09/01/2026
Our photographer stood in this room a long time before he started shooting.
He told us he could not shake the feeling he had been here before. Not vaguely. He knew this room. He just could not place how, and he was fairly certain he had never set foot in this house.
So he called his grandmother, who lives close by, and asked if she had ever brought him here as a kid. She said no, she did not think so. Then she asked who used to own it.
He told her the name. Halterman. Ben's grandmother.
She got quiet, and then she said: I went to a baby shower in that house in the early 1980s. I sat in that room and could not stop looking at it, and I came home and told your grandfather we had to build one like it.
And they did. Not an architect and an addition. They finished out their garage, the least romantic room in any house, and turned it into a den with the beams and the brick and the fireplace, modeled on this one.
That is the room our photographer grew up in. It is where his grandfather still dresses up as Santa every year with all the grandkids lined up in front of the fire. It is where his own children go now.
He had been in this room his whole life. Just not this one.
Ben's grandmother built something so good that a woman saw it one afternoon at a baby shower and carried it home with her, and more than forty years later her grandson walked in with a camera and felt it before he understood it.
That last photo is his grandfather, in that room, in front of that fireplace. Not this one. The other one.
104 Greenwood Rd, Staunton
5 bed | 2 bath | 1,825 sq ft | 0.45 acre | $380,000
Link in bio, or call or text Ben at 540-471-0111.
https://shenandoahvalley.nestrealty.com/properties/104-greenwood-rd-staunton-va-us-24401-681277
