Posted by David Hamilton on February 3rd, 2010 in Architecture and Design, Baldwin Center for Preservation, Education and Inspiration, General, Green Building, Project Updates

In belated honor of  J.D. Salinger,  a deceptively simple observation on homes, by Joyce Maynard:

“A good home must be made, not bought.”

Taken a bit out of context, this assertion is, when you think about it, pretty radical.  We buy homes, like we buy cars and home theater systems, though usually with a bigger loan, and always with more of both fear and hope.  We imagine the lives we will live there, and weigh the impact of bedrooms, half-bathrooms, views and porches, neighborhood schools, even trees and neighbors not likely to last as long as our occupancy.  We renovate, but relatively few of us ever have the chance to make a home for ourselves.  Statistically, even those Americans with net worth greater than ten million dollars, even people for whom “custom-made” is customary, only rarely build themselves a home.

Having built my own home (without benefit of net worth), I’ve always found this statistic a little sad.  For me, making a home was an exercise in understanding myself and my wife, the way we work, live and sleep, an enumeration of what we hold dear, and of what we can do without,  almost a plan for the people we wanted to be.  We stood on a ladder on our homesite, to figure out the view from our “bedroom,” and imagined our children, not yet born, and where their swingset might be.  For a couple who’d previously imagined life in terms of the next academic degree, or the next six months at work, the creation of something permanent and personal was a rare opportunity for introspection.

My work at Bundoran Farm has given me  a front row seat as the first residents of this community have thought, re-thought, and ultimately committed to building the home of their dreams.  The first two new homes have now been occupied for about six months, and the difference between them couldn’t be more obvious.  One home, nestled into a forest preserve, is half the size of the other, which peeks over the shoulder of its pasture site to a 270 degree view of rolling farmland.  If you met these two couples at a party, you’d never guess that their visions might diverge so dramatically.  Of course, the magic of this process is that each of these two homes looks as if it were meant to be there, and the owners seem at home in a way that suggests many years’ connection to their land.

A second building boom is currently underway, with at least three homes being designed, and another pair of homes under construction.  Again, these two owners would look pretty similar on paper: accomplished professionals with a seemingly limitless affection for nature, and once again, their visions of home couldn’t be more different.  I’ve attached some images below of these two homes, both on Hightop Drive, to illustrate what we at Bundoran Farm find so fascinating.  The first home, on Maple Hill, is a charming, clean-lined and well-sited (check out the view from the front door) farmhouse being built by Abrahamse + Co., and the second, “Woodhill,” being built by Artisan Construction, is a smaller, highly sustainable home perched on a hillside amidst Bundoran Farm’s most impressive poplar forest (look closely, these trees are giants).

As with so many other elements of life, the endpoint of building appears to be subordinate to the depth and quality of this process of consideration, discovery, design and execution.  Both the homes underway are already obvious successes for their owners, and for the community: at once respectful, sustainable and exciting.   It’s hard to express the gratitude we feel, as stewards of this land, toward the owners, designers and master builders who have taken the vision of Bundoran Farm and extended it into the incredibly personal and unpredictable world of home-making.

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Posted by Joe Barnes on January 29th, 2010 in Architecture and Design, Education and Inspiration, General, Project Updates

Virginia Public Radio recently aired a segment on Bundoran Farmand our efforts to preserve the character and use of the 2,300 acres of this legacy landscape, promote ongoing environmental stewardship and craft a great place for people to live in and enjoy the countryside of Charlottesville, Virginia and Albemarle County region.  Click here to for a podcast of this segment “Conservation Development”. 

Sandy Haussman’s reports on this new model of conservation development we refer to as “Preservation Development.”  In addition to providing as high level overview of the development concepts, you can hear first hand comments from Fred Scott, the previous owner of Bundoran Farm, Mary Tillman, one of Bundoran Farm’s Founding Stewards, Bob Baldwin, Jr., Bundoran Farm’s co-general manager, and Ed McMahon, a Senior Fellow with the Urban Land Institute.

To add pictures to these great verbal descriptions, I encourage you to check out our website or better yet, drop by for a visit at 5005 Edge Valley Road.

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Posted by Joe Barnes on January 22nd, 2010 in Agriculture, Baldwin Center for Preservation, Education and Inspiration, General, Nature/Environment, Project Updates

Below is the unabbreviated copy of the article written by Edward H. Carter that appeared in Piedmont Virginian magazine.

Where do we go with this?  Posited the fleece clad Bob Baldwin as he stood next to a blank whiteboard facing the fifty or so participants in the inaugural conference of the Baldwin Center for Preservation Development.  The empty whiteboard served literally and figuratively as the blank slate that Baldwin hoped to fill up in the next ninety minutes with concepts, conclusions and concrete next steps as he played the role of facilitator at the closing plenary session of the Center’s two day Inaugural Symposium—Residential Development and the Working landscape: Collide, Contain, Coexist, or Coalesce.

Robert H. Baldwin, Jr., “Bob”, has an open demeanor and a self-deprecating sense of humor that puts the participants gathered in the second floor meeting room of the newly constructed Baldwin Center at ease. Baldwin succeeded his late father as the President of New Hampshire-based Qroe Development, who, with Charles Adams and Celebration Associates, is the Co-General Manager of Bundoran Farm, the 2,300 “Preservation Development” project located in southern Albemarle County about fifteen minutes from Charlottesville.

 Bundoran Farm is now, and will continue upon completion of the development project, a working farm. In fact, 90% of the Farm’s acreage will remain as open space. On this unseasonably bone chillingly cold and damp two day stretch in late October, a thick fog of low lying clouds mask the Blue Ridge just to its west and Bundoran’s Angus dotted fields of fescue and orchard grass and the large orderly rows of apple trees climbing the rolling hills of its working orchard operation.

Located at Bundoran, the Baldwin Center for Preservation Development houses a non-profit foundation with the mission to showcase innovative practices in rural land use planning and development, agricultural preservation, and environmental stewardship.  Named in honor of Robert H. Baldwin, Sr., a pioneer in the use of development to preserve New England farmland and the early visionary for Bundoran Farm, the Center, designed and built by GeoBarns of Vermont, is a modern riff on the traditional barns found on the property.  The structure features a full length front porch and offices on the first floor and an open meeting room on the second, the venue for the conference, which highlights an expansive light filled ceiling of arched trusses and a windowed pergola.

 Despite his welcomed lack of the usual facilitatorspeak of “share withs”, “new paradigms” and “perhaps we should continue this line of conversation off-lines”, Bob Baldwin’s prodding and open ended questions does engender the dialogue and suggestions that he aims for. His white board starts to fill up. The Symposium’s invited participants came from all over the country with a variety of backgrounds, including: farmers, developers, non-profit land conservation organizations, government officials, and leading academics, in order to gather at the Center and share their experiences, perspectives and expertise related to the preservation of working agrarian landscapes.  The combination of disciplines and perspectives provided for in depth discussion of how the private sector can foster rural land preservation with market driven solutions and limited residential development.  In addition, the group explored how these solutions compare with, compliment and/or conflict with other preservation tools.

Notable among the participants and speakers: Professor Elizabeth Brabec, Chair, Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Massachusetts; Dr. Jill Clark, Director, Center for Farmland Policy Innovation at Ohio State University; Professor Bruce Dotson, Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Academics and Senior Associate, Institute for Environmental Negotiation at the University of Virginia School of Architecture; Mr. Bob Lee, Executive Director, The Virginia Outdoors Foundation; Mr. Rex Linville, Land Conservation Officer, Piedmont Environmental Council; Mr. Tayloe Murphy, former Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources and former Member of the Virginia House of Delegates; and Professor Richard B. Peiser, Michael D. Spear Professor of Real Estate Development at Harvard Graduate School of Design; and a very large elephant in the back of the room.

Nobody could accuse the Baldwin Center of including only cheerleaders and sycophants to the Symposium.  Rex Linville, whose employer, the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC), has championed the use of conservation easements by encouraging the use of Virginia Land Preservation Act as a tool of preserving open space and farmland throughout the Piedmont, was a very visible and vocal opponent of the Bundoran project during its zoning and approval process with Albemarle County.  As noted in the Summer 2008 issue of this magazine, the PEC disagreed with what they viewed as the premise and the concept of “preservation development”—particularly the notion that the ultimate economic value of farmland rests with its development potential.  Rex Linville and the PEC argued that the proper land use for Bundoran and similarly situated farms lies with its continued purpose of agriculture and forestry, not housing.  Linville did ultimately concede that the Bundoran development team did “do a good job of siting houses and roads” and that the project scale of 108 new houses was certainly preferable to the 160 houses that would have been allowed under Albemarle County’s land-use regulations.  However, Linville and the PEC still disagreed with the use of Bundoran Farm as a place to accommodate the growth of the County and situate one hundred plus houses.

In his opening remarks on the previous afternoon, Bob Baldwin, Jr.   highlighted the challenge facing preservation development and the challenge that he wanted those gathered to explore in the coming day: “When it comes to the mixing of residential development and farms, historic exurban settlement patterns seem to have reflected either a collision of the two uses, resulting in an unhappy outcome, or containment of uses, a subtly hostile approach. We believe that if planned right, the uses could, at the least, peacefully coexist and very possibly coalesce into a mutually beneficial arrangement. The Symposium’s goal is to explore that hypothesis.”

Award winning author Witold Rybcyznski’s book, the Last Harvest documents the dilemma faced by farmers and large landowners in communities and counties such as those in the Virginia Piedmont.  Faced with development pressure and its economic rewards due to population growth and the desirability of living in Virginia and its proximity to the nation’s capital, many of these farmers and landowners “would prefer no development, but if is to happen, they want the option of selling their land”.  As Rybcyznski notes, this transaction is often referred to as the “last harvest”.

Bob Baldwin, with his concept of Preservation Development and Bundoran Farm, seeks a solution for landowners that lies somewhere in between the social, environmental and the more limited economic benefits of conservation easements, as promoted by groups such as the PEC, and the loss of the rural landscape as a result of the “last harvest”.  Baldwin is “betting the farm”—Baldwin’s hypothesis and business plan for the Bundoran Farm project depends on the predicate that home buyers will appreciate the beauty of the Farm, the guaranty and protection of its open space and the concept of a true working farm as a self sustaining “amenity” and, most importantly, will be willing to pay a 25 to 30% premium for it.

During stimulating and lively discussions over the previous day, the participants were challenged to interpret the value of farmland in new ways and assess the critical components and issues that emerge when integrating rural land preservation and residential growth. While it was widely acknowledged that very significant gains in farmland protection have been achieved throughout Virginia and the country, all agreed that more needed to be done and could be done, particularly in light of the strengthening Local Food Movement.

Using the New Urbanist movement (Seaside in Florida and Kentlands in Marylands, as examples, and its evangelists in the architectual team of Duany and Plater-Zyberk) as inspiration, participants encouraged the Baldwin Center to take a leadership role in exploring and presenting rural development models that could benefit farmers, new residents, and rural communities as a whole.

Bob Baldwin fills up his whiteboard with these suggestions—many reflecting the theoretical and academic bent of the gathering—for the Center: additional symposiums with planners and developers; dissemination of best practice information;  hosting of charettes for planning and design students; and, more concretely, underwriting and producing a White Paper on Preservation Development.

At the conclusion, Bob Baldwin conceded and asserted that the most important task for the Baldwin Center for Preservation Development was the ability to demonstrate that, through the prospective success of Bundoran Farm and other projects, rural development can “deliver”.  This is where reality versus theory and the only uninvited guest at the Conference comes in—that large elephant in the back of the room: the worst real estate market in generations.

When asked after the Symposium, Bob Baldwin acknowledges this reality, but confidently dismisses any suggestion of alteration to the plans for Bundoran Farm.  Baldwin believes demographics and values are on his side. In the words of Robert H. Baldwin, Sr., who died in a plane accident in 2006, and for whom he and the Center were named—“given the current market sentiment toward green development and sustainable development, it’ll (preservation development) practically be mandatory in the future”.  When does that future occur? Only that large tusked participant has that answer.

About the Author - Raised in Richmond and a resident of Old Town Alexandria, Ned Carter is a Managing Director with BlueLine Conservation, a Virginia Land Preservation Tax Credit brokerage, conservation finance and eco-services  firm.  He spends many of his weekends on his family’s farm in southern Albemarle County, just over the Southwest Mountains, from Bundoran Farm and the Baldwin Center for Preservation Development)

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Posted by Joe Barnes on January 20th, 2010 in Education and Inspiration, Green Building

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Posted by David Hamilton on January 15th, 2010 in Agriculture, Architecture and Design, Education and Inspiration, General, Nature/Environment

The Piedmont Virginian is a lovely magazine focusing on history, culture and preservation of Virginia’s rural heritage.  It’s always a good read, especially when they do the occaisional feature on Bundoran Farm or someone we know in the Charlottesville area.  This winter, Thomas Randolph has begun a fascinating new feature callled Deep Background.  In each article, the author presents a painting of a Virginia scene, and an essay showing how much we can learn about a landscape, an historical period, a farm operation or an ecological community from just one image. 

In the first (Winter 2009) feature, a seemingly simple horse-barn scene is unfolded to explain, among other things: why barns are red, why a horse barn might have a silo, why a fence is painted green, and a number of other conclusions about the history of a Mellon family property in Hunt Country. 

This is a kind of parlor-game version of the exercise the design team did in Southern Albemarle County when we conceived the Bundoran Farm project.  Our version took about a year.  Studying this landscape, we tried to understand why a place like this looks the way it does.  Why it feels special to cycle or drive through this valley.  We looked at images like the one above and asked a lot of questions:

How do we know we’re “in the country?”  Why are farm roads so much more attractive than subdivision roads?   Why were they built this way?  What’s the visual difference between decorative fencing and working agricultural fencing?  How do you know where to go?  How do you know who owns this land?

I submit you can answer these questions and more, simply by considering the image above.  I personally have a list of  ten conclusions about Bundoran Farm, but would be delighted if a reader comes up with one I haven’t thought of.  I’ll post my list in a couple of days. 

 Or you could just drive by and say “isn’t that pretty?”  And know that this landscape became this way, and will stay this way, for a reason.  And that’s really the point.

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