By MARKSCOLFORO

By MARKSCOLFORO

Rappahannock New* Staff Writer

Country Traditional Homes’ model home is two miles from a state highway—Route 626 to be exact— straight up a gravel driveway to the top of Red Oak mountain. For home shoppers who venture up Red Oak this weekend for an open house (1 p.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday), the view is magnificent, and the company offers a new alternative.

“Recreating the old is really the concept we’re trying to do,” according to company president Thomas J. Bryan. He might have added that flexibility is a nuyor component of his marketing strategy as well.

The model home, in which Mr. Bryan lives, is built with a traditional design, and with traditional touches, but from modem materials and it features with many of the modem conveniences today’s home shoppers have come to expect.

Mr. Bryan, whose company is based in Oakton, was looking for an older home, a country farmhouse, but he “couldn’t find an old house that was in this setting.” So he purchased most of what had been Alta Vista farm a few years ago, and put in a road straight to the top.

“Most of the old houses are right along the street. Also, for energy reasons, you never wanted to be this high up,” he said. Where he did find the charm of an old farmhouse, the costs of renovations were prohibitive.

So he and his partners devised the mix of modem materials with traditional appearance, and his Red Oak Mountain home is the company’s first completed home.

The modest-sized structure features 22 windows, but they are all state-of-the-art. “I never hear the wind,” he says with amazement. Several layers of insulation were designed into the building, including a wrapping of plastic.

Mr. Bryan and his designers adapted a floor plan that ignores the traditional formal-informal divisions of space in a home, and he increased