Down a long private driveway off Fox Hill Road is a castle of a home, reminiscent of an old English country estate — though this home was built just eight years ago.
This unique estate sits on about 40 acres of what once was a horse farm. Now the property of John and Jill Fees features a formal garden, complete with a water feature and sculptures dotting the manicured space.
But it’s also a working farm and orchard, with a green house, a large vegetable garden, a kitchen garden and enough chickens to get about two dozen eggs per day.
The Fees’ home and gardens will be featured on Lynchburg’s Historic Garden Day tour. Jill said the couple agreed to be part of the annual event after learning of the work the Garden Club of Virginia does to rehabilitate historic gardens for all to enjoy.
The Fees’ house features a central hall plan, providing a straight shot from the front door through to the ample patio, and on to the formal garden dotted with sculptures. The centerpiece of this space is a large water feature.
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Visitors on Garden Day will get to pass through the house and peer into the rooms that extend from the space, including the parlor, the large kitchen and the formal dining room lined by a mural of old Lynchburg.
The patio in the back has its own kitchenette, complete with a wood-fired oven, and off to one side sits a kitchen garden where, in summer, the couple can pick their own salad accoutrements.
“If you want a little side salad with dinner, it’s nice to be able to walk out here and just dress it out,” John said.
The couple owned the property for a while before construction began on their home. There was other work to be done to prepare the property, including demolishing an old house, realigning the driveway and building a bridge, he added.
“We were looking at land all over the place, and we just decided we didn’t really want to be that far from town,” John said. “So we tried to find a decent piece of property to do what we wanted to do, but not have to drive an hour to get to town. So this was a really convenient spot. We’re two miles from Boonsboro Road and feel like you’re kind of still out in the middle of nothing. So that was sort of a compromise, was to try to get a decent-sized piece of land but not really far away.”
The design of the house is inspired by English manor homes the couple notices when they lived in Houston.
“We were attracted to the design,” Jill said. “There’s one architect that we particularly liked, so we’d go to these open houses on the weekends. … We came across this one architect, every time we go to a house that we really, really loved, he was the architect. We talked to him about doing long distance and it just wasn’t gonna work.”
So the couple took their ideas to local architect Scott Glass, who made their vision a reality. Built of various types of stone, the house is crafted to be low maintenance.
Most of the items in the house were handmade, such as the intricately carved mantel in the parlor.
“You can’t really find stuff like that very easily,” John said.
Artist George Snyder, a North Carolina native, crafted the dining room mural in a modified French style, using old photographs of Lynchburg. The painting is on canvas that is adhered to the wall, much like wallpaper.
While the materials for the home were sourced from all over the United States and even other countries, the work to build it came from local contractors, John said.
“I’m really just very pleased and very impressed with the craftsmen that we have in a community that can do these kinds of things,” he said. “It’s really amazing the talent and capabilities here. And it’s really great to be able to take advantage of that.”
The 6,000-square-foot patio provides ample space for outdoor entertaining against a formal garden backdrop. Two massive spheres mark the corner of the water features, and other sculptures stand out against the verdant formal garden. White jasmine grows up arbors and shrubbery lines the manicured space.
A raised-bed vegetable garden sits inside a brick wall, near a former horse barn the couple converted to event space. They call the barn the “Party Barn,” and it’s where their daughter’s wedding reception was held.
Large metal snails sculptures guard the garden entrance. What grows in the space changes from year to year.
“It’s not any kind of rhyme or reason,” Jill said of the vegetable garden. “It’s just like, ‘What do you want to have this year? So it’s not all planned out up there.”
The couple donates part of their harvest to the Lynchburg Daily Bread.
Sidener is the special publications editor at The News & Advance. Know a house that should be featured? Reach her at (434) 385-5539 or csidener@newsadvance.com.
Carrie Sidener
Editor
