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"View Slideshow\n\nNew houses generally come about in two different ways. Some are conceived down to the last throw pillow before a single shovelful of earth is even disturbed; others change over time and with much conversation, evolving\u2014you might say maturing\u2014along with their owners.\n\nThe elegant stone house that James H. T. and Mary McConnell commissioned for themselves in rural Virginia falls into the second category. When the McConnells first began thinking about the 1,500-acre estate they bought back in 1988, they knew how they wanted to live on their land.\n\nJamie McConnell, an investor, and Mary McConnell, a cultural anthropologist with a special interest in the creation of meaning in houses and gardens, have deep roots in Virginia. His family had a land grant from the crown; she attended the University of Virginia. Together they had thought a good deal about what kind of buildings were appropriate to the Virginian spirit.\n\nWhat is the Virginian spirit, exactly? \"It's rustic,\" says Mary McConnell. \"It's gentle. It means living in close rapport with nature. In Virginia you can kneel down in the woods and see an orchid two inches tall. You can also ride, breed horses and dogs, organize fishing parties.\"\n\nThere is also a distinct Virginian spirit in architecture, of course, as she was well aware. \"While acknowledging the local classical vocabulary that goes back to Jefferson, we wanted to make a house that was of this place, this time,\" she explains. \"We didn't want to duplicate an 18th-century house. We are modern people, informal people who nevertheless respect traditional architecture.\"\n\nWhen the McConnells first met with architect Thomas W. S. Craven, a family friend of Jamie McConnell's, he asked them to bring in images of places they liked. At the top of the stack was Nancy Lancaster's library at Little Haseley. \"Tommy looked at it with a smile,\" Mary McConnell recalls, \"and he said, I haven't been there since last year.' \" The next thing the McConnells knew, they were flying to England to visit, and take measurements of, the much-admired library that belonged to Lancaster, a fellow Virginian. The house took off from there.\n\nCraven proposed half an octagon, the octagon being a longtime favorite form in Virginia. He situated the entrance hall and the library at the center of the building, located the master bedroom and family room in the end pavilions and dedicated the interstitial spaces to the kitchen, dining room and guest room. The plan, which maintained a close relationship to the grounds, was a graceful reflection of the McConnells' interest in reading, gardening and animals.\n\nSadly, Craven died before the house was completed. His partner Floyd E. Johnson then oversaw the project. The couple moved in with a collection of inherited furniture, rugs and paintings. They loved their house, but they felt that it was unfinished.\n\nVisiting a friend one day, they were struck by the relaxed elegance of his home's interiors. \"How on earth did you make all this work so beautifully?\" Mary McConnell asked. \"By engaging Tino Zervudachi!\" replied their friend. And thus began the next phase\u2014actually, the next two phases\u2014of the house's evolution.\n\nWhen Zervudachi first came to Virginia, he spent some time with the couple so that he could get to know them. \"These were like mini-vacations for me,\" says the Paris- and London-based interior designer. \"I would spend the days walking through the house and the grounds, making ideas and sketches, and then we would gather in the evening to talk. I actually think it's a good idea for some clients to move into a house before they decorate it fully. A house grows on you. It can be best to move in, let things happen. Accidents happen too.\"\n\nOnce Zervudachi had mulled over the house and the garden, he took an inventory of the furniture, which had not been arranged according to what he calls \"the optimal plan.\" There were good things and less good things; there were overflows, and there were gaps. \"This began as an editorial project that expanded into interior design.\"\n\nHe worked on the house in two phases. In the first, the designer introduced a vivid orange-striped wallcovering in the entrance hall, in order to give the room some extra verticality and \u00E9lan. Then, in the library, he arranged and rearranged the furniture, created upholstered pieces in the right proportions and painted the ceiling with faux paneling; suddenly the already handsome room seemed to grow handsomer still.\n\nIn the dining room, by contrast, he edited out a row of moldings and extended the warm wall color up to the top of the tray part of the tray ceiling. This simple gesture \"completely changed the mood and scale of the space,\" Zervudachi says, \"and connected it more logically to the adjoining library.\" He covered the walls with a plaster-on-canvas finish that was made in India, rolled up, shipped and installed. He encouraged Mary McConnell to think about a chandelier that burned candles and took his cue for the cool contrasting color in the palette from the owners' inherited collection of blue-and-white porcelain.\n\nSeveral years later Zervudachi returned for another round. \"As we finished one room, all the leftover pieces would end up in one of the others,\" he explains, \"and it had come time to attend to the remainder of the house.\" For the master bedroom, he commissioned a painted ceiling, which was inspired, in style, by a small Mughal painting. Then he added flowers that Mary McConnell listed as among her favorites. For the bed and draperies, he designed a botanical print. \"I wanted the room to feel studious rather than feminine, subtle but never dull,\" he says.\n\nFinally, in tackling the family room at the other end of the house, he took his cue from the couple's existing collection of rustic furniture. \"I decided to think of the room as a cabin, albeit a sophisticated one.\" He painted faux planks on the walls and the ceiling and, because of his clients' interest in travel, commissioned a map of the world for the ceiling. Adds Mary McConnell, \"Tino took the architecture and our things, and he made them speak to each other.\"\n\n\"What better way to dream,\" says the designer, \"than to plant yourself in gorgeous Virginia with the dogs and the horses and the blossoms, and to muse over the whole of the earth? I can think of little better, myself.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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