JEFFERSON’S HIDEAWAY

After two centuries of obscurity, his secret Virginia villa, Poplar Forest, provides a rare and intimate glimpse at America’s most innovative revolutionary

The exterior The villa is “a melting pot of ideas,” says Travis McDonald, director of architectural restoration. “It’s part Roman retreat, 16th century European villa and 18th century French chateau built with Virginian materials”

The landscape Jefferson’s unorthodox grounds combined geometrical plantings in the French tradition and wilder English gardens

The reconstruction Using period tools and methods, workers mimic the original construction sequence from 1806 to 1826. The process has reached 1821. Finish carpenters are working on interior details

The master plan The property’s overall geometry radiates from the villa’s tidy nucleus: a perfect-cube central room with a 16-ft. skylight surrounded by four octagonal rooms, which include two bedrooms and a parlor with multiple large windows

Everybody has heard of Monticello, but did you know that Thomas Jefferson’s most personal design was arguably his retirement retreat called Poplar Forest? The father of American architecture broke ground on the villa, 10 miles southwest of Lynchburg, during his second term as President. More than 200 years later, architects and archaeologists are using period tools and methods to meticulously restore both the house and its geometric landscape apron, which once sat on a 4,819-acre plantation.

“Poplar Forest was Jefferson’s sanctuary where he felt free to break rules of classical architecture. Here, out of the public eye in a location he rarely shared, he could design whatever he liked best,” says Lynn Beebe, former president of the nonprofit Corporation for Jefferson’s Poplar Forest. The group began rescuing the retreat—a place only hardcore Jeffersonian scholars were even aware of and where he found the “solitude of a hermit”—from permanent obscurity in 1983. Since then, 617 acres have been recovered and the house’s exterior has been completed, and the interior carpentry is now in full swing. For visitors, this means front-row seats for the property’s restoration and an inside look at one of America’s first celebrities. —ALEX CREVAR

Southern Living
This article first appeared in Southern Living magazine