Kluge Chapel by David Easton
Charlottesville, Virginia

"The chapel has a wonderful south sun that comes in during the day," says architect and designer David Easton of the building he designed for Patricia Kluge on the grounds of her winery. The chapel is sited so that the sun shines through at just about 4 p.m., making the space glow. "It's magical," says Easton, whose practice is based in New York.

Set in a glade overlooking vineyards, the chapel is designed in the English "Gothick" style (an 18th-century reinterpretation of the Gothic of the Middle Ages), to fit into a larger estate, which includes the manor known as Albemarle House, a log cabin, greenhouses, an early 19th-century guesthouse, and a farm shop. But the chapel is also isolated in that it is a 10-minute walk "across hill and dale," says the architect.

Easton turned to historical sources for inspiration, particularly 18th-century English artist and draftsman Batty Langley, author of several books and designer of what Easton terms "extraordinary pieces of Gothic architecture."

The chapel is constructed of a pink-hued Virginia brick in homage to its setting, as well as textured cathedral glass, stone, and marble. The walls are a stucco paint, "to make it look old," says Easton. The furnishings were copied from a charming Gothick chapel in Shobdon, Wales, and made in England. Statues of Mary and Joseph were carved in Italy, and the ceiling was painted by Graham Rust, an English muralist. Everything in the chapel, except the early 19th-century organ, is new but designed to have the patina of age.

This is a Catholic chapel, which means that it faces east and includes all the liturgical elements of the faith. But it is at Christmas or Easter, or during a wedding, when worshippers gather, Easton says, that it all comes together -- architecture, art, music, history, family -- to bring "a totality to the architectural design."

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.

The owner of this secluded chapel in Alligator Creek, Florida, turned to Savannah architect John Deering, known for his skill with historical forms, because he wanted a building that used authentic materials. In this case, the material was tabby -- a tactile mix of lime, oyster shell, sand, and water that was used prolifically in Colonial times along the southeast Atlantic Coast. Today, says Deering "it's not easy to get the mix correct."

The chapel design borrows "bits and pieces" of architecture from the 18th and 19th centuries. The front doorway and the quatrefoil windows in the gables are copied (as was much of Kluge Chapel) from books published by Batty Langley. The side windows imitate ones from Savannah's Unitarian Chapel, built in 1851. The moldings and castellated details are of a cast brownstone, and the flooring is made of limestone from the Negev Desert.

Deering's experience as a preservationist served him well here; instead of restoring an older building, he was reconstructing historical architecture from scratch. The chapel is Gothic Revival, with details Deering drew from field research. "I went to two different cemeteries in Savannah to study the details on mausoleums," he recalls. He fitted the chapel with Bavarian glass and a 19th-century pipe organ rescued from a church. The organ was made in Utica, New York, circa 1875, and there's a French cross from the same era. A visitor to the chapel likened the experience to coming upon a remnant of some lost plantation, where all was gone but this tiny little structure.