FOHH Unveils Commemorative Plaques

If you think your Hollin Hills home isn’t getting enough respect from the architectural history crowd, Friends of Hollin Hills has come up with a snazzy new fix: commemorative house plaques that let the world know you’re officially part of the Hollin Hills Historic District.  

Friends unveiled the new plaques at a lively “reveal party” on Sunday afternoon at Mount Vernon Unitarian Church, billing them as “a beautiful new way to honor your home's story.” And if the words “commemorative plaque” fill your modern heart with dread, have no fear:  the new plaques are nothing like those clunky bronze eyesores that blight otherwise lovely buildings all across Old Town.  In fact, the new design is sleek, minimalist and modern to its core — made to fit lightly with the clean and open lines of Charles Goodman’s architecture.

Jeff Vandersall with the new plaque

“Simplicity is what drove the design,” said Hollin Hills architect Jeff Vandersall (who led the seven-architect team behind the project) as he unveiled the plaques. “We wanted something understated and unadorned — no cornices or little squirrels all around.”  

Instead, the plaques — like Hollin Hillers themselves — embody sophistication and subtle charm.  They’re made of 1/8-inch brushed stainless steel, designed to sit lightly against the exterior siding, as if floating.  At the center, a stylized Hollin Hills house—which seems uncannily close to the FOHH logo—anchors the design, while the words “HOLLIN HILLS HISTORIC DISTRICT” sit cleanly across the top, with the community’s 1949 founding date and its 2013 entry into the U.S. National Register of Historic Places underneath.

Interested?  The Friends are taking orders. The plaques come in two sizes: a smaller 6” x 3.75” version (priced at $329 through May 23) and a larger 8.5” x 5.25” custom version (priced at $449) that adds your address and the date your house was built.  They’re not inexpensive, but $100 of the price goes to FOHH and their worthy park and community programs.  And if you can manage a screwdriver, you can install them yourself without much trouble. 

The crowd of about sixty gave the plaques an enthusiastic reception, with high praise for both the design and execution, and over 20 people signed up for them on the spot. This being Hollin Hills, of course, not everyone was convinced; the mere idea of being “historic” gives some modernists angina, and there’s a certain tension between the free, pathbreaking spirit of modernism that inspired Hollin Hills, and the sense of “artifact from the past” that plaques, like museum labels, might suggest. Hollin Hills is historic — but it wears that label lightly, and some may find the plaques, for all their modern sophistication, a little formal for such a lively and creative place.

But all in all, the plaques underscore the often-overlooked importance of this extraordinary community, and reflect the pride we all feel in being part of it — and they do it while blending easily and naturally into the architecture itself. Kudos to the Friends for bringing these new plaques into reality — they may well become a widespread new feature across Hollin Hills.

To learn more, or place an order, check out the FOHH website.