1. Business: Bobby + April
Photo by Sarah Walor
Bobby Hicks and April Straus have washed dishes, procured babysitters and entertained pets for their home-buying clients. “We try to make moving fun and stress-free,” Straus says.
Bobby + April, a renovation/real-estate company, was started in 2010 by the couple as a way to help suburbanites transition into the city. The Jack and Jill of all trades transform houses, mostly in the Fan and Museum Districts, into more family-friendly layouts while retaining their character and charm.
Their marketing techniques go well beyond creating a listing and plunking a sign in the yard. “We try to do something different and fun — get some buzz going,” Straus says. “For a big house in Manakin-Sabot, we turned it into a fundraiser — a benefit auction for the SPCA, with a tent and bar. It demonstrated how the house would work for high-end clients’ entertaining needs.”
The concierge venture is a success, with about 10 full-blown renovations and 20 rehabs a year. Is there anything they won’t do? “We haven’t found it yet,” Straus says.
2. Event: RVA MakerFest
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Photo by Landon Blankemeyer Photography
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Photo by Landon Blankemeyer Photography
Hands-on demonstrations were an intergral part of MakerFest
Last September’s RVA MakerFest brought together a wide spectrum of local creators and nearly 4,500 curious Richmonders eager to learn from the hands-on demonstrations in science, art, technology, engineering, sustainability, food, music, crafts, fashion and more. Organizers even helped people get there, offering free trolley rides to MakerFest’s Science Museum of Virginia location from stops in the city’s East End. The mix of families, young people and older couples eagerly participated in the hands-on activities, according to Phoenix Handcraft’s Kyle Lucia, a member of the event’s leadership committee: “Everybody wanted to get their hands dirty, so to speak; the positive energy was contagious!” Initiated by The Martin Agency’s Mary Arritt and Corey Lane, MakerFest’s goal was to “tear down the silos that exist between the guilds, and expose the wide spectrum of making happening in RVA,” Lucia says. The homegrown event will return on Oct. 3.
3. Hot Spot: Quirk Hotel
Rendering courtesy of 3north
During the early stages of planning Broad Street’s Quirk Hotel, developer Ted Ukrop ran into an old Richmond friend, Rob Bristow, in Las Vegas. Both men were attending a conference where Bristow presented a talk on authenticity in hospitality design with his partner, Pilar Proffitt. Ukrop realized that their firm, Poesis Design, would fit well on the team developing the boutique hotel.
Quirk Hotel builds on the 10-year brand and downtown Broad Street presence of Quirk Gallery, directed by Ted’s wife, Katie Ukrop. “This is an art hotel,” she says, “celebrating Richmond artists, with their work in every space, from an Aimee Joyaux painting in a guest room to a Susie Ganch lobby installation.” That lobby will open onto a relocated Quirk Gallery in an adjacent building.
“We have a lot of influences to incorporate,” designer Proffitt says, citing Richmond history, the early 20th-century building’s past as a department store, Quirk Gallery, the artists, and The Valentine, where the team has researched textiles to reinterpret in new fabrics for the hotel. “We are combining old and new to give the renovated spaces a sense of flair,” she says.
The hotel will feature about 70 rooms in as many as 20 different configurations, a restaurant, coffee shop and bar. “We are finding many ways to make the hotel Richmond-centric with a modern twist,” Katie says, noting that Bristow will craft one-of-a-kind furniture pieces from wood salvaged from the building. Quirk Hotel is slated to open in September at 201 W. Broad St.
4. Movement: RVA Tiny House Team
Photo by Sarah Walor
Whether they’re millennial couples longing for a place to call home but wary of taking on a mortgage, or retirees ready to become debt-free, more than 100 Richmonders are exploring new options for affordable living in spaces that average 150 square feet.
The RVA Tiny House Team group on meetup.com, founded by Thom Stanton in 2014, joins a movement growing nationally since the turn of this century. With eco-friendly building materials, these diminutive residences can cost as little as $15,000 to $20,000. Stanton and his wife, Midge, hope ultimately to build tiny houses for each of their adult children, erecting three homes on a shared property. Other group members plan to take their trailer-mounted tiny houses off the grid and on the road.
5. Newcomer: Kristen Stewart
When she was a child, Kristen Stewart loved donning reproduction historical clothes in The Valentine’s education space, transporting herself to an earlier time. When visiting the Valentine as a college graduate, she stumbled across a couture gown made by Felix van Driem, whom she’d apprenticed under at Virginia Commonwealth University as a fashion design student. Today, Stewart — who was recently named the Valentine’s Nathalie L. Klaus Curator of Costumes & Textiles — oversees that dress, commissioned by Rejena Carreras for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts 1996 Fabergé Ball, and the rest of the Valentine’s 40,000-piece textile collection. She’s applying skills she honed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute after earning her master’s degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology.
“I look at fashion history as reflective of the personal and the cultural,” Stewart says, “and the Valentine’s remarkable costume and textile collection operates well on both fronts.”
The museum’s Klaus & Reynolds Costume & Textile Galleries will open in May with Stewart’s curatorial debut, “Classical Allure: Richmond Style,” an exploration of the persistence of classical motifs over the past 200 years. Using the goddess on the Great Seal of Virginia as her thematic touchstone, Stewart looks forward to representing an accurate cross-section of Richmond’s population.
6. Trend: Solar Power
Photo by Sarah Walor
The Villas at Rocketts Landing is the first solar-powered subdivision in Virginia
Electricity was dirt cheap and solar energy was ridiculously expensive in the 1970s. A burst of green energy fizzled out. “The timing just didn’t make sense,” says Bernie Stanley, owner of Shockoe Solar in Ashland. As 2015 dawns, a solar revival is under way in Richmond. The cost of panels has dropped to 49 cents per watt, and technology has evolved. The period for recouping the cost of installing residential solar systems has decreased.
Last fall, Scott’s Edge on Moore Street became the first major apartment complex in the city to use the sun to generate most of its electricity. The Villas at Rocketts Landing, a 45-home community being developed in Richmond’s East End, is the first solar-powered subdivision in the state, according to developer Jay Epstein of Health-E Community Enterprises of Virginia.
And three months ago, Gov. Terry McAuliffe announced plans to establish a state solar energy development authority — a move that may propel more Virginians to get off the grid. “Hopefully, we’ll see regular families be able to purchase solar as a simple alternative to electricity,” Stanley says.
7. Gallery: Black Iris Gallery
Photo by Emma Gauthier
When Benjamin Thorp joined Black Iris Music as a sound designer in 2013, he suggested that the music production collective add a space for talks, workshops, exhibitions and performances to match its mission of supporting creative voices. Since then, in its first 18 months, Black Iris Gallery has hosted Kickstarter kick-off parties for entrepreneurs, has donated proceeds from its events to nonprofits such as Tricycle Gardens, and has mounted a succession of exhibitions — from a multimedia retrospective on Richmond punk band GWAR to an examination of surveillance and civil rights.
“We want to be a space that is open and conducive to experiment and exchange of ideas between artists, entrepreneurs, scholars and the public,” says Thorp, the gallery’s curator and programmer. Related programs — be they experimental music performances, audio podcast screenings or puppet shows — give additional voices an opportunity to “reframe what we expect to know,” Thorp says. “Artists have a great way of doing that; they show us how to view Richmond through a different lens.”
8. Product: Fern & Roby
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Photo by Todd Wright
Fern & Roby owners Christopher Hildebrand and Sara Moriarty
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Photo by Todd Wright
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Photo by Todd Wright
When husband-and-wife team Christopher Hildebrand and Sara Moriarty were deciding what to call their new design firm, they “wanted something with personal meaning that evoked partnership and personality,” Moriarty says. Enter Fern & Roby, their grandmothers’ first names.
The cozy moniker belies the sleek aesthetic of the firm’s product line, which features simple metal and wood tables and benches, metal tabletop accessories, and high-end audio components, all designed by Hildebrand and available online at fernandroby.com.
Hildebrand, a principal of local industrial design and manufacturing firm Tektonics Design Group (where Moriarty is the office administrator), sees Fern & Roby as a “pressure relief valve for us to do some work that is just fun.”
After building a modern house in Montrose Heights about six years ago, the couple began making furniture to fill it. Hildebrand says Fern & Roby’s furniture is “very much inspired” by their home. They offer tables constructed of reclaimed heart pine in different sizes, with seven different bases in cast iron, bronze and aluminum.
“This is actually something that is being made here in Richmond,” Moriarty says. “That is really an important thing to us.”
9. Neighborhood: Scott's Addition
Photo by Sarah Walor
If Richmond has a potential Tribeca, it’s Scott’s Addition — a tightly knit, up-and-coming urban neighborhood that retains its historic industrial grit. Developers have transformed empty warehouses and abandoned factories into apartments, retail businesses, and dining and entertainment venues. The hip young enclave, bounded by Broad Street, Boulevard, I-195 and railroad tracks to the north, was jump-started in 2005 by a National Historic District designation. The property originally was part of the Mayo family plantation, taking its name from Major Gen. Winfield Scott — a War of 1812 hero who married Elizabeth Mayo and received the land as a dowry. Its early businesses included Binswanger & Co. glass factory and Curles Neck Dairy. Today, it’s home to a host of design-focused businesses including Surface Architectural Supply, Moseley Architects, Harrison Higgins and McKinnon & Harris.
The historic tax credit program has led to an explosion of lofts such as 1 Scott’s Addition, Scott’s Edge and 3031 Norfolk Street. The population surge has spawned eateries such as Urban Farmhouse Market & Cafe, Lunch and Supper!; breweries including Isley and Ardent Craft Ales; an October Pumpkin Festival and a transplanted St. Patrick’s Day blowout; and a big player that has been Scott’s cultural anchor since 2008 — the Richmond Triangle Players. “It’s been a wonderful place,” says managing director Philip Crosby.
The theater group moved into the former Carl’s Radiator Repair, a building with an open layout that required little reconstruction. Crosby hopes the Players have helped revitalize Scott’s Addition. “We’ve brought 10,000 people a year to the neighborhood,” he says.
10. Designer: Susan Stanley Sprinkle
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Susan Stanley Sprinkle’s line of accessories puts a clean, current spin on classic design elements. Her Reprotique pieces, produced in Richmond, include acrylic sconces, switch plates, trays and more. The sconces, which made a splash at recent High Point Markets and won praise from Garden & Gun magazine, are antique in shape but with bold backgrounds, such as blue animal print and yellow damask. “Our new coaster line is going crazy,” Sprinkle says. “We’re also working on some acrylic wall brackets.”
The owner of Stanley Antiques and Fine Art on Grove Avenue, Sprinkle, an art historian and conservationist, has been a staple at Center 44 showroom in Manhattan since 2005. She specializes in items from the 18th to 20th centuries — procuring pieces for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and providing paintings to Polo Ralph Lauren in New York. Her success with interior designers and retail clients has come in handy for recognizing what’s under the dust — and knowing how to update it.
