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Alt-Dominion
It seems that of the 112 owners of the formidable properties snuggled up to Wildcat Mountain, almost half do business out of their homes. Restrictive covenants written in the 1970s originally aimed at preventing people from running hair salons out of their basements are now grappling with the way the Internet has changed how and where people live and work.
Tom D'Albenzio is one of these Internet-enabled artisans. He was a computer maven for AT&T who, over his corporate life, followed what he calls a classic migration pattern from Brooklyn to Staten Island to New Jersey to the Piedmont. Since the 1980s, he commuted from his place in Bellevue Farms to Herndon until he retired from the phone company. He was brought back as a consultant in 1999 to deal with the Y2K computer crisis because he is an expert on "legacy systems." Think of them as "the senior citizens of computer systems," he says. "New ones are coming along to take their place, but they're still valuable, and you can't just get rid of them."
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Virginia's Piedmont Charming rural communities in Virginia's Piedmont region, roughly between Middleburg and Charlottesville, are filling up with formerly big city residents, with high-paying jobs, who can now work wherever they can stay connected. Save & Share |
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He proved so irreplaceable that when IBM took over these systems' management for AT&T, Big Blue hired D'Albenzio full time to keep the old circuits chugging. The big difference is, they preferred he do it from home.
"I was one of the last people to go to work from home," says D'Albenzio, 61. "I'd spent 37 years working at the office. I found it a little bit hard to get adapted. I really miss being in the office, the social contact -- if I've got a question about something, sitting on somebody's desk. The conference calls and the e-mail are not the same, although I'm getting more and more adept at it as time goes on."
So now he spends his days in front of his computer in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, "just me, and my cats and my cattle." (He's been raising and selling grass-fed beef off his 13 1/2 acres for 18 years. He has 20 Herefords.)
D'Albenzio's pattern has become so common that the only people who really understand the economies of these counties may be the FedEx drivers. They're the ones who know what kind of "cottage multinationals" can be found at the ends of all those gravel roads.
'A Station Before Heaven'
This Piedmont is geologically different from the Triassic Lowlands on which much of the Washington area has been built. As you cross from the coastal plain into these parts, the terrain abruptly becomes more rolling, framing more vistas. It is marked by undulating country lanes snug between the roots of ancient trees, and fences built and painted with more care than some houses. This preserve, largely east of the Blue Ridge from Middleburg to Charlottesville, some 120 miles long and 30 to 40 miles wide, is today at the heart of the Santa Fe-ing of the Piedmont.
"I could live anywhere -- Santa Fe, Montana, Colorado," says Robert Duvall, the horseman and Hollywood star of classics such as "Lonesome Dove."
"My favorite city in the world is Buenos Aires," says the tango aficionado. He still keeps a place in Beverly Hills -- "small, just to have a place to go, rather than a hotel."
He chooses, however, to live at Byrnley, his 360 acres near The Plains.
"It has gentle hills. It's peaceful, beautiful. Reminds me of parts of England."
"It's a station before heaven," says Luciana Pedraza Duvall, his wife.