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 […]

Patron of the artists

The folks at Visible Records want to lift artists up. To do so, they’ve had to slow things down.  The newish art studio/gallery concept, backed by The Bridge/Progressive Arts Initiative and located in the former office space at 1740 Broadway St., opened last November. But the artist-run consortium, which highlights minority and low-income producers, still […]

Accidental actor

Darryl Nelson Smith had never been in a play when he uprooted his Richmond life for an office gig supporting the Charlottesville theater community. He figured he’d take the job with Live Arts for a few years. Twenty years later, Smith is a pillar in local theater—on and off stage. 434: So what’s your ROLE […]

What’s so civil about water anyway?

It makes up around 60 percent of the human body. It covers more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface. And it makes up 100 percent of local Black-owned business Civil Water’s product portfolio.  Good old-fashioned water—in bottles. No bubbles, no flavors, no harmful chemicals, no healthy minerals removed. So what’s the big deal then? […]

For the win

Matthew Winston was thisclose to shutting down the candle-making business he’d recently started. The VCU grad had a degree in creative advertising, but couldn’t picture himself settling into a 9-5 job, so he turned his hobby into a business: The Win Candle. Hoping to drum up ome extra attention (“I would get a few orders […]