Arcadian Rhythms

For Thomas Woltz, a visionary architect of public landscapes, home is a Queen Anne in Virginia with an intimate garden of his own making.

- By Jennifer Hughes

Landscape architect Thomas Woltz has a passion for the clarity and proportion of Italian Renaissance architecture. That Woltz lives in a gabled Queen Anne Victorian comes as an ironic surprise, even to him. Palladio did not use spindles and gingerbread, he notes, dryly. But his home, together with the garden he has established there over the past two decades, is a unified study in pleasing contrasts. The impact is at once disciplined and spontaneous, respectful and irreverent. Much like the man himself.

Woltz bought the house, in a small Virginia town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in 1999. His restoration honors what he calls the historic intent of the structure. I decided to respect the Victorian volumes, he notes. I was not going to remove walls to create an open plan. For two years, the place was a construction site as it received a copper roof, a mansard porch roof, and plumbing and electrical-all new.

In the hands of a less erudite and playful designer, such attentiveness to history might produce a rigid monotony of style. But Woltz loves to devise temporal dialogues not only between past and present but also among different pasts. As a young man, he spent five years practicing architecture and teaching in Venice. He lived near the Palazzo Fortuny, which he often visited. “I was immersed in a world of the Islamic influence of southern Spain, Italian textiles, furniture, and Venetian Gothic architecture, says Woltz, who began collecting antique Fortuny fabrics and light fixtures.