Tucked quietly in Windsor Farms sits a curious host for the May
@modernrichmond tour—a house as storied as the woman who built it. Designed in the 1980s in a decidedly Palladian spirit, it was home to Anne Byrd Sloan, an interior designer of note and a descendant of Virginia’s Byrd family.
Before relocating just down the street, Sloan lived nearby in a stately brick residence. As the story goes, this second house was conceived as something of an escape—an elegant exit strategy during the unraveling of her marriage. True or not, it feels entirely in keeping with her legend.
And what a legend it was. The dramatic, almost theatrical "Dynasty" checkerboard foyer once set the stage for one of her birthday parties, where guests arrived to find a closed coffin… only for Sloan herself to spring up and declare, with perfect timing, that she was “still here.” Other stories—whispered, of course—hint at a rotating cast of young male MCV students in the basement apartment, where rent may not always have been paid in cash.
While the neoclassical interiors and architectural details are now gone, the home has undergone an extensive—and much-needed—renovation by its current owners. A path behind the house leads down to the famed and very exclusive Quarry Club, once described to me as “the type of place where blue-blooded women in dry-rotted swimsuits puff on Parliaments, sip martinis, and nibble cucumber sandwiches while water moccasins gently hiss from the banks.”
But behind the wit and spectacle was a more complicated life. Sloan struggled with alcoholism, a battle that ultimately shaped her later years. The house passed to her son, who lived there for some time before meeting a similarly tragic fate.
I never had the chance to meet her, but she lingers—one of those singular Richmond characters who feels almost too vivid to be real, and entirely impossible to forget.
