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Color and Light
Art, antiques and vivid color add sparkling personality to a Windsor Farms Colonial Revival | Photos by Ansel Olson | Styling by Lauren Healy-Flora
DECEMBER 30, 2024
Looking back, Sally Valentine Ellington recalls with a laugh that her Windsor Farms house was “kind of a disaster” when she and her husband, Jesse, and their three sons moved in 11 years ago. A native Richmonder, Sally and her family had spent 24 years in South Carolina, living in homes in Charleston, Sullivan’s Island and Mount Pleasant, when they made the decision to move back to Virginia.
At that time, the couple’s two oldest boys were attending the University of Virginia. “We were paying out-of-state tuition, which was not fun,” says Ellington, whose husband had recently decided to close his Charleston-based investment business. With a third, much younger son still at home, the couple was trying to plan their next move when Sally Ellington’s father, E. Massie Valentine, had a stroke in Richmond. “My dad made the decision for us, unfortunately,” she says.
Their search for a Richmond home turned out to be somewhat lackluster, Ellington recalls. “There just weren’t a lot of houses to choose from,” she says. However, while the house they landed on needed a lot of work, it was just down the street from her father’s home. “He had full-time [in-home] care, and I could go see him and hang out with him every day,” Ellington says.
The couple quickly embarked on projects to make the home theirs. Projects included grading the backyard, painting the brick house a creamy white, restoring and renovating the flooring, and creating a casual family living space in the basement. In 2016, the Ellingtons built an addition onto the back of the house, creating a new first-floor kitchen and family room.
From the outset, Ellington turned to her sister-in-law, Margaret Valentine, and Valentine’s design partner, Nan McVey, to help with both the new and old spaces. The pair, known best for creating custom color palettes for their clients, immediately saw the need to address a transition in light from Low Country South Carolina to Central Virginia.
“The light in South Carolina is completely different from the light in Richmond,” McVey explains. “You have to adjust the palette. The same colors in one place do not look as pretty in the other. They just don’t shine here.”
The pair chose rich hues of pinks and chartreuse greens to play off grounding grays throughout the home’s formal and informal spaces. Built in 1938, the home’s original elegant details, crafted by noted architect Clarence Huff, were not overlooked with the addition. Arched doorways, deep moldings and casements in the original interiors were repeated in the new. Ellington’s somewhat eclectic reverence for both old and new design is also evident throughout the home, where family antiques rest comfortably next to contemporary pieces. An uncle’s china cabinet, her father’s favorite desk and heirloom pieces from her mother’s family resonate with a commitment to preserving the family’s presence in tandem with fun and colorful modern twists. Pink upholstery dominates the living room’s main seating area, accented with fine antique side chairs and chests.
A calming beige wallpaper with a subtle graphic design provides a counterpoint to the home’s exquisite central stairway, where Huff’s affinity for traditional moldings plays well with hot pink upholstered antique chairs and a Persian rug with reflecting shades of pink and red.
A short hallway between the foyer and kitchen features a moody wet bar painted in Farrow & Ball’s Mole’s Breath with a leathered black stone countertop. Dark stained floors are covered with a Turkish Ouschak rug, adding bold pinks and purple to the design equation. A Phillip Jeffries leaf motif on grasscloth wallpaper envelops adjacent space that once served as the home’s galley kitchen but now provides a cozy office space and back entry hall.
Grays and white, with a splash of chartreuse and lime green, prevail in the space shared by the kitchen and family room, where light spills in from windows offering ample views of the garden.
A saturated treatment of gray walls, ceiling and moldings in the dining room provides the perfect canvas for pieces from Ellington’s art collection, displayed throughout the house. A large abstract work by Richmond artist Janie Pinney is a contemporary focal point amid the family antiques.
“Sally buys art wherever she goes and wherever she lives,” Valentine says.
Landscapes, portraits, sketches and statues are found throughout every available space in the home, attesting to Ellington’s passion for art, especially nudes, which she first began collecting in Charleston.
“I am drawn to the different shapes and colors in each work,” explains Ellington, whose collection also includes works by Charleston artist Anne Darby Parker and Sally King Benedict, a contemporary artist in Ketchum, Idaho. Dense, salon-style arrangements of paintings in the home’s main living spaces showcase works by Richmond artists Frankie Slaughter, Andras Bality and Chris Shands.
“I love to find artists who are up and coming,” Ellington says.
The Ellingtons’ collection also includes works by Sally’s mother-in-law, the late Nancy Ellington, who was a plein air artist in California, and paintings by Sally’s mother, Ella Gordon Smith Valentine, an avid gardener and artist. “I picked up my love of art and appreciation of color from my mother,” Ellington says.
One of her mother’s most treasured works was painted by noted landscape artist Mary Page Evans and is on display in the Ellingtons’ family room. The work was commissioned as a triptych of the garden at the family’s Virginia Beach home. Treasured by all three of her children, the family decided to divide the triptych into its three parts so that all could enjoy the work.
The artist’s joyful landscape filled with bright garden colors encapsulates all that the home’s design represents for its owners: an homage to family, joy, color and light.