Virginia House

Virginia House is a Tudor Revival mansion at 4301 Sulgrave Road in the Windsor Farms neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia, overlooking the James River. The diplomat Alexander W. Weddell and his wife Virginia built it in 1925 using materials salvaged from the 16th-century Priory House in Warwickshire, England, which were shipped to Virginia and reassembled, along with architectural elements drawn from other English manor houses including Sulgrave Manor and Wormleighton Manor; the house was finished just months before the stock market crash of 1929. It includes a great hall, a dining room with a Portland stone fireplace, a second-floor library with a hidden passage, ten bathrooms, and 8.8 acres of gardens laid out by the landscape architect Charles Gillette. After the Weddells died in a train accident in 1948, the house became the permanent headquarters of the Virginia Historical Society, which still operates it as a house museum largely preserved as it was during their occupancy.