Keswick is a rural hunt-country community just 15 minutes from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the University of Virginia, and Downtown Charlottesville. It’s a region rooted in American history, fine architecture, and the rolling foothills of the Virginia Piedmont. Here you’ll find foxhunting, polo, and award-winning local wine. Miles of white fences frame ancient farms, and new homes are built to honor the pursuit of Virginia’s pastoral ideal.

We built the Idea House in Keswick Estate, a private community featuring the Keswick Hall resort, with its Full Cry golf course inspired by Keswick’s foxhunting heritage, and Marigold Restaurant by Jean-Georges.

International design icon and Virginia native Charlotte Moss served as interior designer at the Idea House. Her richly decorated rooms work together to tell the story of a Southern family linked to their landscape. "I wanted the inside to breathe out and the outside to breathe in,” says Moss. Hues of chartreuse, green, brown, and blue mimic the landscape in its most vivid form.

Eugene Ryang of Waterstreet Studio served as Landscape Architect, designing the house’s surroundings with a view towards the future. From the front yard orchard plantings to a meadow sown to invite birds and pollinators, time is an essential element of the design. “It’s about what it will become,” he says, thinking forward to a time when the house sits at the center of a mature homestead landscape that produces fruit, flowers, and new life each season.

Architects Julie Kline Dixon and Keith Scott of Rosney & Co. designed the house itself with local architecture in mind, incorporating gentle, unimposing references to Thomas Jefferson’s masterpiece, Monticello. The five-part Palladian layout, the octagonal entry hall, and the view from the front door straight through to the water beyond recall the subtle architectural elegance unique to Virginia. A low, wide roof shelters the house and front porch in what Dixon calls “an architectural exhale.” Welcome home.

Join us as we take a moment to explore each room in the Idea House and appreciate the local Virginia designers and craftspeople that brought this special project to life.