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The Common House Richmond coworking room includes vintage telephone booths and furniture in luxe velvet and leather.
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In the Richmond Social Hall library, furniture groupings create intimate seating areas.
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Members and their guests can collect a beverage from the marble bar in the Charlottesville social hall and then relax in a midcentury Milo Baughman chair. The artwork is by Sarah Boyts Yoder.
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The swimming pool is on Richmond Common House's rooftop.
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In the Richmond Social Hall restaurant, the curving lines of the velvet wall banquettes are echoed in the light fixtures and planters.
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A painting by Richmond muralist Nils Westergard overlooks the Charlottesville Vinegar Hall dining area, which also features light fixtures created by Common House co-founder Derek Sieg.
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The windows at Vinegar Hall are framed by antique shutters found at Caravati's in Richmond.
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The reception desk at the entrance of Common House Charlottesville
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Meeting space at Common House Richmond
Anne Tollett recalls how her mother told her to accept invitations for dates even if the offer wasn’t compelling.
“She said, ‘Dates breed dates,’ ” Tollett, founder of the Hanover Avenue interior design firm, says with a laugh.
Tollett passes on her mother’s advice to new designers building their practices — with an appropriate tweak. “Work makes work,” she says. “Work outside your town breeds work. You meet that client’s best friend, you meet new tradespeople.”
It’s logical that Tollett’s client roster is split 50-50 between local and out-of-town projects. A native Richmonder and VCU graduate, she lived and worked in New York City, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, before returning to Richmond in 2014 and launching Hanover Avenue the following year. With the onset of the pandemic, a time when more people than ever embraced remote employment, Tollett’s firm already had expertise. “We were always sharing our screens and building things in 3D,” she says. “We’ve been syncing up with clients for a long time; now it’s second nature.”
A project years ago led Tollett to her biggest professional undertaking: designing both the Charlottesville and Richmond Common House locations. Her firm had worked on a total house renovation in Charlottesville for one of the Common House founders. He liked her work so much, he recommended to his partners they hire her for their new project, a social club.
“Always the idea was that [the club] was supposed to feel like a home away from home,” Tollett says. “A place where you could go meet with friends, but you also had spaces where you could come and gather and meet people you didn’t know.
“We didn’t want a hotel lobby feeling,” she adds. “We wanted a living room feeling.”
The Charlottesville location, which opened in 2017 in the Vinegar Hill neighborhood — rescuing a historic building that once hosted a club for the town’s Black community — features contributions from street artists and spaces that can easily be repurposed for different uses. “[One of the founders] designed a picture rail with lights for one room,” she says. “The point was that you could have an event there or do a puzzle or sit down with your laptop.”
In the Richmond Common House, at 303 W. Broad St., arched niches with banquettes covered in olive-green velvet command the social hall, while the basement has a comfortable screening room with club chairs and a wine cellar that doubles as a cozy private dining space.
Both houses have color palettes that include deep, rich tones as well as bright, clean neutrals. The Charlottesville main event space is Farrow & Ball Studio Green — a “moody green,” Tollett says — while in Richmond, the banquet room is Farrow & Ball Setting Plaster, which Tollett calls “a warm glow, the color of love” and the perfect backdrop for any bride’s color scheme.
The point, Tollett says, is to show beauty in all its colors and forms.
“A space doesn’t have to be perfectly perfect to look amazing,” she says. “Things that are similar but different can look beautiful together.”
