hollin hills at 75
modern then, modern now … modern forever
In November 1949, when John and Kitty Nelles bought the first house in Hollin Hills, they must have been out of their minds.
The house itself – at the corner of Drury Lane and Rippon Road – was just plain weird. One entire wall was floor-to-ceiling glass, the living and dining rooms were just a big open space, closets were almost nonexistent, and the house was angled oddly into the woods, rather than facing the street like a normal house. It had no water or sewage system (water had to be trucked in; sewage you don’t want to know about), the roads were unpaved, there was no mail delivery or phone service, and the landscape, as one early settler put it, was “nothing but bare dirt all around.”
It was no place for the timid or the faint of heart – and if the Nelles’s had taken one look at this obvious disaster and run away screaming, no one would have blamed them.
Yet the family survived … and one of the most extraordinary new communities in the United States was born. Over the next two decades, hundreds of these peculiar, ultra-modern houses would spread over the wooded hillsides, drawing in idealistic young intellectuals who’d come to Washington, DC after World War II to build a better world – and found the cutting-edge architecture, populist philosophy and natural setting of this “new and unique” community to be irresistible. As architect Charles Goodman put it, Hollin Hills was going to be a “laboratory” for a new way of life – and the young pioneers flocked in as fast as they could.
Fast forward 75 years – and Hollin Hills has grown from oddball experiment into one of the most beautiful and admired modernist communities in America. Remarkably, Goodman’s original architecture and the free-flowing landscape are still largely intact, and feel as fresh now as they must have in 1949. Even more remarkably, a distinctive community has taken root, and draws the same kind of idealistic and creative people that it has from the beginning.
We’re celebrating our 75th Anniversary in 2024, and in spite of the fact that Hollin Hills is no longer young (it was officially dubbed an “historic district” in 2013, and its traditions might fairly be described as “venerable”), it still feels unmistakeably modern. Why is that? Is it just that we’re in style once again, like everything midcentury modern these days? Or does it go deeper than that?
Maybe it’s the radical spirit of modernism – and not just its outward style – that keeps Hollin Hills feeling so new. When Goodman and developer Robert Davenport were building the place, after all, they threw out all the old rules, re-imagined housing from the ground up, and charged boldly into the future.
Out with traditional ornament and bombast! These new houses would have light, clean lines and walls of glass. Out with cramped little rooms! Open-plan spaces would bring people together. Out with houses that shouted status and wealth! These new homes would live quietly and democratically among the trees. Out with fences, out with fortresses, out with soul-crushing conformity – people would live openly and creatively in these new houses, liberated from the past and connected with nature and with each other.
That was the essence of modernism: boldness, innovation, and a determination to tear down the old world and build a better one in its place. Hollin Hills was an expression of that spirit – and it still has modernism’s radical ethos and subversive edge. Little wonder it still feels so alive.
So it turns out that the Nelles’s were far from crazy when they moved into that strange new house on Drury Lane in 1949. On the contrary: they were just pioneering the unknown, and building a new life there. (Perhaps it’s not coincidental that John Nelles was literally an explorer, spending much of his career in remote parts of the arctic.)
And they remind us that Hollin Hills, for all its “historic” status, is not some quaint relic from a bygone time. It may be graying at the temples a bit, but Hollin Hills was born with daring in its bones, and it still retains that spirit of freedom and imagination. That may be what made Hollin Hills modern seventy-five years ago, and keeps it modern now. And it may just keep Hollin Hills – and those adventurous, confident minds drawn to live here – modern forever.
– Stephen Brookes, January 2024