country properties
Frugal Like a Fox
With his modular homes in classic Piedmont styles, this Loudoun architect
aspires to be the Ralph Lauren of home design
By Kathie Friedley
A
60 THE PIEDMONT VIRGINIAN homebuilding industry crater. For
the past two years they have been
working to marry traditional design and modular fabrication in
the Pennywise House collection,
designed by Russell Versaci Architecture and manufactured by
Haven Custom Homes.
Pennywise houses are far from
McMansions. Ranging from
400 to 3,400 square feet, they
are meant to be within reach of
middle-income
homebuyers.
They were designed using a series
of principles outlined in Versaci’s
first book, Creating a New Old
House, and based on the historic
regional traditions profiled in
his second book, Roots of Home.
While the houses are meant for
modular manufacturing, they are
modeled on the farmhouses, cottages, and outbuildings of preindustrialized America.
The Pennywise collection had
its beginnings 18 years ago, when Versaci
designed a house for the last remaining lot
in the National Historic Landmark village
of Waterford, Virginia. Styled like a typical
early 19th-century Piedmont farmhouse, the
white clapboard home is set on a fieldstone
foundation, with punched dormers, a tin
roof, and a broad front porch.
autumn 2010
photo by sarah huntington
lthough raised in New
England, Russell Versaci
has lived and practiced
architecture in Virginia
for nearly 30 years, and
he loves the vernacular home styles of the
Virginia Piedmont. For years his practice
thrived by designing classic estate homes for
custom clients, but in the early 2000s, troubling signs in the economy led him to wonder how long that business would last.
Versaci believed there was another market
— an unserved one made up of homebuyers who love classic home styles but don’t
have the will or wallet for a custom design.
He thought of Ralph Lauren’s phenomenal
success in translating high design for patrons
into accessible design for customers. Could
he do the same thing in home design?
He wondered if modular technology
could be adapted to classic traditional homes.
To explore the possibility, he visited a number of modular factories but couldn’t get the
manufacturers to understand what he was
proposing. Then he met Jerry Smalley, the
former co-captain of the Rouse Company.
Smalley had the inspired idea that modular construction could serve as the building
platform for fine architectural design, and
his new company, Haven Homes, was setting
out to break the mold.
Smalley and Versaci began their partnership in early 2008, just in time to watch the
The house won several awards and appeared in Southern Living and Washingtonian magazines, and immediately people
began to ask if the plans for the house were
available. The design based on the Waterford
house, the Currier, was the first Pennywise
design.
Beside the Currier, the Pennywise collection contains a number of other designs
with roots in the Virginia Piedmont, based
on real 18th- and 19th-century houses that
grace our country roads and old villages.
photo by Erik Kvalsuik
Modular Homes with Historic Roots
The English who first settled the Piedmont area in the 17th century built plantations with Georgian-style homes on large
tracts of land. They were soon joined by
Germans and Scotch-Irish migrating from
the Pennsylvania colony down the Native
American trading route called the Great
Warrior Path, now Route 15. As newcomers
put down roots, they brought new styles of
homes to the area, adapting old-world building customs to the climate, topography, and
available natural resources.
In the Virginia Piedmont the settlers
found plentiful oak, chestnut, and heart
pine for building their homes. Native fieldstone was plentiful, too, and many 18th- and
19th-century German settlers built stone
farmhouses, many of which still dot our rural landscape. The Pennywise Cobbler is a
design based on these sturdy old beauties.
The Currier is a bank house, with its main
entrance on the second floor. A building
tradition imported from Pennsylvania, a
bank house or barn is cut or “banked” into
a hillside. With its north side buried into a
hill and its south side open for two stories,
a bank house captures the warmth of the
sun and is sheltered from the weather by the
earth. Often, farm animals were kept on the
Versaci’s design for a Piedmont-style farmhouse in Waterford was the basis for the
modular Currier in the Pennywise collection.
THE PIEDMONT VIRGINIAN autumn 2010 61
The Pennywise Cobbler was modeled on the stone
farmhouses built by German settlers who migrated to the
Piedmont from Pennsylvania.
The neoclassical Scribner is a three-part Palladian design, a
style popularized by Thomas Jefferson.
first level while the family lived above.
Also common in the Piedmont was the tradition
of raising houses off the ground to protect them from
mold and damp in the humid climate. The Pennywise
Southern Piedmont is a raised cottage with a secondfloor portico entrance, designed in a neoclassical style
inspired by Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was a self-taught architect influenced
greatly by the Italian classicist Andrea Palladio. His
designs for the great houses at Monticello and Poplar
Forest, as well as the Virginia State Capitol and the
University of Virginia, honor the classical tenets of
symmetry and balance.
Jeffersonian classicism was a popular style in Virginia from Jefferson’s time well into the 19th century.
Classical details in our Jefferson-inspired Vintner and
Scribner include pedimented front facades, fanlight
windows, and balanced wings. Balance and symmetry also characterize the Piedmont-style Sawyer
farmhouse, a rural take on classicism with telescoping
wings and a full-front porch.
A porch was a necessity for surviving the sweltering Piedmont summers in the days before air conditioning, and it played an important social role in the
development of southern hospitality. The Chandler is
an 18th-century-style, hall-and-parlor farmhouse with
a prominent double porch traditionally used for sleeping on sultry nights.
Other Pennywise designs appropriate for building
in the Piedmont are the Tidewater Cottage and Williamsburg-style Saddler, both styles that originated in
the 18th-century Tidewater. Still others reflect 18thand 19th-century home styles that were built here and
nationwide, such as the classical Scribner and Vintner,
the two Greek Revival cottages, the Western Reserve
and New Republic, and the Victorian farmhouses, the
Joiner and Milliner.
Fortunately, there are many preserved old houses in
the Virginia Piedmont to serve as design inspiration
to anyone contemplating building a classic “new old
house.” The Pennywise House collection’s mission is to
offer a choice of new homes that respect and honor the
land and legacy of the Piedmont of Virginia.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Southern Piedmont Cottage is raised off the ground,
a Southern building tradition that protected houses from
mold and damp.
62 THE PIEDMONT VIRGINIAN autumn 2010
Kathie Friedley is a freelance writer and editor
who works and travels
with Russell Versaci. She
lives in the old Quaker
town of Lincoln in Loudoun County.