Erika Howsare

It’s a long way from old-town Fredericksburg to the rolling hills of Free Union. But after 20 years in a historic house in that Northern Virginia town, one couple was ready for the country life. Their four children mostly grown, they relocated to an old farmhouse in Free Union—where she had grown up—and began looking […]

For anyone confronting a property that’s short on landscaping—and feeling that it’ll be a lifetime before anything substantial can grow—Katherine Kane has reassuring words. “If you get obsessive, you can have a mature garden in 25 years.” She should know. In 1990, when she and her husband, Olin West, bought their Free Union farm, it […]

It’s a truism that designers and their clients need to have a good collaborative relationship for a project to go smoothly. But it’s not always the case that they’re actually longtime friends. When Joel and Betty Loving asked designer Karen Turner to rethink a kitchen in their Fluvanna County farmhouse, the request hardly came out of […]

Devils Backbone has been a mainstay of the local brewery scene since 2008. With its imposing building and its beautiful Nelson County site, it’s highly visible to Wintergreen-bound visitors, and hosting outdoor events like The Festy Experience (this year: October 9-11) has put it on the regional map. Says Heidi Crandall, who founded the business […]

One thing about first-year college students: Year after year, they just keep showing up. In pursuit of better places for those folks to bed down, UVA has spent the last nine years building eight new structures on Alderman Road, a massive project that replaces older dorms built in the 1960s. With the first new building, […]

You’d never know that Peter and Angela D.’s house, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway, isn’t brand new. Looking sharp in its ipe siding and modern lines, it appears to be a newly minted creation of Charlottesville design-build firm STOA, which just finished revamping it last December. What’s perhaps even more surprising is that it […]

The more dramatic the house, the more challenging it is to create an appropriate landscape surrounding it. When Jim and Cynthia Stultz built their Western Albemarle house in 2000, architects Daggett & Grigg drew them a plan for an imposing Palladian-style home, including an ambitious hardscape that featured a high semicircular stone wall along the […]

What do you want with a big old house in the woods? This listing, a 4,000- square-foot home outside Madison, seems to invite far-flung ideas. Sure, it could be a family home, as it has been since it was built in 1986. But something about it suggests that it’s ripe for repurposing. We’ll muse on […]

Wend your way through quirky, loveable Batesville, and you’ll spy plenty of historical properties. The heart of this quintessential Albemarle village is loaded with timeworn buildings, but one of the most interesting residences isn’t quite visible from the road. Ecole—that’s French for “school,” bien sûr—is a onetime schoolhouse dating to the early 1920s. Those were […]

It had been a long time coming. Chris and Greg Menke have owned their house in Charlottesville since 1982, and they’ve made many changes and updates to it along the way. But there was at least one big project they hadn’t gotten around to. “A pool was always part of the plan,” says Greg. Though […]