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Look out over several picturesque hillsides in Warrenton, VA, and you’ll see land that’s all in the family. On one hill rests the patriarch’s home. Look across to another rise, and a son’s home is visible. Cousins are out there, too. And when it came time for another son to build on family land a few years ago, he chose to nestle his house into yet another hill.
“I was born and raised here. It’s our family farm,” he says, pointing out thousands of cows that dot the landscape. This piece of land, he adds, “has been in our family a long time. It’s a beautiful spot, and it’s the place where I’ve always wanted to build a house.”
For the exterior of their house, the family knew they wanted to use stone from 19th-century walls on their property, with its gray-green, aqua, and caramel highlights. But inside, this brother says, they wanted a departure from the typical heavy-wood, chintz, and leather-wingback style that is so prevalent in Virginia’s hunt country.
Fashion Sense
The family started off with three local mainstays: Architect Tommy Beach Jr. of Earth Design Associates Inc., builder Ray Keyser, and custom cabinetry specialist Jan M. Forte. But they still needed an interior designer. Forte, who had been friends for years with Designer Dana Tydings, brought her into the project while the blueprints were being drafted.
Tydings knew the family wanted “tradition with a twist,” as the husband puts it, and they also wanted an environment that would stand up to their three young sons, but she took her main cues from their mother, who “is model-thin, loves funky necklaces, and she’s got a really good sense of style. I looked at her, and I decided to give her unusual colors.”
The living room is a good example of the wife’s fashionable instincts. The double-faced sheers exude a pale-blush glow, Tydings says, and she chose the other colors accordingly. “I only do colors that make girls look good,” she says.
Perfecting the Shell
Tydings’ design philosophy is first to take cues from the home’s architecture, and then to create a “shell” in each room that sets the tone for what will go in it. If you invest in lighting, carpets and floors, and window treatments, “then you can put any kind of furniture inside,” she says. Although most of the home’s furniture is high-end, the family allowed Tydings to truly splurge on the shell. The hardwood in the dining and living rooms, for example, is laid on the diagonal with a separate border. The carpet in the dining room is hand-woven angora wool from India. And the rich stone floor in the mudroom is laid in a dazzling herringbone pattern called Roman Road. The wife loves her home’s lighting the best, which is memorably distinctive to each space.
Staying Power
Because this family intends to stay here for as long as they’re able, they wanted a look that would last. That’s why the house was designed to take advantage of the surrounding hills. As Beach puts it, he designed “a nice, good old Virginia farmhouse” that looks like it’s been on that land for generations, but with huge, modern windows that let the outside in. The house was also designed to be accessible, with an elevator and a first-floor suite for the wife’s mother. All the passageways and doorways, furthermore, were measured specifically to accommodate the grandmother’s motorized scooter. The colors inside were chosen to last, too. “What I really love about our color choices is that in every season, they look good,” the wife says.
Private Suite
Tydings repeated the lavender theme from the owners’ previous bedroom. She and the wife started by choosing an ethereal onyx for the fireplace surround – a notoriously difficult material to work with, which was fabricated and installed by Charles Luck Stone Center. The other colors are gray-toned lavender, Tydings says, “because you’d never make a man sleep in a purple bedroom.”
As for the bath and dressing room, Tydings took cues from the distinctive tub the wife had already purchased from Waterworks. She matched it with a Sanderson wallpaper, which she had spotted a year earlier and had been wanting to use in a project.
Trimmed with white marble on the floors and white wool on the windows, the effect matches a most elegant five-star hotel.
