The Blount Family Chapel is a memorial to one of Montgomery's most generous families, and it is designed, says architect Bobby McAlpine, "to be very permanent and real." Like most private chapels, it is small -- just 12 feet wide and 29 feet tall. "It is a combination of noble and humble gestures," says McAlpine.

It was commissioned by the late Wynton M. "Red" Blount, an inveterate Anglophile (who among other things built the theater complex for the Alabama Shakespeare Festival), as a Christmas present for his wife, Carolyn, who died earlier this year.

"I began to think about it and realized that those beautiful little Church of England churches were different from all others because the architects turned the entrance away, so you could enter without pretense," says McAlpine. "I just loved that idea. And the churches were so deeply romantic and always picturesque."

Working with McAlpine was Ruard Veltman, a staff architect who has since formed his own practice in Charlotte. Veltman began sketching, seeking out a design for a "quaint, charming, extremely humble building that you know is private because it seems almost forgotten," he says. Veltman did all the drawings for the chapel on a 10-foot linen roll, the way architects once did.

Once the design was set, McAlpine Tankersley architects built a scale model that became the Christmas present from Blount to his wife. "The roof came off so that you could look into it," recalls Veltman.

"Then came the task," McAlpine says, "of making it potent enough. The challenge was how low I could make the roof, how enormous I could make the slate, how narrow I could make the nave." The chapel is set into a slope so that half of the structure is underground; you can open the window and touch the earth. "I was going for the most perfect feeling -- the feeling that you're being held and you're grounded, and yet at the same time, you're flying," says McAlpine.