Moving from Ashburn to Purcellville: a home built for it
- Patricia Gallardo
- 6 minutes ago
- 6 min read
There is a conversation I have several times a year, usually in a Broadlands kitchen, usually with people who love where they live. The house has been good to them. The schools have been good to them. But the family has grown, or a parent is moving in, or the person who used to commute to Tysons three days a week now commutes twice a month — and suddenly the thing they want most is the thing eastern Loudoun cannot sell them.
Room. Quiet. A sky.
I want to be clear about what this post is. The home below is listed by my colleague Geri Deane of Hunt Country Sotheby's International Realty®, not by me. I am writing about it because it is the single best answer I have seen this year to that kitchen-table conversation, and because I think a number of families in Broadlands, Brambleton, and Lansdowne should know it exists.
16081 Purcellville Road sits on approximately three acres in western Loudoun County, about a half hour west of Broadlands on Route 7. It was custom-designed by Homes of Atlanta and completed in 2014. There is no HOA. And there is a screened porch that faces the Blue Ridge, which is the part I keep thinking about.
The trade you are actually making
When people in the 20148 talk about moving west, they usually frame it as a sacrifice. I would frame it as a swap, and it helps to name both sides.
What you give up: the Silver Line at Ashburn Station, the ten-minute run to Dulles, One Loudoun on a Friday night, and the Briar Woods pyramid. Those are real.
What you gain is less about square footage than about the shape of a day. The last stretch of Purcellville Road is gravel. The Appalachian Trail access at Bears Den is roughly fifteen minutes from the driveway. Purcellville's Main Street, the western terminus of the W&OD Trail, and the Saturday market are under ten minutes out. Hillsborough Vineyards, Notaviva, Bluemont Vineyard, Sunset Hills, Breaux, and Harvest Gap Brewery are the kind of close where you go on a Tuesday because the light is good — not the kind of close where you plan a Saturday around them.
That is the honest version. For some families it is a bad trade. For the ones who have already started driving out Route 7 on weekends and looking at the fields, it is the sign they have been waiting for.
A main-level in-law suite that changes the arithmetic
I have walked through a lot of homes marketed as multigenerational. Most of them mean a bedroom with a bathroom near it. This is not that.
The main-level suite here has its own kitchen — matching Thomasville cabinetry and granite — a full bath, and a separate living area. It is a genuinely self-contained residence attached to the main house, which is a meaningfully different proposition than a guest room. A parent can keep their own hours, cook their own breakfast, have their own front door in every sense that matters, and still be thirty feet from their grandchildren.
The build supports it in ways that are easy to miss on a first walk-through. The main level was designed for single-floor living: no-stairs entry, a ramp on the main level, wide doors and halls, a roll-in shower, grab bar reinforcement, and main-level laundry. An elevator shaft is already framed and in place for a future elevator. Someone thought about the next twenty years while the walls were still open, and that is not something you can renovate your way into later at any reasonable cost.
If your family is not at that stage yet, the suite reads just as well as a media room, an au pair suite, a home gym, or a landing place for a college student who keeps coming back.
The detached garage, and the apartment above it
This is the feature people talk about in the driveway on the way out.
The detached garage is heated and cooled, fitted with two hydraulic automotive lifts, and sized to hold up to approximately eight vehicles. It has its own half bath. It is not a storage building with ambitions — it is a working shop, and for a collector, a restorer, or anyone who has spent fifteen years doing brake jobs in a Broadlands two-car with the door open in February, it is close to the whole reason to move.
Above it is a finished one-bedroom apartment with a full kitchen. The furnishings convey with an acceptable offer. Between that apartment and the main-level suite, this property houses three households comfortably without anyone sharing a coffee maker.
There is also a 16-by-24-foot outbuilding styled to match the garage — currently used for storage, easily a studio, workshop, or fitness room.
No HOA
I say this as someone who lives in a master-planned community and genuinely appreciates mine. But if you have spent a decade submitting paint colors for approval, the absence of an architectural review committee is not a small line item. You can put in a pool. You can plant what you want. The acreage is board-fenced, the back yard is level and open, and the zoning permits chickens. Verizon Fios fiber is in, and the property runs on a well and a conventional septic system.
The porch, and the western sky
The screened porch faces west toward the Blue Ridge, and the practical consequence of that orientation is that the last forty minutes of daylight happen in front of you rather than behind your neighbor's roofline. In Broadlands, sunset is something you notice in the rearview mirror on Claiborne Parkway. Here it is the reason people stop talking mid-sentence.
Inside, the main level runs to formal living and dining rooms, a dedicated office, and a family room that opens to a vaulted kitchen with granite counters and GE Profile stainless appliances. Breakfast happens in a bay of windows over the back yard. Ceilings run over ten feet. Upstairs, three bedrooms each have an en-suite bath, and the primary suite has a soaking tub and a walk-in closet. Bradford pears line both sides of the driveway, which I understand is a considerable event in April.
The details
16081 Purcellville Road, Purcellville, VA 20132 (Hillsboro postal). Four bedrooms, four full and one half bath, approximately 4,081 square feet on approximately three acres. Built 2014. MLS# VALO2128076. Offered at $1,799,000.
Listed by Geri Deane, Hunt Country Sotheby's International Realty®, 703-615-4126. Geri's full listing post, with the complete photo gallery, is here: A Custom Purcellville Estate Built for Every Generation.
If you are thinking about the move
If you own in Broadlands, Brambleton, or Lansdowne and this is the first time the idea of moving west has felt concrete rather than theoretical, there are two conversations to have and they are separate.
The first is about this house, and that is Geri's. Call her.
The second is about your current home — what it is worth in today's 20148 market, what it would take to get it ready, and whether the timing works to sell and buy in sequence or you need a bridge. That one I am happy to have with you, with no expectation and no obligation. I have lived in Broadlands for years and I sell there every season, so I can tell you fairly quickly and fairly precisely what your equity picture looks like. Reach me at (703) 980-4594.
Some homes are a step up. This one is a step sideways into a different life, which is a bigger decision and, for the right family, a much better one.
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