The capacious mansion of Janelia was completed in 1936 for correspondent and author Robert L. Pickens and his wife, Vinton L. Pickens, artist and civic leader. It was designed by Philip Smith of Smith and Walker of Boston, and is significant as one of Virginia’s latest representatives of the country house ideal fostered in England and spread to America in the late 19th century. The Loudoun County property retains many of the essential ingredients of a proper country estate—sprawling manor house, service building, and scenic vistas. With irregular massing and complex hipped roof, Janelia is a blend of the Normandy Manor style popular in the 1920s and the Modernistic tenets of the 1930s. The house is remarkably unchanged, making it a document of the life style of the affluent just prior to World War II.