About one mile south of Hollin Hills on Fort Hunt Road lies Tauxemont, a community of brick and cinder-block ramblers. Begun as a co-op in the early forties and completed commercially during and after World War II, it is here that a history of Hollin Hills should begin.

“Bob Davenport sharpened his teeth on Tauxemont before beginning Hollin Hills,” says Eason Cross, Jr, who worked with the architect Charles Goodman. “One can see there the antecedents of a builder who was capable of making a place like Hollin Hills go. Davenport really took a huge gamble on this business of contemporary design in merchant housing, but he himself believed it was the best and right way to build housing. There was no market survey made; there was just a conviction that there was a market for good design in Washington, and the sense to find a willing and competent architect.”

Davenport was working for the government in the early forties and living in Buckingham, an Arlington county apartment development. He and ten or twelve friends, all restless to have houses, formed a cooperative to build their own. An earlier attempt had failed to materialize, but Davenport had done preliminary work on that venture and felt ready to move ahead.

“We finally got the courage to make a $500 deposit on a piece of land which is the old part of Tauxemont,” says Davenport. “I was president of the group. It was basically a very simple house — very minimal.”

Upon completion of the first group of houses, the co-op did not wish to expand, but it granted permission to Davenport to build additional houses on a fee basis. Work was in progress when World War II broke out and suddenly all the rules changed. Priority certificates were required for materials, and equipment had to be purchased in carload lots (when they could find it). His agreement with the purchasers was to charge whatever the house cost (not to exceed $7,500), plus a $750 fee. If the cost was higher, he would absorb the difference. He finished those houses during the war and lost $2,000 in the process. Nevertheless, he got an option for the balance of the Tauxemont land in 1945 and completed the project.

an almost impulsive decision

“It was about that time that I first ran into Chuck Goodman,” says Davenport. “A few people in Tauxemont wanted him to redesign their houses. I met Chuck and he had some very fresh ideas about what to do with a basic house. About that time, a man on the school committee said, ‘you know, that land off Fort Hunt Road is going to be sold.’ They had already sold the Hollin Hall part down below. I went over and looked at it and it was a wonderful piece of land; I was quite enthused about it and they said they were going to take bids. It was an estate that had to be settled.

“So I went to the chap who was with me in Tauxemont [Shy Rodman] and said, ‘Do you think we could buy it? At least we can put in a bid.’ So we did. It was 240 acres. We went out to that court early [in Fairfax] and sure enough, the judge said, 'I'm going to auction it off right here.'

“Well, it scared me half to death because we kept going up and going up. We didn't have any financing. We had no definite way we were going to pay for it at that time. And we finally ended up with it. I guess it was $500 an acre.

“Then our problem was: How're we going to pay for it? What are we going to do with it?”

after the plunge:
davenport gets things moving

This was 1946. With a minimum deposit made and 90 days to close on the property, Davenport sought the advice of friends in the Federal Housing Administration. He needed a first-rate land planner.

Charles Goodman's name came up again and again. Goodman produced a plan, and with it Davenport set out to find financing. S.J. Rodman approached his brother Morris with a proposal that the three form a partnership to buy the land together. Davenport would be the primary working member of the team; the Rodmans would be the investors.

Morris agreed and they subsequently laid out the lots, a section at a time, and then sold the land to the entity known as Hollin Hills. This was another partnership, with Davenport as Managing Partner, and co-partners Morris Rodman and Samuel C. Cohn as trustees, with various members of Davenport's family as beneficiaries. Thus Davenport was able to finance the project. It was the Hollin Hills partnership which built and sold the houses.

a piece of history

The partners had bought themselves an historic piece of land. It was part of a 2,000-acre tract which had been granted to George Mason by King George III. Mason distributed the land amongst his children. A trustee of Alexandria, he wrote the Virginia Bill of Rights and helped draft the new federal Constitution. His own home at Gunston Hall was south of Lord Fairfax's Belvoir which was, in turn, adjacent to Mount Vernon and Woodlawn.

The share of the land grant given to Mason's son Thompson included what we now know as Marlan Forest, Wellington Heights, Tauxemont, Hollin Hall Village and Hollin Hills. Around 1780 Thompson began construction of an elaborate mansion near the Gum Springs part of his property, and called it Hollin Hall after an estate in his wife's family. It took a decade to build and ten years later it was destroyed by fire.

In the 1840s, Quakers from Pennsylvania and New ]ersey came into the area looking for good timberland. They began with Woodlawn, a large estate left by Washington to his nephew, Lawrence Lewis. It had ceased to be profitable to cultivate. They added Hollin Hall in 1852 and acquired Wellington in 1859 from Charles A. Washington, another nephew. Quaker families settled throughout these lands.

In 1910, a Mr. Wilson purchased 640 acres in the area and called his house Hollin Hall. The land ran from around the Hollin Hills school, south to the edge of Hollin Hall Village. Following his death in the 1930s the estate went into liquidation. Merle Thorpe bought the house and 80 acres at auction in 1941, with ten acres going to the Mount Vernon Unitarian Church in 1959. The estate was sold (except for the church property) in the 1960s and the Mason Hill houses were built there.

In the meantime, John McPherson and Associates purchased 25 acres of Wilson's land, including all of the present Hollin Hall Village. Another member of the McPherson family acquired 60 acres and sold individual lots in Hollindale. In 1946 the 240 acres which would become Hollin Hills were purchased by Davenport and the Rodman brothers.

the influence of goodman

The first lot sold for $1,500. Once the loan was secured for the entire acreage, it became necessary to decide on style of houses.

“Chuck Goodman is a very competent architect,” says Davenport, “but he is also a good promoter. He immediately sketched some plans for houses and said, ‘this is what you ought to do.’ Of course, you can't use a conventional house on that land. We started on Rippon Road with that hillside. My God, you had to have imagination to build on that area! And so we built the first two houses, a two-level house and then a one-level house.

“Goodman got a lot of good recognition because of Hollin Hills and rightly so; we were able to work together because I wanted to do something different and I think it was hard at that time for any builder to conceive of doing anything basically different. Bucknell was built about the same time. It was a lovely piece of land and they took the bulldozers and stripped that whole land. It changed the contour of the land and laid it out so each one of the houses would sit nicely on its space, instead of saying, 'we'll build a house that will fit the lot.’”

“Chuck Goodman was, and I guess still is, a demanding man to work for,” says Eason Cross, Jr, “but from the end of World War II until at least 1958 when I left his office, his was the best atelier in town. Goodman’s reputation on the national scene stemmed from his work in housing design primarily, and from Hollin Hills in particular. One must realize that designing for speculative sale is a far different game than working directly for a specific client, and although there were plenty of good examples of contemporary housing around 1951, very little of it could appeal to a number of family types, the mark of a successful merchant house. [His houses] relied more on rational detail and careful scale than sculptural stunting. Their interior spaces were striking without dominating their owners, and the way they sat in the landscape made the new houses look like they had been there always.”

Goodman and Davenport came along at the right time for each other. Goodman had the means and imagination to create just the sort of innovative housing that Davenport wanted to build at a price fledgling professionals could afford.

goodman the idealist

Goodman was interviewed for the pamphlet, Ten Years of Hollin Hills, published by the community in 1960, and said: “Blind faith is what keeps me going. An ingredient of this blind faith of mine was my feeling that in a community of this kind there should never appear intolerance — intellectual or otherwise.

“Tolerance, of course, is a civilized quality. I'm interested in civilized architecture. Tolerance comes from self-respect. If one respects one's integrity, one respects the integrity of one's neighbor. I never worry about Hollin Hills on any big issues.

“Architecture reflects the social phenomenon. What we yearn for and need is the flowering of the individual. We deeply need more offbeat personalities, more people with unique interests, more people strong enough to stand unafraid and be themselves. We need them not just in houses, but in communities where their influence can be felt. We need unity of diverse interests.”

Hollin Hills reflects Goodman's deeply felt belief that architects and builders needed to “develop fresh thinking on how to use land properly and humanely.” He also held the view that people of every age were essential to the community. That mixture did come to Hollin Hills, but not for some years. lnitially, ages, points of view, values and politics were remarkably similar. As to his hope that residents would move from smaller to larger houses as their families expanded, some did just that. Others increased the size of their houses through additions.

“an avalanche of new ideas”

Reflecting on housing in the 1940’s, Davenport says: “You could buy lots of houses at that time that were the same size [as ours] and had three bedrooms and one bath and a kitchen and a dining room arrangement. The only difference was that we developed a new style of architecture and a new style of land planning.”

In Eason Cross's view, Goodman and Davenport came forth with “an avalanche of new ideas for the postwar American merchant housing boom.” The unique design elements of Hollin Hills houses brought forth numerous awards, as well as articles in books, journals, magazines and newspapers. Regardless of the acclaim, many of the innovations on the land plan and in the house sitings sent opposition stirring through the banking and mortgage establishment, which viewed the entire undertaking with suspicion. For example:

The initial choice of such hilly land — and the accompanying decision to avoid scalping it with bulldozers — was unique in the 1940s and 1950s world of commercially-developed housing communities. Other builders had shunned the land as too expensive and too much trouble to develop. Goodman sited the houses to the fall of the land, rather than to the street, and the individual house plans conformed to the requirements of the land. Hence, the first houses —at Paul Spring and Rippon Roads and Drury Lane — were different from Iater designs developed at other ends of the community. The neighborhood would not be static; this was something the builder and designer were determined to avoid.

High-priced and low-priced houses were intermixed not only within the community, but on individual blocks. The common wisdom of the time was that such a practice would bring down the value of the higher priced houses. In conventional neighborhoods this may well still be the case, because the less expensive house would be of a different styie and of different — and lesser quality — materials than the more expensive ones. In Hollin Hills, quality and style was uniformly good throughout, and the lots were similar. The difference was in size and shape. As a result, values throughout were not only maintained, but residents whose means and requirements changed could move from one size house to another (as Goodman had envisioned their doing) without having to leave a community they enjoyed.

The cul-de-sac was used on Recard, Bedford, Drury and Daphne Lanes; Beechwood; Brentwood Place; Kimbro Street and Elba, Nemeth, Saville and Hopa Courts, and even the Martha's Road circle. The concept of the dead-end turnaround was opposed by those who wanted to move through the community in a hurry — firemen, postmen, milkmen, delivery trucks. Admittedly, people are still seen driving 'round and 'round Martha's loop, trying to find their way out of Hollin Hills. Nevertheless, the general use of the cul-de-sac throughout the country today supports the planners' belief that it provides safety and quiet to a residential area.

Some Hollin Hills lots (notably on the north side of Glasgow Road and the west side of Rebecca Drive) lie below the roadway, an unacceptable practice in 1949, but it was in keeping with Goodman's and Davenport's conviction that the house should be designed to fit the land. Innovative designing made it work and kept it looking natural.

Paul Spring and Rippon Roads are "single-loaded" (having houses on one side of the street only). This feature, while more expensive from the builder's point of view, made for more beautiful roads, greater safety and easier community access to the parklands.

a new landscape philosophy

The setting aside of land to be owned by the community and used exclusively for parks was in itself extremely rare and these parks have enhanced the beauty of the community and the enjoyment of the residents.

In the late forties, land value in a subdivision was based on “front- footage”. The planners of Hollin Hills, however, believed that back yard and private space was of more importance than what showed from the street side. Thus, many lots measure greater rear footage than on the front. The significance of this will be apparent as we consider Goodman's land and site planning, his landscape philosophy, and the practice of landscape architect Bamey Voight and those who followed him.

Landscape plans were developed for all new houses — an important means of integrating the beauty of the community as a whole and a valuable form of guidance for the neophyte home owner who had the right instincts, but no sense of horticultural direction. By way of supporting the landscaping effort, Bob Davenport gave azaleas to the residents for Christmas for several years. The landscaping of the community is treated at greater length following this section.

innovative construction ideas

Over and above the design, planning, siting and landscaping innovations which distinguished Hollin Hills, Goodman implemented a number of new construction ideas which would help to keep costs down and design features high. He believed that millwork should be fabricated in the shop and assembled on the site; that approaches to carpentry should be simplified to make optimum use of less skilled labor; that imaginative and cost-reducing use should be made of conventional materials (flooring on walls and ceilings, for example).

C. R. McCalley, the Construction Foreman at Hollin Hills, had worked with Davenport on the Tauxemont project, but he took a dim view of the new glass houses and walked off the job. He was convinced that the houses wouldn't stand up. He returned, however, to build his crew from just a few men to over 100 and supervised the building of 463 Hollin Hills houses. He lived in a trailer near the construction sheds on Rebecca Drive. Mac is still on the job in "retirement”, building additions and making repairs. There are those who believe he is the only person left who knows how the innards of these houses are put together.

By hindsight, it is apparent that if a number of things had been done differently, some later troubles might have been avoided. In some instances, the thinking of the time — or lack of thought (about energy, for example) — explains such things as single-pane windows and scanty insulation. Other features, such as air-conditioning, extra baths, etc., were considered luxuries then, but as the perception grew that they were necessities, they have been added, along with more efficient kitchens and better storage space. Still, the houses had style and there was growing enthusiasm for the light, the airiness, the sense of communion with the outdoors.

challenging first days

“It caught on,” says Davenport. “We had huge crowds when we opened up that first weekend [in November, 1949]. We had muddy roads; the mud was up to your knees and everything else. The first couple that moved in their house had no water system and they weren't hooked up to a sewer yet, and we hauled water in buckets — 50-gallon drums — and put it up on a hillside and piped it into the house with hoses. And they lived that way for a couple of weeks until we got the water system in and got it functioning.

“We put a well on a vacant lot on Paul Spring — there's a park there now (East Stafford) — and worked from that well; we had to bring the lines back. Gas was nothing; we had gas right away. That was one of the things that made Hollin Hills so desirable. The gas company ran a line down Fort Hunt Road and we were right in there as soon as they knew we were going to start. There was no sewer system, so they built a great big thing out of wood — right behind our office — a huge, temporary septic system which we chlorinated — an eyesore. We used it for three years until they finally got the sewer constructed. If you went wandering near that big tank, it didn’t smell very good. They built a special line down back behind the office and up over the hill. It worked by gravity.”

The Hollin Hills office was an old, cramped frame house on Fort Hunt Road, south of the present tennis courts. The ambience was hectic, delicately balanced between frustration over things gone wrong or inability to locate plans or space or contracts, and the genuine excitement generated by being able to serve up a new and interesting way to live amongst big trees and affordable mortgages.

pioneering owners

In the midst of this heady atmosphere was George Brickelmaier, a Hollin Hills resident and an associate of Davenport's for many years. As trouble shooter and liaison, he took all the complaints.

“In those days (of course everybody was younger then), early settlers had a kind of pioneer spirit,” he reminisced in Ten Years in Hollin Hills. “At that time these houses were wildly unconventional. Besides, nothing worked right — the roads weren't in — sometimes the sewer wasn't in — nothing but bare dirt around — what the people put up with was astoundingl Furthermore, most of 'em had come from apartments and they didn't know how to do a damned thing anyway.”

The question of who was the first in Hollin Hills is moot. Certainly the first two houses built were the two-level Babb house and one-level Nelles house on opposing corners of Rippon Road and Drury Lane. Davenport isn't sure who moved in first. A number of residents say it was Nelles. The Babbs'daughter, Barbara Wade, recalls that Nelles was first; the Ames family up Rippon Road was second and Babbs third. A Washington Post story of May 22, 1971 — featuring the last house completed in the community — stated that the Babb house was first, and they ran a picture of it. Perhaps the confusion lies in the wording: "first house completed," "first house sold," or "first house occupied."

There was no confusion, however, about the last house completed. It belongs to the Christoffersons on Kimbro Street in New Hollin Hills and to celebrate the event, the community had a huge block party in tribute to Davenport in 1971. There was a musical review and three roast pigs were provided by the guest of honor himself.

Whoever was first, people commenced moving in. They got stuck in the mud and picked up their mail at the thirty "rural" mailboxes down on Paul Spring Road. They begged Ma Bell for telephones (the few who boasted them were on ten-party lines). This was a time when milk was generally delivered, diaper service came to the door and doctors still made house calls, but no one, including the Post Office, wanted any part of it until the roads were paved.

From the start, Davenport was anxious to see Hollin Hills function as a cooperating community and he urged the formation of a community association. A Certificate of Incorporation for the Hollin Hills Community Association was set forth on August 25, 1950. The earliest concerns of the association were, quite naturally, related to making the community work. Among the first orders of business were: to contract for trash collection, negotiate the installation of a fire hydrant and to build a culvert to handle waters under Paul Spring Road.

the lay of the land: siting and landscaping

The reason so many builder-developers in the late forties were appalled at the idea of building glass houses on such a hilly terrain as that of Hollin Hills was that they lacked the imagination or confidence to practice the siting and landscaping principles that held the key to success for such an undertaking. Not so Davenport and his designer, Goodman. Their innovative site plans, developed well before the unit house plans were finally detailed, incorporated a philosophy of working with, rather than against, the contours of the land, curving the streets to avoid mutilating these contours, retaining the natural woods, and siting houses on the land so as to provide each one with as much privacy and solar exposure as could be achieved on moderate-sized lots.

There was no inclination to feel bound or deterred by the prevailing conventions of suburban siting in this county, which, for ease of mass construction, fronted all houses facing the street, side-by-side, with front lawns unobstructed by other vegetation until the "foundation planting" was reached, and with "street frontage" the criterion of value.

Instead, the Hollin Hills developer/designers made choices from among the various standard plans available, depending on the contours and situation of the lots which themselves had been subdivided, not in terms of rectangular principles, but again, in response to the land contours and the ultimate living pleasure of the individual homeowner. The cul-de-sac, a bugaboo among local government, fire officials, and delivery companies at the time, was widely used anyway because of its privacy and safety benefits.

These siting principles tended in themselves to contribute to a sense of community. To further foster this feeling, Hollin Hills incorporated another idea almost unheard-of at the time, namely the establishment of parklands through an owners' corporation set up to hold such lands in joint tenancy. Such parklands were chosen in such a way as to preserve natural drainage channels and, in the words of one-time Goodman associate and Hollin Hills resident Eason Cross, to make some "intelligent choices of places to surrender land to natural needs rather than attempting to civilize it."

The philosophies and practices mentioned so far, while exceedingly rare for the period, were not entirely without precedent in this country. The preeminent 19th century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, fresh from his triumphs with New York's Central Park and the U.S. Capitol grounds, turned his attention, in partnership with Calvert Vaux, to the design of suburban developments such as Riverside (a suburb of Chicago) in 1868 and Tarrytown Heights (Hudson valley north of New York City) in 1870.

Olmsted and Vaux, obviously not as much in the driver's seat as the designers of Hollin Hills, were limited to giving "advice" to the developer. Much of this advice was virtually identical with the Hollin Hills precepts, e.g., roads should be laid out in easy curves to take advantage of the natural features of the land; one major aspect of suburban life to be accommodated in the site plans was privacy for the indoor and outdoor life of individual families; another aspect was to provide for community interests and means of "recreating together on common ground."

An important element of the Olmsted/Vaux "advice" was finally ignored by an apparently tight-fisted developer who decided to build houses on the land set aside for community activities, but enough of the philosophy prevailed so that Riverside was accounted a success on its own terms by a critic writing as late as 1953.

There were, however, two major differences between the Olmstead/ Vaux experience and the approach used in Hollin Hills. First of all, they were working with communities of the very wealthy (Tarrytown Heights, for instance, comprised 159 "villas" on two- to fifteen-acre sites), and it seems clear that no designer or developer of that period would have considered it fitting (or, perhaps more important, profitable) to try to provide such amenities for young middle-class families who would make up the bulk of Hollin Hills homeowners.

Secondly, there is no evidence that they considered any overall approach to the landscaping of the individual properties or tried to involve the homeowners themselves in a community landscape plan that would integrate their individual garden spaces into a harmonious whole, as was done in what turned out to be one of the most successful aspects of the Hollin Hills experiment.

lou “barney” voigt comes on the scene

Lou Bernard Voigt, a landscape architect who shared the Davenport/ Goodman philosophy, joined forces with them to carry out such a plan. Voigt concerned himself in the first instance with problems of harmony and continuity, eventually working out landscape plans for the individual lots which, as Eason Cross said so well, "flowed sinuously across lot lines with the intent of breaking down the image of so many regularly-spaced dominoes one might ordinarily get through lawns and foundation plantings."

An individual landscape plan was included with each house sale at a minimal but obligatory cost (initially $100), including one consultation with Voigt prior to finalization of the plan. When Voigt died tragically and prematurely in 1953, his work was continued by like-minded landscape architects, first Dan Kiley, then Eric Paepcke, who survived long enough to provide a plan for the last Hollin Hills house in 1971.

Voigt proved to be a master at parrying clients' sometimes rather weird preconceptions of what plant materials they wanted for screening, accents, ground covers and other landscape effects and at persuading them to accept suggestions that would do more to coordinate their lots into the overall vision he had for the whole area.

This was a risky experiment. The young intellectuals, mostly from urban backgrounds, who made up the bulk of Hollin Hills homeowners, had little previous interest in or knowledge of horticulture and not enough money to patronize expensive nurseries or hire landscape contractors to execute comprehensive planting plans or to build patios, walkways and retaining walls. Arming such people with drawings, plant lists, spades and shovels seemed almost foolhardy.

Reckoning with the potential pitfalls, Voigt undertook to write a regular column in the monthly Hollin Hills Newsletter, providing information about types of plant materials, how to choose good specimens, how and when to plant them, how to improve the soil and, in general, how to think about landscaping problems.

The city lads and their wives took surprisingly well to these new endeavors. A large percentage of them could be seen out on their muddy lots in fair weather and foul, digging in the soil, carting away the building debris buried by the construction crew (a time-honored "professional" practice which even Davenport could not control), and generally acting the way people do when they are succumbing to a new and seductive addiction.

To help them with the high cost of plant materials, the Hollin Hiils rnanagement introduced thern to a unique nearby institution — a wild and disorderly "nursery" operated by a Virginia character, Henry Stabler, on Fairfax County farmland inherited from his father. There, magnificent specimens of just the sort of broadleaf evergreens recommended by Voigt could be obtained — if old Henry could be persuaded to part with plants he had come to consider good friends — for a fraction of their cost at commercial nurseries.

Stabler also contributed Newsletter columns crammed with earthy wisdom. Struggling with such adversities as outrageous soil, rank inexperience, and occasional exasperation when they mistook Voigt's principled zeal for dogmatism, many Hollin Hillers created beautiful and appropriate landscapes and some, in the process, acquired an abiding new life interest.

and how did it all turn out?

Enough homeowners joined the "movement" to bring the community fairly close to the integrated landscape effect envisioned by Voigt and nurtured by Kiley and Paepcke. Early on, a national magazine ran an article (Popular Gardening, "The Garden and the Glass House", August 1957) in which the author waxed ecstatic about the marvelous visual effects already achieved in only six years of this unique community undertaking, and included photographs which inspired subsequent Hollin Hills homeowners.

Today, twenty-seven years after that article, Hollin Hills, its early plantings having grown to rich maturity and the native woods having aged still more gracefully, has acquired a look of its own, with harmonious vistas of beauty on all sides, such as the deodara cedars and Japanese Pagoda trees dotted along upper Martha's Road, the hollies of Paul Spring Road, and the white pine groves of Elba Road, Martha's circle and the Beechwood cul-de-sac. Those few lots whose owners were less than enthusiastic about landscaping are more or less covered by the general lushness and continuity of the landscape, which surprises and delights almost all first-time Hollin Hills visitors.

But the results of the Davenport/Goodman/Voigt/Kiley/Paepcke vision can perhaps best be perceived from the air, Hollin Hills unfortunately being on the flight path of many planes using National Airport. Flying along the Potomac, south of Alexandria, one looks down on many newer suburban communities which have followed Hollin Hills' lead by adopting such features as curving streets, cul-de-sacs, etc., but then one catches sight of what appears to be a densely wooded park surrounded by those other communities. Looking more closely, one glimpses structures nestled among the trees. Look again: is it a woods? Is it a park? Is it a summer camp? No, it's HOLLIN HILLS!

the inner house: decor

Charles Goodman was as concerned with color in — and on — his houses as he was with other details which made the difference between the ordinary, and a whole living arrangement which settled into the land. He began with, and promoted, dark, rich earth tones which were in keeping with houses set in the woods, and felt that some interior walls should serve as a dark accent because the window walls let in so much light.

Over the years, people have held fairly consistently to the earth tones on the outsides of their houses, but have pulled back to much lighter interior colors. The latter may be due to the fact that residents have acquired art works and hangings which respond better to white and off-white than they might to the original pallette which included warrn gray, gray-brown, deep brown, clay red, black, gray-green, and cadmium yellow.

Top Recker, an interior decorator whose showroom was in Alexandria, worked closely with Goodman and Davenport in the formative days, and with residents for years thereafter. Interviewed in March, 1982, he recalled: “Chuck [Goodman], I understand, mixed the paint. I think he mixed quite a number of gallons of some colors before he got what he wanted. In the first few years those colors were all used on the interior and that was the way they had to take the house. I believe there were twelve colors in the palette.

“In the meantime, I had been asked by Bob Davenport and Chuck Goodman how much it would cost to curtain these houses because it was absolutely essential — they were nothing but window glass, and in some cases, 40 feet of window wall — so it was essential that before they moved in they got some kind of curtains. We bought Osnaburg [a coarse, plain weave fabric] in large quantities, and so we got a very low price on it. We kept our curtains unlined and in most cases we managed to [add] some very good contemporary and far-out modern, printed fabrics in small quantities.

“We figured out a minimum way of curtaining the whole house, and I said that it would be possible to do it for $500. Whether we'd ever be able to hold to that budget or not, I didn't know, but of course in the selling of the houses the $500 was quoted as what it would cost. In one case I remember, all we supplied were a few bamboo blinds because that's all the budget could allow. We were the first ones to hang those in this area. We did, as I recall, about three-quarters of the first 100 houses done.”

(By 1953, some residents were offering Top Recker bamboo blinds for sale in the Newsletter. Perhaps a sign of upward mobility? At the same time the Hollin Hills management announced the introduction of two new interior colors, light plum and light brown. Chartreuse was being dropped.)

Recalling that good lines of contemporary furniture were expensive, Recker said that people turned to other styles, to period pieces and items they inherited. Traditional pieces were simplified by means of newer fabric designs. Early American, Shaker and country French styles worked very weil with the extreme contemporary architecture.

Joan Miller, co-owner of Market Square in Alexandria, and a Hollin Hills resident, has been serving some of the community's households since the early fifties. She remembers frantic residents who simply hadn't taken into account the cost of all those draperies. In one instance, a customer looked over her shelves of drapery fabrics and decided she'd go home and weave her own. Another requested a discount on the basis of needing so much more material than she would have required for a conventional house. There are those who have chosen not to hang draperies except where necessary for privacy.

The joys of large expanses of windows, light and trees are very real. Whatever choices were eventually made, there were ideas to be gleaned from the furnished demonstration/exhibition houses. Top Recker remembered doing an early house in pine fumiture. For the innovative Butterfly Roof House in 1953, Florence and Hans Knoll, the furniture designers of Knoll Associates, New York, were given a free hand by Davenport in decorating, including colors, drapes, fumiture and accessories. Davenport then began carrying Knoll furniture and fabrics at his office, along with the contemporary lighting fixtures of Kurt Versen.

Erich and Lucille Ursell, whose Georgetown shop opened in 1948, toid us that they decorated several early New Hollin Hills houses for a house tour, complete with pictures, china and a lot of Knoll and Miller furniture. When asked what people chose for their houses in those days, Lucille Ursell said, "We did a lot of sofas, a lot of wall systems, a lot of draperies. Draperies by the mile."

architectural control

Although Goodman's house plans were not designed with specific enlargement potentiai in mind, the houses have adapted very well to change, and many have one or more additions. Davenport set up the "Committee on Structures" — now the Architectural Control Committee — in the earliest days of the development in order to protect the integrity of the designs and the flavor of the community. In due course, control of the committee was turned over to the civic association and as now constituted, there are four members from the community, two of whom are architects.

As might be expected, there have been misunderstandings over the years about jurisdiction over fences, the meaning of "structure," the appropriateness of certain proposed designs, etc.

“The good addition is the one which becomes not an obvious graft,” says Eason Cross, “but forms an integral part of a complete design. Further, the whole should blend with and respond to the adjacent houses. Rear and side yards, front setbacks and height restrictions are the province of Fairfax County; what's more to the point in Hollin Hills is maintaining the neighborhood network of vistas and exterior living space.

“There are some obvious no-no's — little panes in sash, double-hung windows, ornate trim and doors, shingles, stone, hip roofs, multi-surfacings, bow windows, broken pediments, classical columns, Iouvered shutters, flamingos on the lawn, colored trim, asbestos shingle siding, anchor and picket fences, and additions which are in mass just a bump stuck on the basic house.

“It is also possible to err in the other direction-to get carried away in the modern vein, where dymaxion domes and clever architectural sculpture intrude past the bounds of common courtesy.

“[Goodman's] palette was compatible with temperate and deciduous Virginia — basically earth tones — made popular by the San Francisco School of architects and later imported East. The lines of Goodman's houses were always picked out with white trim and eaves to emphasize the volume, as seen through the branches of the trees. When masonry was used, it was used brick and neutrally-painted concrete block.

“The white house which works so well in New England, and the blue, pink and pastels which work so well in the tropics, were avoided. It was a limited but useful range of colors and materials.”

A tour through Hollin Hills in its fourth decade reveals that for the most part, residents have been respectful of the general intent of the committee's responsibility.

The covenants of owners' deeds were described as follows by the builders in an early fifties buyers' information sheet: "standard FHA requirements. . . they restrict the location of the houses to 25 feet from the front line and 10 feet from the side line and provide for a 5-foot utility easement on the side and rear of each lot. Park areas are dedicated for community use, not public use. Park areas may be used for general community purposes and for utility installation such as sewer lines, electric, water lines, etc. County zoning regulations are more restrictive and provide for a 40-foot set back requirement from the front line and 15 feet from the side line of the lot. . . Upon application, county regulations can be adjusted, but in no instance can the restrictions in the deed be changed except by common consent of the property owners.”