Unforgettable Rockhaven

511 Chesapeake Avenue, Newport News, Virginia

Where We Live: Rockhaven’s romantic history

wydaily.com/where-we-live/2017/11/30/weliv-where-we-live-rockhavens-romantic-history

Katelin HillNovember 29, 2017

Overlooking the Chesapeake Bay in Newport News stands a historic house built by a man inspired by a lost love. The story starts with Edward Patten, who originally built the home for his fiancé in 1909.

“He was an international businessman and he and his fiancé had traveled for several years in Europe,” the house’s current owner, Monty Spencer, said. “They loved the Tuscany region of Europe and they stayed there quite awhile.”

Once he was back in the United States, Patten bought a Connecticut shipyard. One day, he was surveying the land he’d purchased from a lookout tower. He spotted a mountain of river stones in one corner.

The river stones were ballast rocks, brought over on ships from Europe to help the boats keep their equilibrium. But many of the ships weren’t meant to be taken back to Europe, and thus were scrapped on site. Patten had the idea to put the rocks on barges and float them to his property on the Chesapeake Bay, where he’d build his future home.

Patten hired craftsmen from Italy to come work on the house, to give his fiancé a piece of Italian architecture here in coastal Virginia. The river rocks were a main feature of the home, and the house was later named Rockhaven.

In a tragic twist of events, Patten never lived in the home with his fiancé. Right before they were to wed, she was in a fatal accident.

The property changed hands a few times soon after his death. In 1918, doctor Joseph Buxton purchased it for his wife, who fell in love with the house. A prominent family, the Buxtons built the first hospital in the area, known today as Mary Immaculate Hospital.

Buxton’s daughter Elizabeth ended up marrying the father of renowned author-to-be William Styron. Styron is known for his work including “Sophie’s Choice” and “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” But his first book, “Lie Down in Darkness,” featured Rockhaven. The novel was highly controversial because it exposed everything going on at the time in Newport News society life.

“It was fiction, but everyone could put two and two together to know what scandalous activity was going on,” Spencer said. Styron was allegedly ran out of town after the book was published.

A. Louis Drucker bought the home in the 1940’s from Buxton. Drucker, co-founder of the property management company Drucker and Falk, bought the home for his love, Loraine.

Drucker’s special stamp on the home was a concrete pond, complete with flowers and fish in the backyard called “Loraine’s Garden.” It’s said that Loraine would sit on her favorite porch off the master bedroom and look upon her garden.

Like those who came before him, Spencer wanted his fiancé to have the home.

“We were looking for a house and my wife saw this one,” Spencer said. “Once she saw it, there was no turning back.”

They purchased the home about five years ago. At the time it had a lot of “deferred maintenance,” as Spencer describes it.

“Of course we were attracted to the obvious, like all the stonework,” Spencer said. “Construction doesn’t exist like this today at any price point. We went into this curing all the ills.”

A complete renovation had to be done, but now it’s been restored to its former glory. The couple replaced or upgraded the plumbing, electric, landscaping, irrigation system, appliances, HVAC, security system and much more.

Design choices were made to reflect the history of the home, from using Italian-inspired materials to carefully matching river rock to the originals in the front of the house where needed.

“We tried to make everything period-specific,” he said. “We wanted whatever we touched to end up going from being the weakest link to the strongest link.”

The most recent chapter of the home’s love story took place after Spencer and his wife, Nicole, moved in. They married right in the backyard, in Loraine’s Garden.

“The house just appeals to an emotional and visceral response,” Spencer said. “It’s irreplaceable.”