POP UP TOUR: Saturday, May 27, 11AM: 35 University Circle, Charlottesville VA

We are delighted to announce a self-guided pop up tour this Saturday, May 27, at 11 AM of 35 University Circle.

This is a one of a kind Milton Grigg home featuring a magnificent entrance foyer and living room designed to duplicate Monticello on a smaller scale. Special architectural details include a double groin vaulted ceiling in the foyer, a Palladio hallmark with built-in bookcases and an oval shaped great room with inlay wood floors, massive windows, arched bookshelves and a custom fireplace mantle.

Milton Grigg (1905–1982) was an American architect and preservationist best known for his restoration work at Colonial Williamsburg and Monticello. In his career as an independent architect in Charlottesville, he worked as a modernist within the Jeffersonian tradition. Ed Lay, in The Architecture of Jefferson County, called Grigg "one of the premier architectural restoration/preservationists of his time – always with an inquisitive mind on the forefront of architectural inquiry".

Grigg studied architecture at the University of Virginia in the late-1920s. Between 1929 and 1933, he worked on restorations at Colonial Williamsburg. In 1933, he established his office in Charlottesville and built or renovated several homes and buildings. Floyd Johnson was added as a partner in 1936. That partnership lasted until 1940, when Grigg associated with William Newton Hale, Jr.. By 1977, the firm was known as Grigg, Wood and Browne, and over time became Dalgliesh Gilpin Paxton Architects. Some of his work:

• Emmanuel Church (Greenwood, Virginia), Greenwood, Virginia
• Ramsay (Greenwood, Virginia), Greenwood, Virginia
• Hollymead, restoration , 1937, (Charlottesville, Virginia)
• Edgemont (Covesville, Virginia), renovation, 1948
• The Valley Road Cottage, 1937, (Charlottesville, VA

Charlottesville, where Grigg lived for most of his life, has a rich concentration of Grigg houses designed in the years between 1940 and 1964. On some of these he collaborated with William N. Hale with whom he was in partnership from the mid-40s until the early 50s. The houses are located primarily in the Meadowbrook Hills section and Farmington. On Hessian Road one can see a cluster of several fine examples of various sizes and proportions. Because of the number of houses on this street, at one time there was a movement afoot to rename it “Grigg Alley”.

While Grigg was an architect clearly rooted in the past whose great interest was architectural preservation, it is hard to pigeonhole him for he worked on such a wide range of disparate buildings and projects during his career including Walter Reed Hospital in Washington D.C.; Marion duPont Scott’s art moderne Red Room at Montpelier; the annex of the United States embassy in Canberra, Australia, where he created quite an uproar over his insistence on importing brick (at great expense—the bricks cost $15,208;the shipping, $22,614) all the way from Virginia; numerous municipal buildings and hundreds of churches. In addition, he developed a system for creating prefabricated houses in post-World War II France using surplus aircraft aluminum, and he worked on the psychological effects of color to be used in medical facilities.