Living

  From start to finish Question for Tim Swetman from Swetman’s Amish Furniture & Gifts: When choosing among finishes for wood furniture, how do you test them out before making a commitment? Answer: It’s tough to tell from the can whether your finish of choice will look lovely or lousy on your wood furniture. Unfortunately, […]

  Marooned under marshmallows A holiday table seems one-dimensional without the rich orange of ipomoea batatas, referring to both yams (moist and dense, distinct skin) and sweet potatoes (dryer and mealier, monochromatic inside and out). When properly prepared, these tubers don’t need the sickly sweet marshmallow cloak to be festive—instead simply season them sweet or […]

  Death in the garden If life draws us into the garden, death—not to be too dramatic about it—waits there too. That’s part of the gardener’s education. Take leaves, for instance. As the great Brit Graham Stewart Thomas wrote, with admirable English restraint, “If you garden hand in hand with leaves—either green and growing or […]

  Let’s go do the hop If you’re itching to fulfill your cultural quota, now’s your chance to bounce through the local studio scene and score some tasty bites to boot: November 15 and 16, 10am-5pm, the Artisans Studio Tour returns for its 14th year of crafts and snacks. Offering tourgoers the chance to see […]

When you walk up to the front door of Melissa Wiley’s Belmont house, you’re struck by a sense of tidiness: old railroad ties are stacked into low walls, well-tended plants are arranged just so, and the grass is lush. Walk through the house’s central hallway, with its checkerboard paint job, and keep going out the […]

Lately, “Main Street” has become a tiresomely banal political slogan for Everywhere America. But in some well-preserved parts of the country, like historic Palmyra in Fluvanna County, Main Street isn’t a saying; it’s the soul of the community, both past and present. Downtown Palmyra, simply known to locals as “the village,” sits on a short […]

  We’ve long admired this house on JPA—it’s an island of tranquillity on its well-traveled corner. It’s not just the stone construction and cottage profile that make it so romantic; it’s the exuberant garden that surrounds the house and pushes back against the JPA traffic. A small bridge over a stream, gravel walks, flowering things […]

  Setback to where you once belonged At a recent Houses That Work seminar, where local builders gathered to learn about building energy-efficient houses, the topic of thermostat setbacks came up. Setbacks are simply the automatic settings that let you program your heat system to run cooler at certain times, like when you’re asleep or […]