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 […]
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 […]
Born and raised in Charlottesville, renowned interior designer Bunny Williams didn’t start her career with a formal education, but rather with a job at prestigious Manhattan design firm Parish-Hadley—a job that lasted 22 years and helped build the foundation for Bunny Williams, Inc. Since starting the company in 1988, she’s built a bit of an […]
For years, we knew we wanted open concept living spaces—the kitchen spilling into the dining area, spilling into the sitting room —but we didn’t necessarily know why. It just felt right, and that was enough. Turns out, what we were working toward was universal design, a concept of making spaces usable by as many different […]
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 […]
Certain people are born architects, Julie Dixon says. “I spent the better part of my childhood during church, class and road trips dreaming up and drawing floor plans on scraps of paper or on the edge of class notes. It’s the kind of thing you just can’t shake.” Her childhood hobby shook the Tennessee native […]
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 […]
The June issue of ABODE is on stands now! Here’s what you’ll find inside: A Q&A with local architect Christopher Hays, whose global travels inspire his work in Charlottesville and beyond. An historic downtown property, the former Martha Jefferson Hospital goes residential—with 43 new places to live. The latest trend in countertops? Color! But not […]
It’s no wonder that travel is a running theme in Hays+Ewing co-founder Christopher Hays’ explanation of his journey to architecture. The Greenville, South Carolina native has lived in Japan and Italy and journeyed to the Netherlands, Spain, France and Greece for both work and study. It was a trip to Vienna during an undergraduate exchange […]
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 […]