Glavé & Holmes collaborated with Sweet Briar College to create a lively and comfortable space for students, faculty, and alumni to gather for both social and academic purposes. The design team created a classic and serene space with high performing finishes. Indoor/outdoor area rugs protect a seamless patchwork of old-and-reproduced historic wood flooring. Approximately one-third of the seating was salvaged and reupholstered from across campus to align with the college’s environmental values. The new furnishings are residential-feeling and were selected to feel cozy and residential. The design evokes a sense of an elevated “living room” where students can meet with classmates to study, enjoy an afternoon of visiting with friends or parents, or discuss an upcoming exam with a professor.
Category: Community
Willow Oaks Country Club
Willow Oaks Country Club has existed on an idyllic plot of land in Richmond for the past 60 years. The architecture of the club echoed the different decades it had seen and needed a more cohesive aesthetic. Glavé & Holmes Architecture took on this task as well as other renovations to help reshape the Club’s member experience. Architectural work focused on renovating the Pro Shop envelope, providing a new covered walkway, and expanding the patio that overlooks the golf course and James River.
To help unify the Pro Shop and covered walkways, the design team mimicked existing club architecture and extended paving to provide a more formal entry. The patio expansion provides three times the dining area than previously existed and is covered with a pergola. Columns and retaining walls are faced with granite to pay homage to the club’s past as a granite quarry.
Glavé & Holmes also provided interior design services to refresh the Restaurants, Event Spaces, Public Corridors, Locker, and Restrooms in the Main Facility and Fitness Areas. The team provided a clean, transitional aesthetic while retaining a connection to the historic portion of the building. The designers provided a comprehensive interior finish package, decorative and service lighting, and a full furniture package to update the facility. Careful attention was focused on finish performance and furniture plan flexibility to accommodate a variety of Club activities for years to come.
Shenkman Jewish Center
GLAVÉ & HOLMES ARCHITECTURE collaborated with the College of William and Mary to create a dedicated home for the college’s Jewish community. The team worked on the design and construction of the new Shenkman Jewish Center, a 3,000-square-foot Hillel House, as programmed and conceptualized in a planning study. This community building is situated on two lots at the corner of Jamestown Road and Cary Street. The building had the unique requirement of not only adhering to the architectural character of the campus, but also fitting in to the residential context of the surrounding homes. The building’s first floor features a large and open meeting space, an intimate study lounge, a kosher kitchen, and restrooms. The second floor provides space for a Rabbi’s office, a conference room, and a restrooms. A wooden pergola on the patio in the rear of the building is planned for future construction to accommodate a religious festival and other events.
Mary M. Torggler Fine Arts Center
The Torggler Fine Arts Center is the newest addition to Christopher Newport University’s campus serving the University’s Fine Arts Department and creating space for a new Peninsula Fine Arts Center for Newport News, Virginia. The 88,060 square-foot center is a dramatic new space that will bring nationally renowned collections to the University and the community. It houses gallery and programming space, an art history lecture hall, a large hands-on gallery, and studios.
Designed to connect to the existing Ferguson Center for the Performing Arts, the Fine Arts Center provides space for visiting exhibitions and a future University collection, and is anticipated to provide for the display of renowned collections from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and other traveling exhibitions. Highlights include 8,000 SF of new gallery space, a children’s discovery gallery, and a theater combined with a variety of support spaces including secure loading and art handling areas to meet American Alliance of Museums (AAM) accreditation standards. The building also houses new academic facilities for the University’s growing arts programs, which will support both academic learning and public education spaces. New studios and classrooms for sculpture, ceramics, drawing, painting, digital arts, and photography studios expand the arts program into new state of the art facilities. This new facility also frees up space in the existing Ferguson Center, where the project renovated nearly 17,000 SF of existing space to expand CNU’s music program facilities, with a new band room, rehearsal rooms and a recording studio.
The design of the new Fine Arts Center draws from the character of the existing Ferguson Center, originally designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei and offers a transition to the more neo-classical character of the main campus. A dramatic set of three, tiered glass domes serves as the hinge point and main public entry to this dramatic new space. The arcade from the Ferguson Center is extended to provide a consistent public face to the main public façade, while the academic spaces are located in a more neo-classical inspired rear ell. A small café in the dome area, along with two classrooms for children’s education and a Discovery gallery with glass painting box provide space for families to experience the arts. Offices, faculty studios and museum administration spaces are also provided for the building operations.
Trible Library Expansion
CHRISTOPHER NEWPORT UNIVERSITY (CNU) selected Glavé & Holmes for the expansion and renovations to the Trible Library. The existing library was a compilation of four different decades of construction; the original 1966 one-story library, an addition in 1978, another addition in 1993, and a major addition and renovation in 2008. This project needed to remove portions of the building, renovate major sections of the earliest building, and add a large addition. In addition, the existing library contained only 200 seats and the University wanted to increase seating to over 1,000.
Modern university libraries have evolved into much more than repositories for books. G&HA helped transition the facility into a 24/7 student-focused study center, complete with an updated coffee shop, expanded media center, extensive technologies, a lecture hall, reading/study rooms and state-of-the-art archival storage and archives library.
The most dramatic addition was a new two-story Reading Room. Locating it on the second floor allowed this central feature to be flooded with natural light from the library’s cupola and skylights concealed within roof wells. This iconic, three-bay room surrounded by balconies flows out to three outdoor reading terraces. This room, named the Rosemary Trible Reading Room, and the newly renovated spaces that surround it, has become an immediate success with students who occupy the building at all hours of the day and night, fulfilling the hopes of CNU’s library staff and administration.
Saint Gertrude High School
Saint Gertrude High School (SGHS) is an all-girls school division of the Benedictine Schools of Richmond. SGHS desired to relocate to the 50-acre Benedictine Abbey campus, shared with Benedictine College Preparatory. Glavé & Holmes Architecture designed a new academic building to support an enrollment of 280 students. The building sits on a bluff, seventy feet above the James River Valley. It is prominently visible by cars driving northound across the Veterans Bridge above the James River. The new building includes a Chapel, a Grand Hall for school gatherings, a Dining Hall with prep-kitchen, classrooms, labs, and administrative offices. A modernized Spanish Mission style architecture was used, incorporating architectural elements of SGHS’s existing building. The new building completed construction in spring 2023.
Heslep Amphitheatre Renovation
GLAVÉ & HOLMES ARCHITECTURE assisted with the rehabilitation of the historic Heslep Amphitheatre at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
A long-cherished campus location whose construction dates from 1923, the Amphitheatre was repaired and upgraded to retain its attraction as a quiet wooded campus park, while continuing to serve as a flexible outdoor academic facility. In addition to a sensitive historic renovation, the inclusion of barrier-free access paths, seating, and newly constructed restroom facilities ensure that the Amphitheatre remains a rich piece of the University’s fabric.
The judicious and farsighted assessment, preservation, and enhancement of the wooded environs surrounding the Amphitheatre, including a natural perennial stream channel, are integral aspects of the project.
Riverwalk Landing
GLAVÉ & HOLMES ARCHITECTURE (G&HA) was chosen by York County as part of a design-build team to assist with the master plan for a new commercial center along the York River in historic Yorktown. A key component of the plan was a structural parking terrace. G&HA designed the 263-car parking structure to blend with the charming scale of the waterfront houses and new waterfront boutiques. In addition to the contextual design, the parking terrace serves as a gateway from the Colonial Parkway into Historical Yorktown. The parking terrace sits into the hillside to minimize the physical scale of the building and to take advantage of the natural contours, which enable people and cars to access the second level of the deck without an internal ramp. A stairtower at the corner and carefully detailed brickwork help decrease the overall scale of the facility and provide an appropriate backdrop to the village-like setting of Riverwalk Landing’s Town Center.
A secondary component of the plan incudes a small gatehouse that welcomes visitors arriving by boat to Riverwalk Landing. This simple pavilion acts as a lighthouse and gateway for all who come and go to Yorktown by way of watercraft.