Sticking it out

Yoshihiro Tauchi is tough. When he developed back problems decades ago while butchering tuna at a New York fish company, his way of “taking it easy” was to switch to restaurant work. After he healed up he started his own fish company in Washington, D.C. That was only the beginning of his adventures in the […]

Any way you slice it

If you want to make Neapolitan-style pizza in Charlottesville and you’re not from Naples, being from Lampo is probably the next best thing. But let’s back up. Aaron Hill’s pizza-making days started well before he served as the Belmont restaurant’s sous chef from 2016 to 2019. His first serious dough-flinging foray was at another member […]

The Downtown Mall gets Lucky

Patrick McClure had spent four happy years running Citizen Bowl Shop on the Downtown Mall—“Well,” he says, “not 2020”—when he decided it was time for a change.  You wouldn’t know it from the outside, where the old CB sign still hangs. But the old Bowl Shop’s been reinvented on the inside as Lucky Blue’s, a […]

Bake it till you make it

How many badass bakers can one modest hamlet support? Seems Charlottesville is determined to find out. Christina Martin comes to Charlottesville trailing a wake of Michelin-starred experiences by way of the West Coast and Chicago. She most recently wrapped a short stint at The Inn at Little Washington. Now, Martin’s putting out pastries under her […]

Falling in love with a house

Alana Woerpel began using her imagination to create beauty and comfort as a little girl, helping her mother sew, paint, and hang wallpaper in the houses her parents bought to renovate. These days, the UVA alum has her own business, Alana’s, Ltd., a prize-winning interior design firm.  Creating beautiful rooms has also become her avocation: […]

Sit, don’t stare

Tate Pray doesn’t consider furniture art. But that doesn’t mean his work isn’t artistic. The classically trained painter, sculptor, and tireless maker began working as a carpenter after earning his art degree. He moved to Charlottesville in 2005, transitioned to concrete formwork and stuck with that for more than a decade.  In 2019, Pray returned […]

Good picks

Onyx Art Deco bookends, a collection of vintage zoology plates, Brighton Pavilion side tables. Thanks to three new vendors on our local home décor scene, we have more options than ever when it comes to redesign. Street wares Like a lot of folks, Maria Gall started rethinking her career during the pandemic. With kids at […]

Making a more livable kitchen

There’s nothing like a pandemic shut-down and virtual school to show you that your kitchen just isn’t working.  For one family who moved into the Rugby Road area in late 2018, the “new normal” showed that their eat-in kitchen, while large, didn’t have a good working space for their grade-school daughter’s remote learning, and didn’t […]

The zen box

You would think a black box the size of a large living room, set amid the rolling hills of Albemarle County would stick out like…well, a huge black box. But Ivy Levien’s studio, perched on a rise with a view towards the Blue Ridge, rides on the land like it’s always been there. A year […]

Living the dream

Don’t call Carrie Waller an influencer. Even though the home blogger has upwards of 55k Instagram followers (@dreamgreendiy), she has a different take. “I don’t love that term,” she says. “It has become kind of the standard for people in my industry, but I feel like it makes us sound very cold. I want people […]