All that stands of the 240-year-old Menokin house—once the Richmond County, Va., home of Virginia statesman Francis Lightfoot Lee—are two broken walls and a pair of crumbling chimney columns. The Menokin Foundation would like to change that: Restoring the manse, a National Historic Landmark, may be the key to raising the esteem of Lee. (Did you recognize him as a signer of the Declaration of Independence? No?) The one problem being, as the late founder of the Menokin Foundation told the Richmond Times-Dispatch, that “Virginia needs another house museum like it needs a hole in the head.”
That’s why Annapolis, Md.–based conservator John Greenwalt Lee and Winston-Salem, N.C.–based architect Charles Phillips want to turn it into an Apple Store (kind of). Greenwalt Lee and Phillips drew inspiration from the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York and approached the store’s designer, Tim Macfarlane of the London firm Dewhurst Macfarlane, about rebuilding the house with structural glass. Virginia Living tells the whole story.
TL;DR: The plan’s feasible, according to a 2007 study, and though funding and construction could take years, rebuilding a Georgian-style mansion with structural glass could open a window into 18th-century building techniques.