After a decade spent living with a hand-me-down outdoor playhouse, Charlottesville’s RiverBluff community decided to do its children a favor and upgrade. “Originally, the community was designed with a small private playground in mind,” says RiverBluff resident Janet Evergreen, who helped spearhead the project. “So when we held our annual homeowners association potluck [in 2015], […]
Before Hannah Barnaby became a writer, she was an editor at Houghton Mifflin. It was there that the process of creating picture books first fascinated her. Yet it wasn’t until after the birth of her children that she began to read enough picture books to really understand how they worked. During the five years that […]
It’s a little odd to hear a 12-year-old talk about her “greatest focus,” but for Chloe Carpenter, who’s been dancing for nearly 10 years, that’s exactly what the sport has been. “Dance is my passion,” she says. She takes tap, lyrical and performance group classes each week at The Wilson School of Dance, which this […]
In this month’s Abode, learn about Charlottesville kit homes’ past, present and future; see why lighting is better in threes; explore an Ivy landscape that matured over 30 years and—we saved the best for last—peek inside V House, a palatial Albemarle estate designed in Jeffersonian tradition. And then some! Here’s what’s inside: A dank downtown home […]
A kitchen can get outdated while you’re looking the other way. Beth and Greg Morris built their house south of Charlottesville in 1999, and lived there for many busy years as their son was growing up. And although they made a couple of cosmetic changes to the kitchen during that time, it essentially remained the same. […]
Of course the house takes advantage of the views; on this spot, even a campsite would do that. But the formal, palatial home that Dalgliesh Gilpin Paxton Architects designed for an Albemarle hilltop is about more—much more—than what’s outside the windows. The “V House,” as it’s known, sits not only at a physical high point, […]
Thirty-six years is long enough to watch a forest grow. And it’s long enough to establish an enchanting garden beneath the tree canopy—a magical realm on what was once considered a neighborhood’s least desirable property. “It was the cheapest lot,” says Fran Boninti of the two-acre place she and her husband, Andrew, bought in 1981. […]
You wouldn’t expect a townhouse in Crozet to have an urban feel. But Ashley Jewell got a jolt of inspiration last year when she looked at a rendering of the townhouse that she and her husband, Tim, were planning to buy in the Old Trail development. Then unbuilt, the home had a long windowless wall […]
Good things come in threes: primary colors, books in a trilogy and, says designer Kori Messenger, lighting. “There are three layers of lighting: ambient, accent and task lighting,” she says. “We like to see all three in a space if possible.” In a recent client’s home, Messenger and her designer partner at Foxchase Design, Nicole […]
Since its construction in 1896, 1515 University Ave. has been a drugstore, a bookstore, a boarding house, the Cavalier Diner and many more incarnations. The building, which opened in mid-March, now pieces together fragments of all its previous incarnations, giving UVA students a new place on the Corner to call their home away from home. […]