6/25/2007

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Colonial Has All the Right Connections Washington Post Nancy Trejos Walk past the horses and up the gravel path, and you might think the 7,500-square-foot Colonial is like any of the other farmhouses nestled against the Blue Ridge in the tiny village of Bluemont. What you find, though, is a high-tech house where the lighting, heating, air conditioning, security cameras, televisions and stereo system all operate through three strategically placed control panels. "It's very deceiving," said owner Joe Austin, chief executive of Government Marketing & Procurement, a Fairfax consulting firm. It was meant to be that way.  When Austin had the house built three years ago, he wanted it to look from the outside like all the other charming homesteads that dot the landscape around the western Loudoun County village.  Inside, though, he wanted his family to have all the domestic comforts of any other new luxury suburban house. "The whole idea was to have an old-world exterior and a new-world, high-tech interior," he said. Austin and his wife bought the land for $207,000 and spent about $800,000 on the house, which was built over 18 months by Graystone Homes of Culpeper, Va.  They have decided to sell it because they also own a home close to his job and are building another one in North Carolina. They asked $1.295 million when they put the Bluemont house on the market in late October but have since dropped the price to $1.265 million.  It is listed with Barbara Powell of Evers & Co. Real Estate's Bluemont office. On Whitehall Farm Lane, the house sits on 10.7 acres and has five bedrooms and 5-1/2 bathrooms. Other features include two laundry rooms, two master-bedroom suites, tubular skylights in the bathrooms to cut down on electricity bills, a pocket office in the kitchen and granite countertops not only in the kitchen but also in some of the bathrooms. The lower level has an exercise room, a bar, a playroom and a movie theater.  The second-floor master bedroom has the plumbing capability to add a breakfast bar.  The house has plenty of windows, a deck and 360-degree mountain views. But the real appeal is the "smart" house technology, a trend that emerged in the 1990s and has since been increasingly used in upscale homes. On a recent day, Austin demonstrated how it works.  He pressed a button on a small, white control panel in his kitchen, and a Marc Anthony song started playing.  Then he switched that off and pressed another button to activate the satellite radio. Yet another button produced a view of the front door.  The talking alarm system was meant to rival that of Redskins owner Daniel Snyder, but Austin conceded that he has not found much use for it.  "It's the country.  People trust each other," he said. From that control panel, he could activate music or control the termperature anywhere in the house. To make life easier, there are two other control panels, one in the basement and another in one of the master bedrooms. On the lower level is a closet where all the machines - including a DVD player, a music computer that holds 1,000 CDs and the high-definition television box - are hooked up to one another and wired to the control panels.  "The brains of the house, " Austin said as he pointed to the machines, neatly stacked on a shelving system. Whoever buys the house will get it all. "Every kind of machine you need is right here," Austin said.