For Katie and Ty McElroy, the white-picket-fence, manicured-lawn version of the American dream wasn’t appealing. Preparing in 2010 to move to Staunton from Lexington, the couple set their sights on something different: an urban loft-style space, a home that would indulge their interest in design while allowing them to participate in a walkable, downtown lifestyle. [...]
Restaurant people know that the best way to avoid passing your spouse like a ship in the night is to marry another restaurant person—double points if she works in the same restaurant. Rapture’s Executive Chef Chris Humphrey and longtime waitress, Sarah, tied the knot last fall and now see one another at work six days [...]
Drawings of ponies and dragons frolic across the glass of the large picture window that faces the front of 4-year-old Makenzie Lee’s home. The word pony is written in red washable glass marker. The Fontaine-area duplex is tidy and decorated with brightly colored accents, Makenzie’s mom Chelsea’s sea-creature themed paintings and, now, Kenzie’s window drawings. [...]
05/18/2013 10:00 pm The Pollocks Fellini’s #9, Charlottesville VA
If you’re looking for a true conversation piece—whether chest of drawers or wastebasket—check out the wares of Sang & Serena, an import company based here in Charlottesville. Sourced from Rajasthan, the region in India with a long tradition of inlaid furniture, its pieces are luxe objects [...]
Somewhere between painter and textile artist, Maria Pace is an Orange County original who makes a variety of lovely objects for the abode. And she’s an artisan with a conscience: Besides designing her own textile patterns, she likes to repurpose secondhand fabrics and uses only American-made [...]
“This painting was a wedding present from my husband’s uncle and aunt, who commissioned it for us. The church shown is Chapel of the Cross, the church in Chapel Hill where we were married. The church is so special to us, aside from the fact that we were married there: We actually met each other [...]
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An L-shaped bar defines the kitchen, once a family parlor. (Photo by Andrea Hubbell) Many house buyers might shy away from a place known to neighbors as “The Cat House.” Especially if the nickname derived from the fact that more than 100 felines had lived there. “As soon as you walked up on the [...]
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(File photo) Buying a home with cash. The phrase evokes images of lugging a large suitcase stuffed with bills to closing. What does it really mean and what’s involved? Buying with cash means the buyer has the money available to purchase the house outright; he or she doesn’t have to secure [...]
As the owner of Sweethaus, the old-fashioned bakery on West Main Street, Tara Koenig gets to satisfy both her sweet tooth and her love for design. Before opening her cupcake and candy shop last September, she fed her design habit by renovating the kitchen in her 90-year-old home in the [...]
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(Photo by Andrea Hubbell) A year ago, Tracey Love and her boyfriend, Bridge, decided to buy a Greenwood farmhouse that was built in 1925. “It was a lifestyle change for sure; it was a commitment. Friends that drive out treat it as if it’s so remote, so rural—when in fact I’m five minutes from [...]
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Christine Gyovai and Reed Muehlman built an extra-big deck to support their yurt, so that they’d have outdoor hangout space around it. (Photo by Andrea Hubbell) It’s a moment familiar to countless homeowners: You look around the house and think If only we had a bit more space. More room for [...]
You’d think that Dean Maupin, Keswick Hall’s Executive Chef—who also lists The Greenbrier (West Virginia), Tra Vigne (California), and The Clifton Inn on his resume—would be the cook in his family of five, but he’s sure to give credit where it’s due. His wife, Erin, who studied pastry at the [...]
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Justin Hershey and Vu Nguyen (Photo by Cramer Photo) Not only do owner Vu Nguyen and executive chef Justin Hershey work together at Zinc, West Main’s gas station-turned-shrine to local, seasonal food, but they also live together. Fortunately, the roomies agree on organization and cleanliness [...]
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Classic Charlottesville surroundings, including lots of greenery, lend the house its character. (Photo by Andrea Hubbell) Jim Tuley certainly wasn’t the first architect in Charlottesville. In fact, he arrived in 1968 to join a well-established design community at UVA’s School of Architecture. [...]
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It was a strange form of pioneering. For a year after Frank and Linda Dukes moved into their new house in the Belvedere development in August 2009, Frank said, “there was no construction going on anywhere.” The Dukes’ house sat nearly alone in what had been envisioned as a 675-home [...]
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Paula Rau’s only lived in her Staunton house for a short time—since fall 2010. But the century-old home embodies many more years of history than that. There was the house’s original incarnation, a single-family Victorian in the city’s oldest neighborhood, Newtown, which blankets a series of [...]
Just five years ago, Darryl Smith couldn’t picture himself as a homeowner. A renter since college, he’d enjoyed being able to pick up and move when he got tired of the place. Cut to last Christmas, when he and roommate Alex Wear, a carpenter at Builder Beast and Alloy Workshop, began renovating [...]
Blame it on the empty room. That’s what designer Kelly Witt does when she recalls the momentary panic she felt the day she hung “a wire and crystal atom-shaped chandelier, lit from within by large holiday lights” in the furniture-less dining room of the brick colonial she and her artist [...]