GREEN ACRES

Trading New York for the mountains of Virginia, influential fashion critic Cathy Horyn enlists architect David Bers to help conjure the flower farm of her dreams

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I had the name of my farm, Miniver—after the 1942 movie Mrs.

Miniver, which I always loved for its wartime story and English scenery—before I had the land, and I found the land quite by accident. I wanted to start a small flower farm near Charlottesville, Virginia, an area I knew from my early newspaper days, in the ’80s. Virginia had the advantage of kinder winters and taxes than New York, where I'd lived and raised a son, Jacob, in the Hudson River town of Garrison for 20 years. Those were good reasons to load the dog in the car and head south in the spring of 2015 to look for land, but that wasn’t all. Despite a lifetime of covering fashion, mostly for The New York Times and New York magazine, where I still work, and enjoying many glamorous locales, sometimes the place you know in your 20s is the one you call home. That's how I feel about Charlottesville and the green hills surrounding it. Or maybe I’m just a country person at heart.

By June, the hunt for Miniver wasn’t going well. I seemed to view only eyesores or land I couldn’t afford. Then, on a trip with my son and a friend of ours, I decided at the last minute to stop at a real estate office in nearby Orange. I asked the agent if he knew of anything for sale along a certain beautiful road that I remembered, a road I had been down many times with a guy I once knew. He said there was one property, but from his tone and description it sounded dismal. I decided to drive out anyway, curious to see the area again. The agent said to look for a sale sign. On the road the mountains opened up spectacularly. Grapevines and hay covered the hillsides. After several miles we veered onto a smaller road and, at a bend, we saw a broken-down house sitting on a small rise. Could that be the property?