Living

The Virginia Film Festival is dishing up three courses for foodies

SECRET INGREDIENT Give thanks for the apple There is no fruit (or vegetable either!) that serves as such a stalwart servant month after month, year after year, as that all American fruit, the apple. European settlers stitched seeds into their clothing, then sowed them here in the colonies to propagate the taste of home. But […]

GROWING ROOM Separate peace Challenge: Provide independence for growing sisters Sisters Alex (7) and Ivy (9) Lynch walk together from their home off of Rio Road to school, every day. However, as a bright and articulate fourth grader, Ivy has started to feel the need to assert her independence and has questioned the traditional, not-quite-three-minute, […]

Standard story: Couple buys a 1922 house in one of Charlottesville’s protected historic districts, then plans a renovation. But what happens when the couple in question has distinctly modern taste? The front facade of the hous, as the Mills and Dreyfus learned, hadn’t always featured brick columns or railings (above). The new wooden porch is […]

You finally find the house you want to buy. Your Realtor draws up a purchase agreement and you’re told you have to get title insurance. This sounds kind of scary, so you ask yourself, “Do I need to hire a real estate attorney?” For "boilerplate transactions," you can probably just stick with a title company, […]

I remember the days when all I needed to hang “art” on the walls were some plastic push pins and a roll of masking tape. Times have changed—but unfortunately, custom framing can come with a hefty price tag, leaving you hanging before you’ve even put a nail hole in the wall. With do-it-yourself framing and […]

Kitchen renovations never finish on time. For Matt McClellan, a graduate of UVA’s School of Architecture working toward his license, the process of designing a major addition onto the side of his 1949 house took five months longer than expected. He and his wife, Meredith, bought the house in 2007 and tore the existing kitchen […]

When the first wave of protestors took to Zuccotti Park in mid-September, few could have predicted that the Occupy Wall Street movement would soon spread throughout the globe, but Iraqi-American singer-songwriter Stephan Said can claim some prescience on that front. Said’s sixth album, Difrent, released on September 20 on his own Universal Hobo Records, has […]

The good chef You probably know Chef Eric Ripert as a judge on Bravo’s “Top Chef” or from “No Reservations,” where he’s traveled and eaten with best buddy and fellow silver fox, Anthony Bourdain. But, this soft-spoken chef from Andorra, France, is a star in his own right, with four cookbooks, a show called “Avec […]

The Downtown Mall’s Fifth Street has been busy this season