But it’s when you walk into the house that you feel the joy of the design and understand why Jefferson thought it a sublime arrangement for living. Stand just inside the entrance, and in front of you is a center atrium drenched in light from the windows of the belvedere two stories above. Look straight ahead, past the atrium, and you see through to the dining room and then through the French doors to the porch and garden beyond.
Still standing just inside the front door, a glance to the right reveals part of the living room; look to the left, and there’s the kitchen counter in the middle distance. None of the rooms is wholly revealed even as you enter them, letting each one borrow square footage from your imagination.
More important, though, and what so captivated our third president, is the light that floods each room from the ample windows and French doors that march around the perimeter. Walls and ceilings on the ground floor are all white. They gleam and reflect natural light because there’s a slight gloss to the painted finish.
In designing Poplar Forest, Jefferson was inspired by Andrea Palladio’s 16th-century reinterpretations of Roman villas. He thought the long, windowed pavilions of the French were brilliant in the way they provided light. He absorbed these ideas and developed his octagonal plan based on Palladio’s round Temple of Vesta.
Cooper’s inspiration was also historical, but more recent and more personal. Thirty years ago, she fell in love with a round house in Marshall, Va. It belonged to her then-boyfriend. “It was really 13-sided, but it read like it was round,” she says. “I was fascinated by it.”
A few years later, Cooper asked Vienna architect Joseph Burton to design an octagon house for her. She even had a model made. Years passed, and Cooper, who helped manage her family’s commercial real estate portfolio, put the plans out for bid but couldn’t make the numbers work. When Cooper and her second husband, Carleton Cooper, wed in 1992, he wanted to keep his Arlington County house, so the octagon house plans stayed on the shelf. When Carl died several years ago, Cooper decided she needed a project.
Cooper — granddaughter of developer Ashton Jones, for whom the Ashton Heights section of Arlington is named, and daughter of Ashton Jones Jr., who developed Arlington’s upscale Country Club Hills — is now 69. She has two children from an early first marriage, three stepchildren from her second and seven grandchildren. And, since 2008, she also has had an octagon house, made to her old plan by a custom home builder, with help from Burton. (“Marty Dunn is the best contractor I’ve ever worked with.”)
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