Behind the Brand

If a place can embody the spirit of the people who live and work there, Morven Park in Leesburg is the embodiment of peace, solitude and thoughtfulness, an oasis of calm in an ocean of change and construction.

If one man could be the soul of that place, it would be the executive director, Will O'Keefe. O'Keefe has held the position at Morven Park for the past 16 ½ years, giving up life on his family's 400-acre, circa 1938 homestead in Fauquier County to take over stewardship of the 1,000-acre Leesburg historic park, helping also to usher in the most intense period of restoration the property has ever seen.

O'Keefe grew up around a farming life, raising colts and selling yearlings as fox-hunting mounts. He was an active equestrian and has been involved with steeplechase racing since the '70s. Coupled with a degree in history, the executive director post at Morven Park was ideally suited to his skill set. "My knowledge there was a fit," he agreed. "When I came here in '93, I was giving up what I was doing there, but it was a great opportunity."

"The things I've done that I'm most proud of have to do with the history," O'Keefe said.

Morven Park's primary purpose was to commemorate the legacy of Westmoreland Davis through an endowment set up by his wife, Marguerite Inman Davis, to preserve the mansion and grounds. The property is held in trust by the Westmoreland Davis Memorial Foundation, Inc. for future generations to enjoy.

O'Keefe is leaving his own stamp on the property as a participant in this renovation. Over the past six years, the mansion has been carefully, meticulously restored, a process that has required an invasive gutting of the building to repair aging stucco and add state-of-the-art temperature control and heat suppression systems appropriate to a building with a past. "It's a place of cultural and historical significance," O'Keefe said.

There's still a lot of work that needs to be done, but most of it is cosmetic at this point. The house is in the last throes of its renovation, which has also included updating the plumbing and electricity. Most of the bathrooms are just for show, O'Keefe said. "We wanted to eliminate the risk of the pipes bursting and doing damage."

The fire suppression system also allays another major concern for O'Keefe and the rest of the staff at the park. "My greatest fear is fire," he said.

Aside from the steady ebb and flow of workers who pepper the mansion, along the back roads and paddocks of the park, dump trucks are moving earth in steady streams, trundling down Route 15 into the heart of the property to create several athletic fields and one polo field which also has mixed-use capabilities as an athletic field. "It'll take a couple of years for the turf to get established; it'll be a wonderful asset to the community," O'Keefe said. "I think we've made the property more accessible for the public. During the good parts of the year we've got at least one event at the property. We continue to have a heavy influence on equestrian events, but not all of that is related to horses."

As such, attending to the building and its surrounding acreage has been a labor of love, not only for himself, but his wife, Kathleen, and daughter Ashley. Like most of the staff who work at Morven Park, O'Keefe has been a resident on the 1,000-acre property, living in the executive director's house with his family. Since 1993, when his daughter was still a toddler, the family has lived in the little cottage house, just a short walk from the mansion's imposing shadow.

"The game plan was always to work here until my daughter got out of college," he said. She graduated from University of Virginia last spring. That same year O'Keefe's father passed away. He and his wife moved back to the family home, into the same house where O'Keefe was raised, and began the process of taking stock. Since then, he's been commuting to work from Fauquier County to the park. About mid-January, O'Keefe said, he'll cut his hours to part-time and start the transition process with the new executive director and new resident of the cottage. "I'll pursue other things," said O'Keefe.

Sitting at an antique table, three men - Ed Shihadeh, Hartoun "Arthur" Varoujanian and Varoujan "John" Varoujanian - compare notes about their shared history on a lazy Saturday afternoon at Shoes Cup and Cork Club in Leesburg. Watching the snow falling upon King Street through the shop window, each man looks about the space, pointing here and there at artifacts from a different time.

Shihadeh points up to one of the jugs on a high shelf.

"We think he made his own wine," John Varoujanian said, referring to the original owner of the shoe business, which has left its mark on the new coffee shop.

Within the realm of distant memory, this storefront in the center of old town Leesburg was the site of a small shoe manufacture and repair shop owned by Sicilian immigrant Vincenzo Raneri, who had first started making and repairing shoes here after World War I. When Arthur Varoujanian took over the space in 1973, there were still wine bottles in the cellar, nestled behind a chicken wire enclosure at the bottom of the stairs.

"So that's what it was for," Shihadeh says. Just days before, Shihadeh had poked his finger through the chicken wire and wondered about its origin.

From 1973 to 2006, the Arthur Varoujanian trademark was to tease some of his clients about the cheap shoes they brought in for repair. "They can buy for much better, so I don't want them to pay for nothing," he said. The Armenian-born Varoujanian came to the United States by way of Iran in 1971, worked for a year at a shoe store in Vienna, then bought the Leesburg store when Raneri went into a nursing home.