Wrote This, Wrote That

DC's Living in a Youth Quake

Text and Photos for the Wall St. Journal's OWN Magazine

Start fanning yourselves, dowdy old Washington has burst into paradise found for the young and hip, a multiculti kaleidoscope of sound, color, food ...and cool.

14TH AND U - Logan Circle

Studio Theater bustles, Whole Foods is packed, nouveau Audrey Tautous skirt by on candy colored Vespas, and black clad hipsters loll at the sidewalk cafes. Restaurants like Le Diplomate are nearly impossible to get into.

Meet DC's epicenter of cool.

At the exceedingly popular restaurant/bookstore/performance space Bus Boys and Poets, north of U Street, 20 and 30-somethings parallel play on laptops at communal tables, while others subtly browse the mating possibilities along with the books. The rest head straight for the bar and cushy sofas in the lounge.

The turf south of U is fast displacing Georgetown as design central for both the haute and hot, combining Mitchell Gold & Bob Williams gloss with treasure hunts like Miss Pixie's--for furnishing one's first loft. The Washington Design Center will seal the deal when it slinks into its new space at the end of this year.

Poodles now prance about what was recently the purlieu of prostitutes; once seedy town homes and derelict mansions around Logan Circle are among the most coveted houses in the city. These mingle with pre-war and new condos sproinging terraces, with prices that range from around $200,000 for a studio in an older building, to the million range for a home that's, as they say, livable.

for the duPont Registry

The curved teak gates swing open.

Follow a crushed coral drive, 800 feet winding through two acres of native plants and exotic animals, a deliberate wild. Egrets pose, a white dove coos, an iguana scurries out of your path.

Set amid impeccable gardens, the great house looms. The front staircase splits to embrace a massive royal palm stretching thirty feet, fronds feathering the roofline. To one side is a salt water pond, your private aquarium. To the other is the conch house, an early dweller on this six acre paradise, just five feet from the water's edge. Grandfathered in, it's now your marina, leading to a dock that in turn leads to a 1000 foot deeded boat basin.

Tomorrow you can sail out for some tarpon fishing, or snorkeling at Hens and Chickens reef. But now a hammock beckons from the island that forms and reforms with each tide. An osprey flies by the lighthouse, its walls shot with red and gold by the setting sun.

A Garden Variety Masterwork -- A Hostess Gift from Chagall

Beginning with the coda...Several years ago I was lucky enough to interview Evelyn Nef in her Georgetown home, a place where a series of Picasso's circus etchings hop scotched up the staircase, a Brancusi presided over the piano, and a collection of Chagall sketches lined a wall -- birthday gifts from the artist.

As Adrien Higgins wrote this weekend in the Washington Post, there were "31 drawings, 46 prints and 25 illustrated books by such artists as Auguste Renoir, Wassily Kandinsky and Fernand Léger, along with early prints and other paper works by Chagall and Pablo Picasso."

None of that made it into my article for the Washington Post, which was one of a series of sketches about outdoor murals in private homes. Nef lived alone among these astonishing riches and I was terrified for her safety, though she was casual about it to the point of carelessness -- on my way out I did a double take, seeing a Picasso hanging tipsy on the wall behind the front door.

What I'd come to see was the Chagall mosaic in her garden, which now resides in the National Gallery of Art's Sculpture Garden, right where she wanted it -- a delicate removal process that Higgins describes here.

My interview is here....

A Garden Variety Masterwork
By Stephanie Cavanaugh
Special to The Washington Post

"What's this article about again?" asks Evelyn Nef, standing in the foyer of her Georgetown home. Not because she had forgotten but because she wants to hear it directly, instead of filtered through her assistant.

"Murals in private homes around the city," she's told. "And you're the top!"

"You're the top," she sings, doing a little soft-shoe down the hall. "Noël Coward!"

It's early afternoon, and the sun is shining brilliantly. She doesn't see anyone before noon, her assistant explained. She works out every morning. "Weights and stretches," Nef said. She'll be 95 next month.

"Come into my back yard and see a marvel," she said, leading the way through the house. And there it is, surrounded by magnolias and climbing roses, the only Marc Chagall mosaic in a private home in the world.
At the top she points out "Orpheus and his lute, Pegasus and images from Greek mythology." Below are European refugees coming across the ocean, and in the right corner she and her husband sit in the shade of a tree.

Chagall was a good friend of her third husband, historian John Ulrich Nef, whom she married in 1964.
"Every summer, we went to France and saw the Chagalls," she recalled. The people, not the paintings. "We always went to the Hotel du Cap -- they'd come to get away from the tourists in summer. In the morning, Marc would paint and my husband would write and Valentina and I would gossip. We became like a family.

"When he'd come to New York, where Matisse was his dealer, he'd come to visit us in Washington. He loved the village of Georgetown and shopping at Woolworth's for new pencils and colored crayons."

It was something of a hostess gift, the mural. When he proposed it for the garden, she was imagining a plaque of some sort, "a little 8-by-10-inch thing to hang," she described with her hands. "I never dreamed we'd have to build a wall."

The mosaic was flown over from France in 10 panels and attached to the wall with bronze pins so it can be moved. "When I die, it will go to the National Gallery. The present plan is to put it in the sculpture garden," Nef said.

"When it was done, Marc came and the French ambassador and the society person," she said. "It was a very big deal."

Nice to Know a House is Haunted

Nice to know a house is haunted
By Stephanie Cavanaugh
Special to The Washington Post

"As I was walking up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there;
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd stay away."
-- "The Little Man," by Hughes Mearns (1875-1965)

" 'He' sat there in midair, smiling at me from in front of the cold fireplace. Hands clasped around his crossed knees, he was nodding and rocking. He faded slowly, still smiling and was gone. . . . He was the most cheerful and solid-looking little person I'd ever seen."

"He" was one of five friendly ghosts that inhabited Helen Ackley's 18-room Victorian home in the New York suburb of Nyack, or so she claimed in an article she wrote for Reader's Digest in May 1977.
Sadly for Ackley, the tale came back to haunt her.

When Jeffrey M. Stambovsky contracted to purchase the house in the early 1990s, he and his wife soon began hearing tales of things going bump in the night. They wanted no part of them -- even if the resident spooks did, as Ackley boasted, occasionally leave gifts such as "tiny silver tongs" to toast a daughter's wedding and a "golden baby ring" to rattle in the birth of her first grandchild.

Stambovsky made his case to the Appellate Division of New York state Supreme Court and got his deposit back. Because Ackley had publicized that her house had ghosts, the court ruled, "as a matter of law, the house is haunted."

The court's precedent, though, was short-lived. By the mid-1990s, New York and many other jurisdictions, including the District, Virginia and Maryland, passed what are known as stigmatized property laws. While real estate agents must pass along information to prospective buyers about leaky roofs and other physical defects, immaterial items such as a murder or suicide in the house -- or a ghost -- may now remain shrouded in silence.

But should you tell anyway?

"Are you out of your mind?" one real estate agent said with a shudder. "Never, never, never tell anyone you have a ghost."

But Don Denton, a branch vice president of Coldwell Banker/Pardoe Real Estate, disagreed: "I'm of the school that you disclose everything -- but you disclose with the permission of the seller. If you don't, two or three weeks later the client will be walking down the street and hear about it and it becomes an issue. They feel taken advantage of."

Washington real estate lawyer Morris Battino thinks the same way. "It goes with termites and leaky roofs," he said. "People today are litigation-happy. As far as I'm concerned, the more you disclose the better. In fact a ghost might turn out to be a good selling point -- something to brag about."

Richard Ellis of Ellis Realty should know. He handled the sale of the Ackley house and listed it again several years later. "People love the history of the house," he said. "It appreciated with the marketplace when it changed hands." The current owners have lived there six or seven years, he said. "I assume they're happy. They're still there."

Are ghosts a serious issue in the Washington area?

"Hauntings have picked up in the last year," said Bobbie Lescar, founder and director of the Virginia Ghosts and Hauntings Research Society.

She said the organization gets 70 to 80 calls and e-mails a day. "Not all say, 'I have a ghost,' " she said. "Some just have questions."

Lescar is not surprised at the number of calls. "Virginia is one of the most haunted states in the union. As an original colony, it has all that energy," she said. "Fredericksburg is the second-most haunted city in the United States, next to New Orleans."

"There are hundreds of ghost sites in the U.S.," said Beverly Litsinger, a founder of the Maryland Ghost and Spirit Association. "Maryland probably has 30 or 40. Virginia has 20 or more. There are a lot of people who believe."

Lawana Holland, proprietor of the Washington, D.C. Ghost Hunting Page, said she gets "e-mail from people from all parts of the country, even from overseas, who say: 'This has been happening. . . . We don't know what to do.' "

Holland, a graphic designer, said she is "more of a researcher than a hunter -- I have a history background. . . . It's more the nature of ghosts, where the hauntings are located and why."

Before you jump to the conclusion that your house is haunted, Holland said, you should look for "a natural cause first -- an electrical problem or power lines." But sometimes, she conceded, events appear truly unnatural.

She recalled the time the owner of a local restaurant called. "The staff was terrified," she said. "They'd seen an apparition of a woman and mirrors were breaking and things were being overturned. It subsided after a while, but the cook was still saying his rosary in front of the oven."
It is possible that the ephemeral nature of this haunting had to do with remodeling.
"Sometimes renovations stir things up," Holland mused. "If you've gone and changed the home, the land, the place . . . it creates a little more activity."

Lescar's organization will investigate, but will not intervene. "Our mission," she said, "is to document and record empirical evidence. We want scientists to take the paranormal seriously so that some big research university will devote some money to it. We take a very scientific approach to something that hasn't been proven by science yet."

Her volunteer staff conducts about one full-scale investigation a month. After a phone interview to weed out the "crazies," a team is sent in to check out the home. "We look for obvious stuff," she said. "Drugs, tapes like 'Night of the Living Dead' -- to see if they've been watching too many scary movies."

If supernatural activity is suspected, "We set up surveillance," Lescar said. "We try to catch phenomena on a tape or camcorder, which is pretty boring unless something happens." They also monitor room temperature and electromagnetic activity using an electromagnetic field detector .

Lescar, a technology teacher at Cumberland County Elementary School, maintains that most spirits are benign. "I've only run across a couple that had negative energy," she said.

Do people learn to live in harmony with their ghosts?

"Oh yes!" she said. "I had one lady who liked the fact that the house is haunted, that when she goes on vacation the place is protected." This family's retainer is "a mean looking old man that looks out the front window," she said. "They're actually comforted."

But who can you call when an uninvited guest has worn out its welcome? Litsinger does not claim to bust ghosts; she is more of a mediator. She will work with you and your haunt to try to find a happy medium.
Litsinger, a consultant for several nonprofit organizations, has always been comfortable with the spirit world. "As a child I'd see them and commune with them. I thought everybody did." Her daughter, now 30, also has the ability, she said. Her husband "won't talk, but the man has seen full-bodied ghosts."

"People want to know if they really have a spirit," Litsinger said. "They want to make peace with them so they're not frightened."

Take the case of the mother and son in Ellicott City who were terrorized by . . . something.

"The kid was a teenager and kept playing loud music," Litsinger said. One night he was going full blast in the basement when he started hearing noises and noticing that "things" were moving around the room. Scared witless, he fled upstairs and slammed the door.

Then, realizing he had left the light on -- No! Don't open that door! -- he opened the door, reached in to flip the switch . . . and the door slammed shut on his head.

Mama called in Litsinger, who communed with the speechless wraith via an EMF. (Hers is equipped with a gauge that allows "yes" and "no" answers.)

"The ghost was an old, old, old lady and she didn't like his music," Litsinger said. As long as the boy kept the volume down, the specter indicated, the scare tactics would cease. "She was very happy to chat. I liked her a lot."

Sadly, the intervention did not bring about a lasting detente. The lad was not about to give up his music and the family decided to move.

Litsinger was more successful at solving the problem of a woman in Glen Burnie whose tenant was "a very pleasant man -- a full-bodied ghost who just smiled at people."

While the family had grown used to him, his appearance at dinner parties was unsettling.

Litsinger discovered that the man, who had died in the house, had been a jeweler. He told her that he had dug out the floor by hand to make a workshop, was quite proud of it and did not want to leave. (It was, in fact, the only house in the neighborhood with a cellar, she later found.) With Litsinger's help, the lady of the house struck a deal with her smiling spook: He could stay, as long as he kept to the basement.

"People often make peace with ghosts," Litsinger. "They're just people in another incarnation. And just like you, they don't like to be ignored. They like to have their presence acknowledged. Sometimes they'll leave when you ask. If they don't feel like it, they won't."

Traditionalists might prefer to call in a priest to roust their demons. The Rev. Michael J. O'Sullivan, pastor of St. Peter's Church on Capitol Hill, has some experience with them.

"Oh my, yes," he said. "The rectory is haunted."

The first step, he said, chuckling, should be to "try a little Guinness."

If that does not help, he said, "I'd go in and bless the house."

If that still does not help, "and if there truly seems to be some supernatural being," O'Sullivan suggested calling the archdiocese offices.

Every archdiocese has a specialist in casting out demons -- at least, he said, that is what he learned from reading "The Exorcist."

Oh to Own a Piece of History!

Oh to Own a Piece of History!

The Greenbrier. Call it Home

by Stephanie Cavanaugh

Wall St. Journal's OWN Magazine

"We're going up to the White!"

That's what people said long before the Civil War, when White Sulphur Springs, in what was then known simply as western Virginia, was to the south what Saratoga Springs was to the north.

"In the 19th century, there was a cluster of resorts within a fifty mile radius," says the Greenbrier's official historian, Dr. Robert Conte. "Visitors would make a circuit, spending two weeks at one, a week at another. "

The Greenbrier was one of them.

Famous and fashionable southerners flocked to the mountains to "take the waters," drinking and bathing in spring waters rumored to remedy just about any ill. Conte quotes a visitor in his fascinating History of The Greenbrier, "It cures ugliness itself."

They also came to eat, drink, socialize and escape the summer heat -- plantation owners and southern belles traveling on horseback or by stagecoach or up the Mississippi from New Orleans. Lodgings then cost about $1.15 a day.

The whirl of the social season was put on hold for the Civil War, resuming shortly after with the installation of a Chesapeake and Ohio railroad station, virtually at the resort's doorstep.

The railroad had such an interest in The Greenbrier's success that they bought the property in 1910. Shortly after, they added a magnificent hotel to the 19th century cottages that housed early guests; cottages that still exist, upgraded and expanded, and line the walk to the famous golf course.

Fabulously decorated by Dorothy Draper, and offering the most exquisite hospitality, the facilities included stables and pools and a bath wing that was among the finest in the world. The guest list before World War II was as star studded as the setting, a cross-section of luminaries that included presidents Taft and Wilson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bing Crosby, Babe Ruth, and the Prince of Wales.

Over the years, the world-class resort has played host to 26 U.S. presidents.

Time once again stopped for World War II, when the railroad temporarily sold The Greenbrier to the U.S. Government for use as a rehabilitation hospital for 25,000 soldiers. "A particularly nice hospital, and an incongruity," Conte says with a chuckle. "In the 40s the resort was a hangout for the rich and famous, where millionaires went -- to have it available to soldiers? It was never a democratic resort, in the small "d" sense."

With the war over, the railroad regained the hotel -- though the connection to the government was not entirely severed. A Cold War bunker was constructed underneath it "with room for 1000 people," says Conte. "535 members of congress plus staff."

Assuming that Russia sent missiles and Washington was destroyed, this and several other facilities dotted about the region would be easily reachable by train, ensuring the government's continuity.

"It was a helluva idea," says Conte, adding that the bunker still exists and tours are offered. "You can't get rid of it, it's a giant concrete box under a hill. It's not going anywhere."

Conte recalls someone once saying, "The Greenbrier was the symbol of the height of civilization -- here was a facility built for the end of civilization."

The Greenbrier still exists, of course -- as lavish and fabled as ever, nestled in 6,750 acres of mountain and stream and valley, with 4,250 acres reserved for the resort itself.

And now you can own a piece of The White.

In 1999 the railroad sold the hotel and spa, and 2500 of its 6750 acres became The Sporting Club. "A club within the resort," says John Klemish, the broker in charge and advisor to the chairman. "You would be blown away!"

Fifteen neighborhoods, each with its own character, pepper the land. "You can live where you can walk to the hotel itself, or on a golf course, on a river, in the valley, " says Klemish. You might also chose the mountain, where the views stretch 50 miles.

"Of the 500 home sites, 400 have been purchased, and 200 homes have been built," he says, adding, "some are worthy of Architectural Digest."

Each neighborhood has a different architectural character, "the sites and the vernacular, the language of the design, makes them different," says Klemish. There is, however, an orderliness to designs, with the homes closest to the hotel echoing its classical Georgian style, stone and timber homes in the mountains and along the river. An architectural review board approves each custom building.

As members of The Sporting Club, homeowners receive special discounts on hotel amenities, including rooms, dining, and activities and enjoy exclusive use of private club facilities including a golf course, lodges for dining, a spa, an equestrian center, and a fitness center.

And there's a brand new casino, "James Bond meets Gone with the Wind," Klemish calls it. "It's elegant, it's civilized, it's Monte Carlo." It's the elegance of a movie set, where champagne flows, music plays, and jackets are required after 7 p.m.

These are second and third homes for most of the homeowners, most of whom live within a five hour drive of The Greenbrier, says the broker. You can also fly directly from Dulles International or Hartsfield Int'l airport in Atlanta, Ga.

And you can still take the train from Washington's Union Station for a mere $39.

Should you ever tire of the offerings at The Sporting Club or at the hotel, Klemish notes that the nearby town of Lewisburg was recently voted the "America's Coolest Small Town" by Frommer's Budget travel Magazine. It has a has a Carnegie Hall for concerts, boutiques and antiques, a college, coffee shops and art galleries -- and an adorable main street reminiscent of an idyllic New England town."

Up at The White, the heyday never ends.

The Ultimate Ski Home

Publisher's Showcase from the duPont Registry

Gallery of Fine Homes

One would expect the extraordinary from the CEO of Dreamworks, the film studio that brought us Shrek, Madagascar, and the Lion King. The Park City residence of Jeffrey Katzenberg does not disappoint.

"It is the ultimate ski home," says Paul Benson of Sotheby's International Realty, who is handling the sale of the $20.5 million Park City, Utah property.

On two lots within the prestigious Bald Eagle community, the home was designed by Rick Otto and Charles Gwathmey with interiors by Naomi Leff, whose celebrity clientele includes Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani and was built by renowned hotel developer New Star, a true dream team.

"They set out to build a home with a cabin feel -- a true family trap," says Benson.

A 14,100 square foot rustic lodge, with 7 bedrooms, 10 baths, and multiple entertaining spaces flowing beautifully from one to another, including a living room with 30-foot windows offering shimmering views of the silver rush town.

"It shows like an art gallery," says Benson, but one where you "want to jump on a sofa and enjoy a fire."

This is a house you want to be snowed into, he says, with a resort-style entertainment center on the lower level that includes an indoor pool, sauna, spa, gym, and game room. An 80" LED TV allows for private film screenings and a ski room with a bar that walks right out onto the slopes.

Should you emerge, three of the world's best ski areas are outside the door along with a dozen world class golf resorts and exceptional restaurants and shopping -- as expected from a town that attracts thousands of glitterati to the Sundance Film Festival and counts Mitt Romney and Katherine Heigl as part-time residents.

The town is enjoying a latter day silver rush, with home sales-- and prices -- climbing.

"The Olympics put us on the map," says Benson. "Sundance keeps us there."

With consistently sunny days and a lung-building altitude, the town remains a training paradise for Olympic-level athletes. "We have the lowest percentage of body fat in the U.S." Benson laughs.

It increasingly attracts buyers from the United Kingdom, France, China, Mexico, even Russia, says Benson, who markets properties around the world. In one recent month he ran magazine ads in 7 countries.

The strategy has paid off. With a client list that reads like an international who's who, Benson was named one of the country's top agents by the Wall Street Journal and is Utah's top broker, selling over 100 homes and over $100 million in volume in 2011 and 2012.

"It was," he says modestly, "a pretty good year."

PEOPLE IN GLASS HOUSES

How Does Your Sunroom Grow?

by Stephanie Cavanaugh

For the Wall St Journal's OWN Magazine - September 2012

Molly and Michael Metzler sleep under glass. Their bedroom opens to a domed conservatory with marble floors and a panoramic view that skips across 15 acres of garden and grounds to the lapping shore of Delaware's Nanticoke River.

From the boudoir one also sees a free-standing conservatory nestled in a woodsy setting and echoing the style of the 5,000 square foot main house. Molly Metzler originally wanted a simple greenhouse, but the project grew, as these things do, into a mahogany-lined, cupola-topped jewel-box, with windows set in bronze.

"It's much too nice to be a greenhouse," she says of the single-room building that features a sitting area with a fireplace, a wet bar, and an in-ground spa for splashing amid hibiscus flowers and banana trees in the middle of January.

"It's just a place for my husband and me. We don't even let my son out there," then adds with a laugh, "He's 21. You don't want one of those in your spa."

It's June in January

Fooling mother nature is a great part of the allure of green houses, conservatories, and orangeries. Though the terms are often used interchangeably, there are differences between these structures.

Greenhouses, which are generally detached from the house, are designed for the propagation of plants, with heating and lighting controls to create the optimum environment for your eupatoria and fritillaria.

Conservatories are usually attached to the house and allow the harmonious cohabitation of plants and brunch.

The orangerie is a cousin to both. Originally designed to grow citrus trees in climates too chilly to sustain them outdoors, they are generally defined by a two-tiered roof that allows headroom for trees.

There is, however, considerable overlap among the three forms. A conservatory might have a domed roof and an orangerie a flat one, with no glassing at all. A greenhouse can be used for reading as well as raising flowers and plants.

"We've done greenhouses that incorporated relaxation rooms with tables and chairs," says Rob Suman, president of Creative Conservatories, which is based in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. "They're all glass structures, of course, and very similar."

To be frank (which is nice), he adds that whatever we call them, what we're talking about is building magnificently ornamented sunrooms. Rooms that will become, as he puts it, "the jewel of the house."

Having been given Suman's absolution, and to simplify matters, we'll dispense with the distinctions and simply call all of these glass rooms conservatories, since that is their ultimate function: to conserve plants.