Inside

Over the years, the Cottrells had spent many weekends in their waterfront condominium in Urbanna, but what the Richmond couple really wanted was a lighthouse vacation home. Finding the right design was the problem— until nearly nine years ago, when they wandered into the Rappahannock Jewelry Company on Virginia Street, Urbanna’s main thoroughfare, and got an unusual jolt of inspiration. “They had a big collection of lighthouse miniatures,” recalls Christy Cottrell, “and we saw one that was of an actual lighthouse on Sister Island, in the St. Lawrence Seaway. When we saw it, we knew instantly that this was the one.”

And they knew just where to put it. The Cottrells had one year earlier bought three adjoining waterfront lots in a newly carved subdivision named Urbanna Harbour. “It is an amazing spot with great views of Urbanna and the harbor, and in the winter we’ve got wonderful [Rappahannock] river views,” says David Cottrell. So the couple had a spectacular setting, and they had a model of the house they wanted to build. Next they needed an architect—and found one with help from their daughter, Leah.

Skip Wallace, president of Chester-based Island Architects, has designed hundreds of homes on Kiawah Island in Georgia, Hilton Head Island in South Carolina and North Carolina’s exclusive Figure Eight Island, but the Cottrells were unaware of him until he gave a career-day presentation to Leah Cottrell’s class at St. Bridget’s School in Richmond. As part of his presentation that day, Wallace handed out pictures of a house he had created on Kiawah Island for Olympic gold medalist and ice skating star Tara Lipinski. Leah brought the picture home, and the Cottrells liked it. “When we decided to build the lighthouse, we thought he would be the perfect architect, because almost everything he does is on the water,” says Christy.

The Cottrells gave Wallace the lighthouse from the jewelry store—it would be a template for the exterior design. A bigger challenge for the architect was the interior. “Proportion is everything,” Wallace says. “The exterior façade and the interior spaces and floor plan have to work together. Usually it becomes a balancing act, with a lot of going back and forth, in and out, to make sure everything is balanced and works. In this case, because it is a lighthouse, it was important to just start at the top and work down, to make sure the proportions stayed true.”