From an early age, Julie Kline Dixon would cover her school notes with sketches of floor plans. And although it was untested in college, the idea of architecture was one she just couldn't shake. Find out how making space for people is often about much more than the structural components.
Had Dartmouth offered a course of study in architecture, guest Julie Kline Dixon may have taken it. At an early age, she would cover her school notes with sketches of floor plans and seemed drawn to the field. She had sat through one day of the sole architecture course she saw offered, but dropped the course when she realized it was mostly focused on the structure of bridges and that didn’t appeal to her. When, as a history major, she approached graduation, she didn’t have an idea of what she was going to do. Still, she couldn’t shake the idea of architecture. She found a pre-professional program in architecture and design the summer after graduation and finally felt at home. She worked at a small firm in Cambridge and decided to apply to architecture school, which she did at UVa with an emphasis on historic preservation.
At the same time, she met her husband and committed to a life with him on a farm in rural Virginia. As such, she needed to figure out how to make a life in architecture fit into that reality. She realized, in time, that she could marry the two and build a successful practice focused on rural residential projects while raising her own growing family from her farmhouse. Taking the time to listen to the rhythms of farm life, she began incorporating that into her approach to making spaces for others.
In this episode, find out from Julie how making space for people is often about much more than the structural components…on ROADS TAKEN...with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode's Guest
Julie Kline Dixon is founder and partner of Rosney Company Architects in Charlottesville, Virginia, specializing in beautiful rural residential work. She lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere Virginia with her husband and their three feral (but now well grown) children.
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Julie Kline Dixon: Controlling people's experience and how they feel when they're in a different place has always been fascinating to me. There's such an interesting need for people to become more aware in their space and what it does to them. And I think that creating spaces that feel right for the people that are in them is super interesting.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: From an early age, Julie Kline Dixon would cover her school notes with sketches of floor plans. And although it was untested in college, the idea of architecture was one. She just couldn't shake. Find out how making space for people is often about much more than the structural components on today's Roads Taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
I'm here today with Julie Kline Dickson. And we are going to talk about architecting a life and just letting it go with the flow. So, Julie, thank you so much for being here.
JD: I'm delighted to be here. This is so fun. It's like podcasts therapy.
LJR: It is podcast therapy. That's why I do this. Are you kidding? This is my weekly therapy session and figuring out who I want to be.
So, we're going to get to who you are by way of two questions. And they are, when we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
JD: Well, I've listened to so many answers of these questions now, since I've been diving into your podcast and I hope I'm the same person, maybe a better version of myself than I was when I arrived at Dartmouth. And then when I left Dartmouth…but I will say that when I was at Dartmouth, I think I was a person who was just really excited to be in college and to be at Dartmouth specifically. I think I mistakenly considered myself quite an academic because somehow I had squeezed through the admissions cracks. So I kind of built up a narrative around myself that may not pan out. And when I was leaving college, I had no idea who I wanted to be. I remember like literally senior week calling my dad and saying so what do I do now? And my dad paused on the other end of the line and said, I think that's for you to figure out. [LJR: Good dad. Good dad.] So I don't have great answers to either one of those questions, but I will say that when I tried to figure out when I was leaving Dartmouth who I was, which I think is kind of swirling around the topic of what do you want to do professionally: Architecture, and I don't really mean design, I mean architecture is the only thing that I had always consistently been interested in since I was in elementary school. I drew houses, I think like a lot of people did. Built houses out of mud in the backyard, daily. And if you look at my school notes from, you know, elementary school on through, it's all just full of floor plans. You know, like scratched over my notes on the Aeneid or chemistry were just like house floor plans. So I think in a lot of ways, architecture was the only interest that I couldn't shake. And I had no idea whether I was good at it or had the chance to do it.
LJR: ‘Cause we couldn’t give you any of that. Was there maybe a history, an art history class? What was the closest thing?
JD: Yeah, so…yeah, I was incredibly intimidated by the idea of architecture because I knew so little about it. And Dartmouth did offer a class in architecture, which I went to one day of, and then I left and never went back because it was all on bridge construction. And I can't describe to you how little I'm interested in bridge construction. It would be impossible for me to want to do anything having to do with the structure of bridges, ever. So I went to one day and I'm sure it was a riveting, wonderful class for people who were more interested in structure than I am. So I had no idea. Luckily, there is this incredible program at Harvard, at their graduate school for design there, for people just like me. And it's a summer program where you can go and they give you a broad brush introduction to architecture. So I schlepped all of my belongings down to Boston and did, I don't know if it was a month or six weeks or something, course in architecture at the GSD with this collection of kids from all over the county, identical to me just thinking we can't really shake this architecture thing, but we have no idea what it is. It was incredibly cool. Intimidating. Yes. But I got to understand what life as an architect might look and feel like and what that meant for me intellectually, physically, because you're drawing and building and things a lot. And obviously didn't have a chance to do much of that at Dartmouth. I wasn't building balsa wood models. So. I did that. And then I got a job for an architect in Cambridge for a couple of years to see if I liked the whole atmosphere. And I did. So I just kind of dipped my toes in and then kept moving forward.
LJR: Yeah. So moving forward though, requires going back to school and you'd already been out some, but now you knew this was the thing. [JD: Yeah.] So was that a painless process or how does that work?
JD: No. It was incredibly painful, but I mean, like everything you just said. In the middle of that, figuring out that I wanted to go to architecture school, I maintained a little bit of interest in historic preservation. I was a history major at Dartmouth. So I narrowed my search primarily to architecture schools that offered a certificate in historic preservation. And I also had not given up entirely on a save the world agenda. So I went for almost a year to an NGO in South Africa. And worked with their, what they called the Appropriate Building Technologies Department. This is going to make me sound much cooler than I am, but we lived in this hut in the middle of Zululand and worked with the women who were really in charge of the construction down there, building sustainable soil blocks for building construction. Yeah, it's really cool. So ultimately, I ended up at UVA where they had a lot of sustainable architectural practice instruction, as well as historic preservation.
And it just so happened that my now husband also is living in Virginia, so that made it a very easy decision to come back south [LJR: Nice.] and go to school there three and a half years. They weren't kidding around. Yeah.
LJR: Is that typical? I don't even know.
JD: If you have no architecture background. It's totally difficult.
LJR: Okay. And when you were in Cambridge, was that a firm that specialized in residential or…?
JD: That firm did everything from, you know, an addition to a house all the way to art centers and schools. It was a husband, wife team. There are no longer married, but. Are both brilliant architects and ran a very dynamic office full of very engaging people who showed me that the chops it took, I guess, intellectually to follow this pursuit because when they were, for example, they started out by designing this Waldorf school. And while that sounds, you know, interesting, what became just on a, in a design way, it became clear that to design something like a Waldorf school involved, so many different parts of your brain, because you had to understand the pedagogy of Rudolf Steiner and the Waldorf approach. And you had to understand and embed yourself in the community surrounding not just the school, but the area and then you had, on top of that, blend those intellectual understandings with the physical environment of the school and the scale of children versus adults and what the whole day feels like. So it felt like the most engaging thing for all different parts of your brain. And that firm in particular was really good at that. They were high level of designers, very well thought of. Even internationally, they'd worked all over the world really. So it was, it was inspirational. It was inspirational. And it was a small firm, which was neat, great personalities. It was, it made me feel excited about getting into this field.
LJR: Yeah. And then having that international experience with a whole different level of intellectualizing your relationship to the earth and power dynamics and society and all those things. So when you're then in a classroom, how are you kind of integrating all of those things that you've experienced into this vision of “What kind of architect am I going to be?”
JD: Yeah. Good question. Well, I think there were a lot of questions in that question.
LJR: Ok. Unpack it. Let's unpack it.
JD: I guess if the, what kind of architect am I going to be? Question implies that I had total freedom to establish that. [LJR: Right.] And by the time I was out of architecture school, I was already married. We got married that end of second year of school. So I've spent my third year married, living in an apartment in between my husband's family business and school, and knew that after graduation, I was going to live on a farm in the middle of nowhere. So I had already, you know, set out for and agreed to this life that was totally isolated. There was one architect about 25 or 30 minutes south of where our farm was. And to be an architect, you actually have to practice under a licensed architect for three years to gain your own, to even gain eligibility for your own licensure. There's a lot of barriers to entry in this field. So I had to beg for a job from the only architect in a 50 mile radius so that I could learn from him what I needed to know to be able to practice or to even be eligible to practice. So I got out of school and felt a little more scrappy. I'm still going to make this architecture profession work, even though I had fully bought into the vision of a farm life in the middle of nowhere. So it was about putting together the pieces that were available to me.
LJR: Yeah. So. Wow. So yet another layer of experience with this local…he'd probably been there forever. He knew everyone, all of that and designing for a certain, if not aesthetic, a certain way of living, right?
JD: Yeah, totally. So I worked for him for a couple of years. And then for my final year of training actually went off on my own and hired essentially, or partnered with, a licensed architect and started our own firm to finish my training under a different umbrella. And that was because in the first couple of years, I realized how hungry people were out in the country or you know, really underserved areas, for architecture and design and professional services. So people were approaching me pretty early on when I got there. You know, I want to, I have an old house on the middle of this, you know, 400 acre farm and we need a new kitchen and a new master bedroom or whatever it was. And so, organically, all of a sudden I had enough work that I could practice on my own and partnered with a guy in Charlottesville who had been a summer intern boss of mine. So that worked out pretty nicely because we knew each other. I think he was looking to go out on his own. And so we had enough work that that made sense. So little bit risky, definitely a few years of just working out of the living room. You know, back when they had like the big desktops. So it took up half the living room and giant architecture screens and cobbled together enough experience that we could really establish, you know, what's now a thriving residential practice. But what, it's, what I think that we do best in our practice now, I think that my whole baptism into country, rural living and frankly, my background in historic preservation teed us up to understand rural design better than a lot of people who haven't lived it, if that makes sense.
So I understand the flow of life in the country. I understand that, you know, you want a screen door to slam a lot of times a day as kids are going in and out. I understand, you know, where the chickens need to be relative to the house so that you're not deafened by the rooster in the morning. It's kind of like all these rhythms of my life in the country led me to a real practical and physical understanding of design for these farms and what's now, you know, the Charlottesville area, estates, bigger pieces of property. So it's developed into quite an interesting design practice that I'm incredibly grateful for, but it has been slow in the making and evolved.
LJR: Yeah. It sounds like you've done your own home projects, too. [JD: Oh yeah.] What was your farm like before and after? And, and you're not divorced yet, so that sounds good.
JD: It’s amazing. So we bought this house before I was out of architecture school and it's an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, Virginia. There's nothing spectacular about it architecturally, except that it, it has this feeling of real solidity, for lack of a better word. It has a feeling that is very grounded. It is a complete lack of ostentation. Trim details that are really typical of the early 1800s in Virginia that are very substantial looking, but really it's a house that feels like home. However, it had one bathroom that might've been put on in the fifties and a kitchen. And when we bought the farm and got its first real estate assessment, the house was valued at something like $15,000 if that tells you anything. It was pretty banged up, pretty banged up. So we did a renovation of that debrief some new life into it and put an addition on it. And of course, because I'm me, I'm tinkering with it constantly,
LJR: Still to this day.
JD: Yeah. There's always something going on. And my worst client by a mile without comparison is my husband. Full-stop period, hardest client ever listen to a thing I say.
LJR: Well, Julie, I want to kind of go touch back on this little throwaway comment you made earlier about no interest in bridges and the structural element. And of course, you're dealing with structural element all the time. You even are using those words of solidity and all of this, like that matters. But I also know you were social chair of your sorority, and I'm just wondering if you see the parallel between like, not finding the structure piece all that interesting and you just talked about where the chickens should be and the slamming door and all of those things are really about our social connections and the way that we move in the world. And yes, people move over bridges, but they just want it to be safe. It's really the design piece of a life and a community. Talk to me about your philosophy there. Or what that brings up for you.
JD: I think it's really funny that you were able to find out that I was social chair.
LJR: I have my yearbook still, so…
JD: I think you touch on a really interesting part of the practice. And if I was to criticize. Practice of architecture as a whole, I would say that may be some practitioners are less focused on the actual inhabitants or how people live in their environments and too focused on either the structure or the design. It's a little bit a prima donna field and I am definitely more interested in how people live in the space, how they move through it and where they are and where the light is in the morning and where it is in the afternoon and where the people are at those different times a day to access that light. So I think that's an interesting point. And I think the older I get, the more I'm circling back to not just doing this for other people and creating places of connection, but owning the fact that I think connection, like you picked up on originally, one of the most important things to me—professionally or outside of the profession, you know, I think so many people have talked on this podcast, you know, because like I said to you before, I've been listening to all of them. I love them. So many people have been talking about the academic experience at Dartmouth. And I do remember trying to pretend, like I said, like I was really academic and having like wonderful afternoons deep in the stacks feeling really smart. But what I really remember and what is Dartmouth’s most lasting gift are the people; there's no comparison. And the, the people in my life today that are the people that show up every time are my friends from Dartmouth. You know, I got a random message yesterday from someone out of the blue that just said, you okay? I mean, nothing is wrong. I didn't know. But it's that kind of mindfulness and deep connection to people that is irreplaceable. So in some ways I loved my time in the stacks, but then in other ways I feel like why did I waste my time in the stacks for 10 days? Right. I should've just been back focusing on my social chair.
LJR: But Julie, wait, wait, wait. So one thing that you said earlier is that you had this vision of yourself as an intellectual and you really weren't. And then you tell the story about seeing this firm in Cambridge, having to intellectualize everything and you continue to do that. And I think you're selling yourself short when you keep saying you're not because you are an intellectual and it clearly means something to you, but I think we apologize so much. And just want to confirm that you are.
Sometimes I ask people, you know, the college aged Julie, what she might think about where you've landed now. But I'm even more interested in that elementary, Julie who's writing floor plans on her essays because I don't know, was it at that point about structure? Or, or do you think you knew, like this is a way that I can be a part of people's everyday living? I don't, I'm just wondering how far you can think back about that.
JD: Interesting. I do think that there was an element of structure that has always driven me, that interests me. But I think that more than that, it might be about making spaces, if that makes sense. And that is about how you feel when you're in a space. You know that there's a reason why when you walk into a church, there's a really low space that you walk into to compress your vision before you walk into the big space, right? There's a reason there's a narthex and then the church and that whole process of controlling people's experience and how they feel when they're in a different place has always been fascinating to me.
It's interesting how people can be out of touch with how they feel and that when they're in a space, your rational brain tells you that something's beautiful or your rational brain tells you that something feels right. But it takes a lot of thought to feel like, you know what may be the 20 foot vaulted ceiling in my bedroom makes me feel cold and lonely because there shouldn't be so much air above me. You know? [LJR: Right.] There's such an interesting need for people to become more aware in their space and what it does to them big is definitely not always better. And I think that creating spaces that feel right for the people that are in them is super interesting. That's going to be different for everybody, right? I have clients that have very strong opinions in all different directions and for the most part they're all right, because they know how they want to live. And I am just a shepherd to construct what their lifestyle, the best possible place for their lifestyle. But it is fascinating to me how you bring people together, how you provide them separation. All of that is deeply interesting, like psychologically and architecturally.
LJR: So Julie, I love that concept of making space. But there's another connotation to that, which is making space in your life for a career in architecture when you had this vision of farm life, which also meant family life and all of that. So how was the balancing act? Talk to me about making that kind of space.
JD: The discussion about career choice relative to family planning is nowhere near robust enough. And when I went out on my own and started that firm with my still partner today a long, long time ago, one of the primary drivers for that was that I was pregnant with our first child. And so I knew that showing up to a nine to five job every day in Farmville, Virginia was unsustainable. It just, there's no way in this world that I was going to be happy leaving the farm and all my stray dogs and my new baby to go, you know, make blueprints. I had to reach out and go out on my own to make it work. And for whatever reason, as much as I wanted to stay home with the kids, I was not willing to give up my career path. There was something that felt so essential to continuing to work to me that I was not willing to give it up. And I wanted it all. I mean who doesn't? And so what you end up getting is 50% of everything, as everyone knows, you're not, you know, you don't, there is no such thing as having it all, but I worked hard to craft a situation where I could be flexible. And so did that mean a lot of early mornings and a lot of late nights so that I could spend the waking hours with the kids? Absolutely. But architecture, unbeknownst to me at the time that I chose it, provides that kind of flexibility. And that's what people don't talk to you about. Right? How many lawyer friends do you have that cannot practice law because there is no space in that field for the kind of flexibility that other fields provide? And I'm not saying it was easy in architecture, but because it's project-based work and because, well, certainly now with everything networked together, flexibility is improving. But I hope that when our daughters are making those choices, they know more about what they're getting into. You know, I know surgeon friends and other ones who have had to work very hard to find an avenue in their field that gave them the kind of flexibility they wanted to maintain their career and have a family. And these discussions are, are so limiting right now. Not only is it an either or you either work or you stay home, but I think we need to dive into more complexity on what's out there for people who want to do both in some capacity, even if it's not full-time at both. So career-wise, it felt like treading water. For a lot of years while all three kids were born. But because I tread water, I was in a place where the firm could pick up steam when the kids were in school and I had more flexibility mentally and physically to jump on it. So it, that treading water paid off, but those were a little bit hard years to figure out how to navigate all those different things. So that's an important part of my path down the practice of architecture that has paid off because that I could be home more than I was away.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. And so you've, I mean, talk about how you make people feel...I'm sure just your being around changes the way that you’re little ones at the time, but now bigger ones have moved through their spaces.
JD: Maybe, maybe, I mean, they were like feral animals because we were out on this farm and I wouldn't, I wouldn't change a thing about it. Like I said, in the beginning I bought into the vision of farm life, even another thing, I think maybe I'm just incredibly obstinate because not only did I zero in, on architecture as a young kid, but I also zeroed in on farm life. You know, my grandparents lived on farms. We did not, I was in a suburban neighborhood in Tennessee, but my grandparents lived on farms and I've found them to be the most enchanting environments ever. And meanwhile, they were not, these were like dirt farmers in rural Tennesse. [LJR: Hard-working…] They were not enchanting at all. There were like pigs in pens and, you know railroad tracks coming right through. But I found them absolutely enchanting. And so I loved the vision of not only living on a farm, but raising a family on a farm. And I think my kids gave me a lot more than I gave them because they were like wild animals. There's nothing spectacular about our farm, like I said, it's a very simple old house and it has two creeks on either side of it. And they spent probably 65% of every day at the creek. I mean, there's no limit to the number of things that they did down there from damming it up to building full structures. I mean, my son, before he left for boarding school had built a full structure with like a concrete foundation and a roof and all that. But there were years where they, you know, spent the night in the little teepees that they built by the Creek. And it was everyday inspiration because they were, so it was so funny to see what they would come up. I kind of thought it was going to be me giving them something like, oh, look, there's this neat farm that you can pay in. And instead it all came back and washed over me because they just brought so much out of their own imagination to the table every day.
LJR: I am just so super happy that you shared this with us. It gives us new insight, I think, into all our spaces. But it was just lovely walking down this path with you. So thanks so much, Julie.
JD: Thank you so much.
LJR: That was Julie Kline, Dixon, founder, and partner of Rodney company architects in Charlottesville, Virginia, specializing in beautiful rural residential work. See her gorgeous portfolio at Rodney architects. That's R O S N EY.com. She lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere, Virginia, with her husband and their three feral, but now well grown, children. Just as Julie makes space for people to live and be comfortable. We hope we do the same for our guests. Thanks so much for listening, following rating and reviewing so that others can find us and make themselves at home with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on future episodes of Roads Taken.