer to make money working for his father. After graduation, Blake and his band, Trees on Fire, came to Charlottesville to live in a cabin and work for Peter—and stayed. Blake is still playing gigs around Charlottesville, now with a group called The Gatherers, but he’s also launched his own business, Feather Stoneworks. 

Father and son have found that doing what they love, creating something both old and new out of historic materials, requires a special kind of client—someone who loves craftsmanship, and has both the money and the time to have the job done right. One client who shares his passion is local software engineer Matt Lucas; he brought the Hunters in on the restoration of his family’s 19th-century house in Free Union a decade ago, and has had them working since on projects from a Revolutionary-era cabin in Crozet to a barn restoration. “It’s a really good marriage,” says Peter—after all, Lucas is a dedicated salvager, with his own barn full of historic building materials.

These days, Peter is consulting on design and construction, while Blake wants to incorporate what he’s learned about craftsmanship into his stoneworking and design firm. “I hope to continue moving towards building more creative outdoor living space designs with stone, while incorporating reclaimed material and a traditional design aesthetic,” he says. 

And there’s no question the old skills are still needed. A dry-laid stone wall Blake recently built along a section of creek in downtown Batesville, with steps up to a backyard patio, withstood the summer flooding after Tropical Storm Debby. Blake’s pretty proud of that work—it’s built to last a long time.