Talk about seizing the day. When Anna Boeschenstein found out that a practically new kitchen was slated to be removed from a home in Farmington, she realized she was looking at a golden opportunity. The place had served as the 2014 Design House—a fundraiser for the Shelter for Help in Emergency, in which many local […]
The house in downtown Charlottesville had lived many lives. Built in the early 1900s, one of a number of similar foursquare houses on its street, it had served for decades as an office building before Gerald and Marianne Starsia first saw it in 2014. And though the couple liked the structure right away, they also […]
What does it mean for a garden to have “good bones”? Like a beautiful woman or a handsome man, it’s what remains when the bloom is gone. Some believe good bones reveal character, or perhaps it’s just a matter of chance. We know it when we see it, however, in gardens as well as faces. […]
What’s better than finding that perfect vintage material to reuse in your home? Donating that perfect vintage material for others to cherish for years to come. Or at least it was for C.J. Stands, whose dream plot with a view in Lynchburg was blighted by a water-damaged house when he purchased it. “We thought we […]
Dave Fafara stands over the noisy machine in the back of his Shenandoah Joe’s Preston Avenue shop, coffee-scented steam rising from a batch of freshly roasted beans. A metal arm pushes through the beans heaped in the cooling tray, and Fafara occasionally stirs them with his hand, until they’re cool enough to slide out a […]
Upon their return from the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., in January of 2017, local moms Kristin Clarens and Amanda Sovik-Johnston felt empowered, but also challenged. “We were just emerging from the super-foggy days of having newborns and realized that we wanted to re-engage in our community,” says Clarens, an attorney. “It felt like a […]
Cutter Huston has never had to worry about clean clothes. But it wasn’t until he became involved with The Laundry Project that he realized not everyone takes something so basic for granted. The son of an Army brigadier general, Huston was living in Tampa, Florida, when his mother, Michelle, saw a news story about people […]
Holly Regan sat with her son in a lightened theater last year, watching a Four County Players production of A Charlie Brown Christmas. It was a special performance, and not just because of the time of year; it was a sensory-friendly production put on for people like Regan’s son, Jimmy Seidl, who’s autistic. The show […]
While it’s true that proper manners can take a lifetime to learn (or is that just us?), Etiquette Empowerment founder Patty Hughson teaches a local four-week course in the foundations of table manners and polite interaction to young adults. But because attention spans are fickle things, we asked her to distill it down even further […]
Five years ago, Cale Elementary School principal Lisa Jones instituted a Foreign Language in the Elementary Schools program for her incoming class of kindergarteners and rising first- and second-graders. For three years, offerings featured typical FLES programming—that is, 120 minutes a week of instruction in Spanish. However, as Jones saw it, that wasn’t enough. “By […]