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From left, Amanda, Diana, Dan, and Liz Welch. |
The day before we met, Amanda Welch had returned from a run of events to promote a memoir she co-wrote with her siblings, The Kids Are All Right. The book is about the process of losing both parents at a young age, in a span of four years. The process for Amanda, who was 19, included taking the reins of the family: She chose the coffins, executed the family trust and raised her youngest sister.
But just as the book has its moments of levity, Amanda’s is a story of making the best of a tough situation. Take her dining room, for example. When her father died, leaving the family saddled with debt, her mother sold the family home and built a new one near the first, in Mt. Kisco, New York. Her mother fell ill and ultimately succumbed to cancer there. And then the Welches lost that house.
In her twenties Amanda lived in New York, where $80,000 meant an apartment the size of a milk crate, with the heirlooms in a storage unit. In Central Virginia, it meant a 20-acre horse farm and plenty of space for tradition. So when Amanda and her husband, Dennis, decided to build a home, Amanda—who earned her degree in architectural history at UVA—adapted the plans from the house her mother built. Her house in Trevilians, she says, is a “combination of Virginia’s history and my personal history.”
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“I wanted to have a place where everybody could meet up and be comfortable.…When I first moved to Virginia, it reminded me of where I grew up. There were trails and you could ride your horse for miles. First we lived in Glenmore—in Keswick—and the whole area reminded me of Mt. Kisco. But the property around us was getting subdivided. So [after she and her husband lived in Northern Virginia for five years] we built the house in Trevilians.…It was really important creating that sense of family that we lost.
“The space feels very similar to our house as kids. Everything in the room comes from the house in Mt. Kisco except for the pig paintings on the wall. The table is covered because it’s not a very nice table underneath the cloth. My sisters and brother and I all used to sit at it and do everything here, eat our meals and do our homework here when we were kids, so there’s definitely some scratches in it.
“The two grandfather clocks [that face each other at the end of the dining room table] were in two different rooms of the house in Mt. Kisco, but one was in the dining room and the other one in the living room. When I was living in New York, I didn’t have a place to keep them, so they were stored, one of my friends had them.…But I recently had one of the grandfather clocks restored, and when my sisters were visiting a couple of weeks ago they didn’t even recognize it. It’s a really nice silver underneath, and none of us had ever seen it that way.
“None of the things in the room have a deep history to them. I wish I could have cooked some food to show what we’re all about. We always get together and cook food together. The Silver Palate cookbooks from the ’80s are like our bibles.”
