A farmer’s daughter makes a home in horse country.
“Someone may see beauty in a rock,” says Tom Massie, “but to me it’s something I have to farm around.”
His daughter, Aney Melissa Hoehn, sees beauty in rock. The slope behind the home she lives in with her husband Dave, a software engineer, is full of rock. She’s terraced, built steps and retaining walls and planted, and planted and planted.
“Dave and I picked this spot years and years before we moved here,” says Aney. That spot is 60 acres of land on a Rappahannock County, Va. farm, which Tom Massie inherited from his father and grandfather in 1963. “My dad thought it was a terrible idea – we should build on the top of a hill, ‘you’re never going to be able to reclaim it from the poison ivy.’”
But the poison ivy’s gone, replaced by feverfew, white yarrow, violets, Siberian iris, hellebore, bleeding hearts, toad lilies, peonies, hostas, mandavilla, beebalm, coneflower and forest pansy redbud, some of it transplanted from her previous gardens, some from other sources (the liriope came in Ziploc bags from a friend), all helped along with dumptruck loads of manure from her father.
“In the most exposed, poorest soil, I put the native plants,” Aney says – daylilies being one. “It’s weird in a garden. You have these huge flushes of flowers and then everything dies at once.
“I love flowers and growing things,” says Aney, who teaches elementary school reading and math to gifted and talented students. “I feel almost driven to do it even when it’s not much fun.”
The house itself, with a view of Old Rag Mountain and the ridgelines of Shenandoah National Park, is an amalgam of inspirations. The initial design, by a Canadian architect, was in a magazine, but the Hoehns tweaked the plan to suit their lives and aesthetics, increasing the size of a closet, changing the skylights and putting a rail instead of a wall along the steps to the basement, to open up the space. They broke ground in 2004 and moved in in 2005.
“I wanted lots of windows,” says Aney, “and Dave wanted nothing real squared-up and traditional.” The house, built with 20-some different truss designs, is anything but.
“The thing I really like is it isn’t all the same kind of rooms,” says Dave, and, “I like how the kitchen connects to everything else.”
“Dave has been known to microwave a dinner,” Aney clarifies.
The floors are built of heart pine reclaimed from a tobacco factory in New Jersey (through Mountain Lumber Company near Charlottesville, Va.). The fireplace is built mostly of bluestone from the farm, much of it from an old springhouse, some of it from a local quarry. The mantel comes from a pre-Civil War farm building; around it – sleighbells from “somewhere back in the history of the farm;” pottery from Floyd, Va.; and quartz (beautiful but impractical) her father’s dug up from the surrounding land.
“Whenever he found crystals, he’d throw them onto the nearest stone wall,” says Aney. “‘They are not good for machinery and they do not grow grass,’ Dad says.”
Furniture and decor reflect a love of travel and a good eye for a bargain – there are shelves filled with art and photos from France, Belgium, Morocco, Greece, Jamaica. There’s a wooden bowl from Alaska; a carved wooden giraffe from a friend from Camaroon; blue glass from the British Museum. The fireplace tools and coffee table are from a Pottery Barn outlet, the table runner from Pier 1, an African batik from a flea market in Amsterdam, library stairs from eBay. Upstairs bedrooms contain a quilt from Dave’s grandmother, Spanish mirrors, Slovakian lace and a five-dollar yard sale dresser spray-painted bright blue.
Despite their globetrotting (Aney’s taken her students dogsledding in Quebec, the couple spends every New Year in the Netherlands and Dave’s learning to speak Dutch), home is where family and family history are, and house mirrors both worlds.
“We couldn’t have known until we saw it, and it was the perfect house.”
