Refreshing an 1830s Virginia Farmhouse Without Erasing Its History

By Elena Vasquez

Melissa Colgan and Daniel Schned bought a 1,200-square-foot, 1830s farmhouse in Sperryville, Virginia, in 2023. The property also includes a barn that once housed the county doctor’s horse.

Sperryville has 350 residents and sits in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, minutes from Shenandoah National Park. Colgan is a Washington, DC-based designer at Melissa Colgan Interiors. She grew up in the Midwest and moved to DC with Schned in 2016. They spent their early years and weekends exploring the countryside.

Colgan said, “One of the areas we fell in love with is Rappahannock County,” describing the county’s scenic pastures, rolling hills and grazing cows. She added, “It feels a world away from DC.”

After the couple eloped at The Inn at Little Washington in 2020, they began looking for a vacation home. In 2023, they found a listing for an 1830s farmhouse and barn that had served as the county doctor’s home and office. Colgan said, “It’s a very special house in Sperryville because it’s where the doctor saw all his patients in the early 1900s.”

What did the renovation change?

The house began as a single-room log cabin in the 1830s. A barn and second story followed in the 1890s, then another addition arrived in the late 1990s. Colgan found much of the original fabric intact. “A lot of the original details were still there,” she said. “We just wanted to freshen things up a bit.”

Colgan hired Washington, DC architect Alexander Smith of Mortar & Thatch. Their shared aim was to make the house work again without making it look new. Smith said, “The thing we aligned with from the very beginning is we didn’t want it to feel like a new renovation,” and added, “Maybe we slapped on some paint or got new countertops, but we didn’t want it to seem like we were implanting foreign ideas.”

The main intervention upstairs split the single bedroom. Colgan was pregnant with her now two-year-old daughter at the time. “We basically took down the walls of the one bedroom, made a middle bedroom for our daughter, then eked every inch we could in order to fit a king bed and built-in closets in our room,” she said. The result is a quaint, colorful two-bedroom plan, with dappled light through street-facing windows.

How did color and furniture define the rooms?

Colgan and Schned spend most of their time in the downstairs living room, which retains its 1830s chink log siding. “The room is so soulful. You just walk in and take a deep breath,” Colgan said. “The thing that came to mind early on was a little Russian country house or dacha. When we first saw the listing, we were in Switzerland, so that was the original seed for the design.”

Original pine floors and the log walls supplied a warm, deep base. Colgan chose ochres, reds and blues, then echoed the surrounding terrain through botanical and floral-patterned fabrics. “We’re surrounded by mountains and flora and fauna, so I wanted the house to reflect that as well.”

Colgan assembled old, new and local furnishings. “We didn’t really have anything for this house because the style is so different from our city home, so we had to start from scratch,” she said. Her collection includes:

• A 1920s French fruitwood dining table.
• An early American rocking chair salvaged from Ruckersville Antiques.
• A BDDW sofa purchased at auction and stored by Colgan before moving into the living room.

Colgan upholstered the BDDW sofa in Décors Barbares’ lively Roses Tchékhonine print, which places winged butterflies over cobalt and crimson flowers.

How did the service areas change?

The mudroom and laundry sit near the side entrance. Colgan made both more welcoming and useful with cupboards dressed in hay-colored gingham skirts. In the kitchen, Colgan and Smith reconfigured appliances and added cabinets and open shelving to improve storage and traffic flow. “We were able to inch out so much in such a small space,” Smith said.

What did the barn contribute?

The doctor kept his horse in the barn for house calls across Rappahannock County. The previous owner renovated the structure with a kitchenette, an open living room space and sleeping quarters. “The barn had pigs in it up until the last owner, and he renovated it,” Colgan said. “I’ve since layered in a lot of fabrics and antiques.”

Colgan also called the first Thanksgiving a stress test: “That first Thanksgiving was a real stress test,” she said.

Can modern life fit without erasing the past?

Colgan concentrated her creative work on the farmhouse rather than the barn. “A lot of times people come into these old houses and instead of trying to think carefully about how to make modern life function there, they blow out walls and make everything open,” she said.

Her approach preserved weathered planks that had patinated over time and sunlight moving across the wavy panes of 19th-century windows. “They are very much not energy efficient,” she said, “but they are absolutely beautiful.” For Colgan and Schned, the next test is keeping the 1,200-square-foot, two-bedroom plan workable as their daughter grows.