Orange County
Sleepy Hollow Farm

16280 Blue Ridge Tpke. (Route 231)
 Gordonsville 22942.

Nestled in a hollow off Route 231, Orange County’s prettiest byway, Sleepy Hollow is a paradise of sorts. Beverley Allison, innkeeper with her daughter Dorsey Comer, moved to the house as a bride in 1950 and calls it "a poor man’s Montpelier, a humble little frontier house in the midst of all the estates." Expanded over the years, the house is beautifully but comfortably furnished and has a lived-in feeling. It is surrounded by lawns, woods and pastures. In front is a farm pond beside a gazebo, a dock that says "swim at your own risk" and, at our visit, a bunch of ducklings scurrying after their mother.

Beverley, an ABC News journalist turned Episcopal missionary, calls hers an organic house that’s still growing and evolving. The process continued with the conversion of a TV room into a sixth guest room with a queen bed, fireplace and jacuzzi and the enclosing of the adjoining terrace for a new TV room. The jacuzzi is "bowing to the trend," Beverley acknowledges, "even though this is a place for people not to lie in a bathtub but to go birding, to discover the wildlife, to smell the flowers."

Guests have plenty of space to spread out in a cozy living room, a beamed dining room and what used to be a country porch, now expanded into an enormous sun room with a showpiece dollhouse (Beverley provides a less precious one for the kiddies to play with). This is the setting for a breakfast of fruit compote, farm-fresh eggs (from Dorsey’s chickens) or pancakes, and extra-good coffee because the water comes from a deep spring on the property.

Accommodations include a main-floor master bedroom with a queensize canopy four-poster, dressing room, full bath and a stunning handpainted chest from the Orient. Others are the downstairs Squire Room with a queen bed and working fireplace and a large bathroom with whirlpool tub overlooking the pond. Upstairs is a small bedroom known as the Ghost Room, though the ghost has not been seen since the house was blessed. What’s called the children’s suite has two bedrooms connected by a bath. Just outside is the Chestnut Wood Cottage made up of two suites: the kitchen house, which obviously has a kitchen, and the older and smaller slave house. Each has a deck, a fireplaced sitting room with a pullout sofa and a bedroom and bath upstairs. A recent two-story addition to the kitchen house made room for a larger bedroom upstairs and a whirlpool tub room below.

Baskets of fruit and Virginia peanuts are in the rooms. Beverley and Dorsey serve refreshments, from tea to local wine, upon guests’ arrival.

Material excerpted from Inn Spots & Special Places / Mid-Atlantic, by Nancy and Richard Woodworth. Copyright 2003.

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