Inside

“People come to the door all the time and ask if this is an office or a museum,” says Cathy Stewart of the impressive brick manse, where she lives with her husband, Doug, a wealth management consultant, and their three kids. But color is the only business inside: lilac walls and molding in the formal dining room, turquoise rear panels for the bookshelves in the library and an orange TV room with a silver foil-papered bar—and that’s just the first floor.Stewart, a former runway model who worked for such designers as Carolina Herrera and Chanel in New York and Washington, has a whimsical nature, which helped interior designer Suellen Gregory channel her client’s wishes into a fashionable decorative scheme shortly after the couple bought the house in 2007. “Cathy really is so adventuresome,” says Gregory. “She loves color. She makes it fun. What I love about the house is that it has a wonderful, elegant, old world quality mixed with younger, hipper stuff.”

Smithsonia’s history is complex and nothing close to hip. The home was built in 1834 on what is the original site of the Presbyterian Church of Fredericksburg. The church was founded in 1808, when there were only two Presbyterians in town; by 1832, the congregation had outgrown its original home on the Amelia Street site, where Smithsonia now stands, and moved to a new sanctuary at the corner of George and Princess Anne streets, the site of the present Presbyterian Church.

The house was built on the old site as an orphanage for girls and later served as a hospital during the Civil War. Then, in 1867, a woman named Rebecca Smith opened it as a boarding house for female senior citizens and named it Smithsonia. That wasn’t the last of its incarnations; around the turn of the 20th century, Smithsonia served as a boys’ dormitory for what was then Fredericksburg College. Graffiti carved in the brick façade sometime in the 19th century attests to years when the house sat derelict. In 1917, William E. Lang bought the home, and it stayed in the Lang family until 1942. That explains why it is often called the Lang House as well as Smithsonia.