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The chimney was extended up to the ceiling line and clad in Venetian plaster with a custom black pigment, creating a dramatic focal point.
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The new primary en suite bath, once an office, has a double shower enclosed by frameless glass; the teak vanities were custom-made on site by Dawson’s craftsmen.
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The office before its conversion into a bathroom
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The kitchen footprint was updated with new custom walnut cabinetry and KitchenAid appliances. The travertine marble flooring is original.
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A painting by Dawson hangs above a bed from the Crate & Barrel Tate collection.
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The midcentury-style room divider was custom-crafted from sapele wood with a walnut finish.
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Vinyl recording enthusiasts, Neff and Dawson keep a small portion of their impressive album collection in floating walnut cabinet.
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The ceramic sculpture is by Cri Kars-Marshall; the large prints are by Timothy Van Laar.
Missy Neff and Chopper Dawson recall discovering their house while walking along the James River’s Buttermilk Trail.
Facing the trail and the river beyond, the house has a tony Riverside Drive address, but it’s elevated from the roadway, well screened by trees and accessible only from a hidden alleyway. Neff and Dawson, then living in nearby Woodland Heights, caught glimpses of the house’s angles and were curious. They were also patient.
“Over and over, we saw that [For Sale] sign,” Dawson says, laughing. “It was kind of out of reach [financially], but it stayed on the market. There were a series of contracts that fell through. Finally, we were able to make a play for it.”
Dawson credits Alexis Thompson, their agent with River Fox Realty, for helping craft a sale in October 2020 that took into account the house’s leaky roof and windows, which had led to interior mold, as well as a fish tank that had never been emptied.
“It was like black death in there,” Neff says, grimacing. “Luckily, a neighbor knew the name of the person who had done the fish tank installation. He came back and took it out for free, for salvage parts.”
The couple took less than five months to rehab the home, relying on Dawson’s team from his own company — Chopper Dawson Inc., a comprehensive renovation firm — for the bulk of the project. The couple worked at nights, too, determined to keep things moving along.
“From experience, I know that all of us [contractors] tend to leave loose ends on personal projects,” Dawson says. “I treated it like a job. I wanted to make sure Missy was getting the same attention as any other client.”
Because there weren’t significant structural issues to remedy, Neff and Dawson were able to focus on the aesthetic changes they wanted. The midcentury modern home, built in the late 1940s, originally had a one-story wall of windows in the living room. It became a two-story wall in a 1980s expansion that added windows along the ceiling line above the fireplace, as well as dark cherry paneling on the wall. The upper windows were leaking, so Neff wanted them removed.
“Our vision was oddly similar, but he wasn’t sure about losing the windows,” Neff says, noting that the change is now one Dawson embraces. “We didn’t lose anything [in terms of light], and the [new] white walls make it so much brighter.”
The couple further modernized the home by fashioning a new bedroom out of two separate but connected spaces — a room that they believe was an in-home theater, and an office with more paneling and another fireplace. By filling in a wall, they created a formal dining space as well as a private first-floor suite, so often found in today’s newer homes. A wall was added upstairs, separating a bedroom from a bathroom added in the 1980s renovation, making for a total of four bedrooms and three full baths.
The house’s Sherwin-Williams Pure White walls are the perfect foil for the couple’s art collection, much of which is by local artists or self-made. For the most part, furnishings came directly from their previous home, matching the new house’s vibe without missing a beat. “It was odd watching our stuff move in,” Dawson notes. “It was like we had been trying to move into this space before we even got here.”
The goal, Neff says, is to enjoy the house and embrace its location, which is what attracted their attention in the first place.
“This is really why we bought the house,” she says, gesturing to the 25-foot wall of windows behind her swivel chair. “We wanted to make this part of the house be pretty clean and neutral. We wanted the inside to have really clean lines to allow us to bring the outdoors in and not compete with it.”
