Inside

The Randleston manor house, which sits on a rolling expanse of grass and red oaks overlooking the Shenandoah River, recalls none of these. A relative youngster at only about 90 years of age, it wasn’t even built by a Southerner: New York Supreme Court Judge Phillip Dugrow, owner of the Savoy-Plaza—a French Renaissance residential hotel on Fifth Avenue that was the last word in Gilded Age luxury—commissioned the Arts and Crafts mansion as a gift for his only daughter, Antonia Dugrow Scholer. But in all the most important ways, the manor is the most Virginian of homes.

Every stone used in the construction, every exposed rafter or support beam, every rectangle of faux travertine tile (they’re fashioned from wood even though they look exactly like limestone) was hand-crafted using local materials and local artisans. Despite a somewhat checkered history of multiple owners and years of neglect, the Randleston manor house—now in the hands of owners Jim and Melinda Carter—shines like the proverbial pearl of great price.

Jim Carter, then vice president of U.S. marketing for Exxon, discovered the house roughly a decade ago. “I was on safari in Africa,” he says, when he got a phone call informing him that he was to report to Mobil’s headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia to go to work on the Exxon-Mobil merger. “I never saw my office in Houston again.”

For the six months that it took to negotiate the merger, Melinda Carter and the youngest of the couple’s three children held down the fort in corporate apartments in Fairfax. But something that the president of Mobil had said to Carter was percolating in the back of his mind: “You can live in horse country, and it’s not a bad commute.”

Every male Carter going back to his 17th century Virginia ancestor had owned horses, Carter noted. So the idea of a few brood mares seemed … intriguing. But the timing could not have been worse. “It was the dot-com bubble. Every time we’d see something we liked, it was gone before we could make up our minds. It was frustrating,” Carter said. Even more frustrating, after the couple started making the Middleburg cocktail party circuit, was hearing the most fascinating stories about the Randleston manor—always punctuated by the refrain: “Too bad it’s not for sale.”