Erika Howsare

Second homes are all about contrast: the difference between the weekday place and the getaway. Tom and Jenny Becherer live in a historic neighborhood in Alexandria—a bustling urban environment where the homes are mostly a century or more old. Ten years ago, they found the spot that would provide the perfect foil: 21 acres in […]

You know you have a special site when you hire a landscape designer and his primary goal is “Don’t mess it up.” That’s what John Meaney told himself when he contemplated the charge from clients Shahir and Nancy Kassam-Adams, who wanted to add a pool and poolhouse to their Nelson County property. The 51-acre site […]

Even in a well-loved city like Charlottesville, there are still hidden gems. Lynn Valentine had her eye on one that was just three blocks from her home on Park Street. “I’d walked by this property for years,” she said. It wasn’t the house—a modest brick Cape Cod overgrown with ivy—that attracted her. It was the […]

Most architecture, by nature, wants to be noticed. But sometimes design aims to fly under the radar—to seamlessly blend with its surroundings. That’s a tall order when the project in question is a 16.3-acre, multi-million-dollar roadway interchange that helped inspire a decade or more of dogged citizen protests (not to mention legal action) before it […]

A neighborhood like Glenmore exerts a powerful force on everything within it. The gated golf community east of town is one of those places understood to be more than a collection of houses; there is also a social and aesthetic norm here that can hardly be flouted. Aesthetic conservatism is the byword. Perfect appearances abound as […]

Who wouldn’t want to live a short walk from the Downtown Mall? That’s an easy question to answer. Slightly trickier: Who wouldn’t want to live in an old hospital? In creating Locust Grove Apartments within a portion of the former Martha Jefferson Hospital, developer Octagon Partners aimed to make the building’s history a plus for […]

You’d never know that Ken Schmalzbach and Karol Forsberg’s house isn’t brand new. It looks as up-to-the-minute as anything Wolf Ackerman has recently designed to be built from the ground up. In fact, this home on Lake Monticello is 31 years old, and the architects are responsible for transforming it from a near-eyesore to a […]

In Keswick Estate, the houses may be luxurious—but, as garden designer Virginia Rockwell points out, they don’t easily mesh with their surroundings. “The challenge here is how to have the house settle into the landscape instead of alighting on it,” she said. The home of her clients Julie Christopher and Marge Connelly, completed in 2008, […]

Worthy Martin and Ruby Burt woke up on the morning of August 25 to the sound of a backhoe outside their house in Fry’s Spring. For him, it was the beginning of a new chapter in a 30-year history with the house. For her, it was the first morning of a new life in Virginia. […]

A stone house looks very permanent from the outside, but big changes can occur within. Though the Rugby neighborhood house that Hyam Hosny and Eric Spooner bought in 2009 was stately—and its location couldn’t be beat—it needed to be brought into the modern era. “The kitchen was a servants’ kitchen,” said Hosny, relating that the […]