A rendering of the new Virginia Home facility in Hanover County
There’s no place like home; one of Richmond’s oldest nonprofits knows that well. The Virginia Home has been caring for people with disabilities from its six-story building at 1101 Hampton St. near Byrd Park for just shy of a century. In recent years, leaders of the organization — which provides 24/7 care to 130 residents — sought a new space tailor-made for current and future residents and an expansion of services. Earlier this year, they found what they were looking for.
The Virginia Home’s new destination is a 70-acre campus in Hanover County off Bell Creek Road, which will feature a 196,000-square-foot building meant to increase resident capacity by more than 20%. Doug Vaughan, president and CEO of the nonprofit since 2021, estimates the residents will be fully moved in by fall 2027.
“The new campus will address some issues we’ve had at our current location,” Vaughan says. “We felt like transitioning to a single-story modern design would enhance our resident safety, their accessibility and ease of movement throughout the building, and overall let us accomplish a lot that a renovation of the current building couldn’t accommodate.”
The current Virginia Home in the Maymont neighborhood
Additionally, architectural upgrades to resident rooms and bathrooms will be a primary focus for the new building, with plans to add roughly 100 square feet per room and introduce semiprivate bathrooms, which is a change from the shared hall bathrooms in the current facility.
Residents and staff, many of whom have worked and lived in the building for decades, share their excitement at being included in the plans for the new facility. “It’s designed specifically for us,” says Cyndi Carter, a resident at 1101 Hampton living with multiple sclerosis. “It’s just beautiful.”
The future-thinking move isn’t just about improvements — it’s about additions, says Laura Stewart, the nonprofit’s board chair. Their goals include expanding to 160 full-time residents and opening a day program meant to improve the quantity and quality of care for people with disabilities in the region. The organization’s waitlist for residency openings has grown in recent years.
“It’s the kind of thing where there’s definitely a need, and I don’t know that locally there’s a supply to meet the demand,” Stewart says.
While the home’s prime location in the Maymont neighborhood was hard to give up, Stewart, Vaughan and others with the organization look forward to the positive impact the move can offer residents and the evolving nonprofit.
“It’s a great spot with tons of room and nature around it, and there’s lots happening in Hanover, too,” Stewart says. “This building [in Richmond] has been very good to us. It will be hard to say goodbye to this building, but our new building is an opportunity to better serve our current residents and staff.”
