Fortunately, that did not happen. The Corys partnered with Spencer, an old friend and classicist who practices from offices in Charlottesville and Newport, Rhode Island—and now, after a multi-year renovation, Blue Ridge Farm once again evinces Bottomley’s brand of good living. Indeed, the group Preservation Virginia gave the estate, which now occupies 167 acres, its 2007 Private Preservation Project of the Year Award. But it is no house museum. Though Blue Ridge Farm is sophisticated enough to house the couple’s notable collection of American art and furniture (including an 18th-century mahogany dressing table attributed to master cabinetmaker Job Townsend), it is a home with a beating heart for a busy couple with three young children. “Bottomley designed with a sense of how people lived,” says Spencer.
The same might have been true in 1906. That’s when Randolph Ortman and his wife, Blanche, purchased the estate, then known as Alton Park. They renamed it Blue Ridge Farm and developed it to raise livestock and horses. The original two-and-one-half-story brick farmhouse—built between 1852 and 1854 for a man named Smith on what was then a 600-acre tract of land—was five bays wide, with a high mansard roof covered with slate shingles, and a large porch reached by a flight of wooden steps. Around 1900, Washington, D.C. architect Waddy Wood drew up plans to remodel the house in the Colonial Revival style, but the renovation was never completed.
In 1923, the Ortmans decided to expand the house—and commissioned Bottomley for the design. It would be one of the three he would complete in Albemarle County. Bottomley retained the home’s original center block and added two asymmetrical brick wings, one room deep, to maximize the views of the gardens and the mountains. He replaced the window sashes on the first floor with French doors and added a balustrade and cornice to the roofline. In addition, the interior was completely redesigned, including nearly all of the mantels, paneling, woodwork, trim and stairs. Characteristic of Bottomley’s work is the progression of light to dark rooms, the open staircase and the high-quality brick and woodwork. Gillette, whose involvement in Blue Ridge Farm actually preceded Bottomley’s, designed an expansive English-style landscape, enlarged and redesigned brick terraces, and created formal boxwood and flower gardens.
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