the original landscape plans

In the early days of Hollin Hills, landscape plans for many individual properties were prepared by landscape architects Lou Bernard “Barney” Voigt (from 1949 to 1953), Daniel Urban Kiley (1953 to 1955) and Eric Paepcke (1955 to 1971). Priced by Voigt at $100 (including a one-hour private consultation), the plans were initially optional, but by June 1950, developer Robert Davenport required they be included as part of each home’s sale price so that the designs could be integrated and the community landscape developed as a “coherent whole.”

Although a number of the landscape design plans were produced, it’s unclear which were actually executed, or which (if any) of the designed landscape features still exist.

What remains of the Voigt and Paepcke plans are archived at the Library of Congress, while the existing Kiley plans are held at Harvard’s Frances Loeb Library. Some plans may also be found at George Mason University’s Fenwick Library in the Hollin Hills archives. Many residents have been able to get a high-resolution scan of their plan from those libraries for a reasonable fee.

how to get a copy of your plan

First, find your lot number by typing in your address here.

Once you have your lot number, you can "Ask a Librarian" at the Library of Congress by clicking here and providing your information. You will get a note back from Mari Nakahara in the Prints & Photographs Division, and if she can find your plan, she will guide you through the request and payment process. The fee is $73, and the process usually takes about two weeks. Your plan will be emailed to you as a high-resolution TIFF file.

If the Library of Congress doesn’t have your plan, it may be at Harvard’s Frances Loeb Library, which holds the papers of Daniel Kiley. Click here for a listing of their collection of Kiley’s Hollin Hills designs. There are over 80 plans listed, each with a short description. (The lots are not always listed in numerical order, so it may take some digging to locate yours.)

From Loeb Library’s list of Hollin Hills plans, click on the link for your lot, and then click on the “Add to my request list” button in the upper right. Then go to “Request > My request list” at the top of the screen. From your request list, you can submit a form to order a copy. You will need to select format “Publication-quality copy.” This is a price list for scanning.

implementing your plan

Decades of change in Hollin Hills — from the growth of trees to the many architectural additions — can make implementing these plans difficult, or often impossible. The landscape is no longer the blank slate it was in the 1950’s — areas like Martha’s Road and Popkins Lane, for instance, are far more heavily wooded now — and some midcentury features (like areas for clotheslines and incinerators) don’t seem as relevant as they once did. Meanwhile, new eco-friendly approaches such as planting native species, eradicating invasive plants and creating wildlife habitat have become priorities for many homeowners.

Nevertheless, Barney Voigt — the first and most influential landscape architect of Hollin Hills — set out his ideas in a series of important essays in the Hollin Hills Bulletin in 1952. To read his articles on “How To Use Your Landscape Plan” — which offer practical tips and insights into the design philosophy of Hollin Hills — please click here.

sharing your plan

Help build the collection! If you have an original plan you’d like to share, please email us a copy and we’ll add it to the website. We’d like to gather enough plans to create a “big picture” showing how the plan for each site connected with those around it, forming the integrated, community-wide landscape the designers envisioned. (If you only have a printed plan, let us know and we’ll figure something out.)

Click here to see how four properties at the corner of Recard Lane and Martha’s Road form a unified plan.

printing out your plan

For a full-size black-and-white printout of your plan, Elisabeth Lardner recommends AAB Imaging at 1101 King St. Suite 107 in Alexandria. Contact them here.

the landscaping philosophy

Each of the landscape architects had a distinctive style. Voigt and Paepcke favored “quiet, restrained sweeps of shrubs and trees arcing across the landscape in simple masses,” while Kiley’s gardens featured “striking circular forms, straight lines, and the strong collision of geometric planes,” writes Dennis Carmichael.

But for all three, integrating the properties was key. “Kiley liked to cluster the same plants across adjacent lots, if given the opportunity, blurring individual property lines,” noted the Hollin Hills registration form for the National Register of Historic Places. “He also married the individual properties with the communal parks by using homogeneous vegetation.”

As an early Hollin Hills sales brochure explained, “Each purchaser of a home in Hollin Hills has prepared for him a complete landscape plan by Dan Kiley. In making the plan, Kiley, in addition to the personal interests of the owner and his family, considers the overall relation of the houses and the development of the plantings and proposed additional buildings of each site so that the combined efforts of the home owners become, gradually, a coherent whole as the plan is put into effect.”

For a description by Barney Voigt of one of his plans, click here.

For more on the landscaping philosophy of Hollin Hills, click here.

For more about the landscape architects and their ideas, click here.

For an interesting 1997 Washington Post article on Dan Kiley’s plans for Hollin Hills, click here.

intellectuals in the mud:
the first hollin hills landscapers

In 1984, original Hollin Hills settler Marion Tiger (left) recalled how the first homeowners of Hollin Hills —mostly struggling young urbanites — grappled with their new landscape plans in the 1950’s:

Barney 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 Hills management introduced them 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.

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. In August 1957, the national magazine Popular Gardening ran an article titled “The Garden and the Glass House” which 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 [1984] 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.

— Marion Tiger

aerial photographs of hollin hills

Ok, this is pretty cool: To see how your property was landscaped when the original plans were developed, you can consult Fairfax County’s detailed aerial photographs of the area, which date back to 1937.

The County has made them available online, and the photographs clearly show the dramatically changing ground cover as the community was settled. There are maps for 1937, 1953, 1960, 1972, 1976, 1980 and so on, up to 2019.

Click here for the website, then type your address into the search bar in the map panel. You can click on the “layer list” icon (looks like a stack of papers) to choose which year you want to view, and whether you want an overlay of the street map.

a key to the plant names

For a “key” that identifies Kiley’s plant name abbreviations, please click here and scroll down. (Thanks to Harris Lokmanhakim!)

a note to the first homeowners

From a 1949 welcoming brochure to new residents, titled “Now That You Live in Hollin Hills”:

“Hollin Hills has graded, fertilized and seeded your lawn areas, also cleaned off your lot adjacent to your house … to establish an initial standard of appearance in Hollin Hills as a whole. We feel that this extra landscape work on our part should provide our residents with a real incentive to take over from there and continue improvement of their grounds in accordance with their own tastes, plus the help they have received through the excellent landscaping program provided by Mr. Voigt, the landscape architect. He may be employed on an hourly fee basis if you wish additional advice on your landscaping work.”

the collection of landscape plans