A Room With An (Expensive) View: Fancypants New Hotel Has 24-Hour Room Service, Creepy Robert E. Simon Mask

While we were focusing on the An Art and palpable lack of woonerf right outside, the fancypants JW Marriott at Reston Station opened its doors to guests last week.  We Restonians -- us lumpen proletariats, toiling away at our rapidly endangered government contracting jobs strapping bombs to dolphins -- are now the hosts of Virginia's ONLY JW Marriott, among the fanciest of the fancy Marriott hotel "brands."

"Every moment made exquisite," the hotel's website gushes, and we agree! For a high-end chain, the folks at Marriott really leaned into the Reston mystique. Its signature restaurant is called "The Simon," and it offers "a multi-sensory journey" (we assume one of the senses is taste, but then again, we're simple folk who usually stay at lesser hotel brands, ones where you can park right outside your front door and walk down a "breezeway" to get ice from a machine that sounds like a broken rock tumbler). Another amenity is the "Schar Bar," named after the folks who funded Inova's cancer center and offering the bourbons which were once made right down Sunset Hills from this august hotel.  Plus, as an added bonus, you can be creeped out inspired by this terrifying death mask breathtaking rendering of Robert E. Simon:

Yikes. Hopefully that glass frame will keep it from escaping and invading our nightmares. If not, those of us of a certain age can remember the first time we saw something similar:

But enough of the public spaces. What are the rooms like? Well, they have beds and whatnot, plus windows that offer this breathtaking view of our cutting-edge, Metro-adjacent developments:

Stunning. Let's see how affordable that million-dollar view might be. 

COMPUTER, ENHANCE:

Oof. People are going to have to clicky clicky on a lot of the fun WHO'S YOUR BABY'S DADDY ads on this filthy "web log" for us to be able to afford a night away, if by "away," you mean "right down the street with $45 hamburgers for room service," the end.

Here An Art, There An Art: Everywhere An Art Art: New Arts Confound Restonians, Or Maybe Just Us

Way back in Reston's Golden Age, when the Silver Line was still a dream we could only clap for, we would pore over the design documents and behold the breathtaking vision for Reston's 21st century future. And it was rad! 

BEHOLD, what might have been at the Wiehle Reston Metro Station, instead of a giant LCD screen showing fish and whatnot. You can sense the '80s vibes.

Clean. Edgy, in a tasteful pastel sort of way. Never happened for reasons known only to God and WMATA. But the second phase of the Silver Line did include a different An Art for the RTC Metro Station, which was completed last year. This An Art reflects a... different vision.

Behold "Ethos." No clean lines. No pastels. Something vaguely cyber-y? If only there was an explanation to help us comprehend this An Art! Oh, wait:

Completed in 2024, the design was inspired by the founder of Reston — Robert E. Simon — and the statement that “You can’t have a Utopia of one.” The artwork, inspired by these interactions, is multifaceted and thought of as a dialogue in which everyone can participate. Bates' design for the station can be seen as referencing artistic movements and philosophies such as Brutalism, Modernism, Wabi-Sabi, and Universal Constructivism, or as an echo of the biophilic character of Reston's history of natural and environmental integration, growth, and togetherness. It may also be experienced as a representation of emotional delight, as the "Play" from the "Live, Work, Play" maxim of Reston's founding vision.

IT MAY. To us, it looks like something that would be used on an album cover for some '90s grunge band. There's an old saying that the 1980s was basically a reboot of the 1950s and the 1990s was the same for the 1960s. So if the ought-teens were the '80s and the ought-twenties are the '90s, who knows what will be in vogue in just five years time? An homage to reality TV? Land wars in Asia? Green Day cover bands? The mind boggles.

But we digress. This An Art was nominated for a fancy award, but sadly, it lost to other An Arts with names like "Cloud Puncher" and "Elder Mother". But do those An Arts allow people to peer through them, metaphorically speaking, and see the monolithic earth-toned pillar of a Metro station totem sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb? WE THINK NOT.

Meanwhile, across town (or at least down Sunset Hills), another An Art was unveiled earlier this month. Called "Building Bridges," it is a replica of An Art in Venice, only instead of romantic sun-flecked canals navigated by singing gondoliers in striped shirts we have endless traffic crammed into one lane as cranes work to finish the fancy mauvescraper it sits in front of. BEHOLD:

We could have had woonerf in this very spot, but instead we got this scaled down version of An Art. Again, we are not bright enough to understand the meaning of this An Art without some blockquote. Oh, wait:

“I want this sculpture to spread love and to make us realize that, really, skin-deep we are all the same. It doesn’t matter where we come from or our background—it’s important to work together to bring the world together. There are so many wonderful, good-hearted people who need to work together to make this a better world. When we work together, humanity achieves greatness.”

True true, as the kids today might have said as recently as six months ago, before devolving into polyglot phrases such as "Skibidi." Anyhoo, expose yourself to your nearest An Art, we guess, the end.

Counting What Matters in Reston

Somehow, we missed the annual Reston Butterfly Count this summer. But thanks to a helpful Reston Association press release, we learned that while volunteers spotted plenty of different species, overall numbers were down. Sightings ranged from the European Cabbage White (which also happens to be a DRB-approved trim color) to the Huron Sachem Skipper (that abandoned floating dock), and the Common Wood Nymph (think closing time at one of RTC’s many fine watering holes). 

But we digress. Why should we only count the bugs flitting through our plastic-fantastic planned community? They don’t even pay HOA dues! Here are some other things we, as Right-Thinking Restonians, might consider keeping tabs on:

• The number of times the police helicopter circles over Reston. Airborne like the butterflies, but with a distinct soupçon of suburban suspicion.
• The number of Facebook and Nextdoor posts about the police helicopter circling over Reston. Grab some extra scratch paper for this one.
• The number of vowels in apartment and business names. BLVD, VY, SWTHZ, the late-lamented BGR (RIP)—you could count them on one hand.
• The number of fish swimming on the jumbotron at Wiehle Metro. Great for keeping the kids occupied while you try to remember if you parked on level G95 or G96. 
• The average indoor temperature in homes with Reston’s jet-age lake-cooled AC system. Bonus points for breaking triple digits!
• The number of green dots signifying open parking spaces in RTC garages. For extra fun, subtract the actual number of open spaces and order that many breadsticks at your favorite chain restaurant.
• The number of 90-degree angles in the new buildings rising near Wiehle Metro. You won’t need a lot of paper for this one.
• The number of walls meeting at 90-degree angles inside Reston’s 50-year-old homes. Another low number. Things improve with age—but don’t necessarily get more plumb.
• The number of golf balls sliced into the woods around Reston’s golf courses. If some folks have their way, that number may soon drop faster than the butterfly count, the end.

This post was originally published in the Reston Letter.

Vowel Movement: Consonant Explosion More Unnerving Than A Cold Plunge

Following in the footsteps of some of Reston's trendier, or at least blockier, apartment complexes, this vaguely Welsh-sounding business is currently under construction in RTC West, whatever that is. For those of us over the age of 27 and/or not goatee-adorned "brand consultants," this loosely translates to "Sweathouse" in English, and will apparently be a place where you can sit in an infrared sauna followed by a cold plunge to, wedunno, sweat all the vowels out of your system?

We've got a fever, and the only cure is more consonants!

We're old enough to have the name, like Proust's madelines, spontaneously remind us of some of our favorite TV sitcom characters:

Who among us didn't laugh along with the SWTHGZ, the end.

The DOGE Days of Summer

There's been a lot of talk about efficiency these days, but why does it have to stop with the gubmint? As the founding members of the Department of Cluster Efficiency (DOCE), we and our employee (a 21-year-old named Big DRBs) have taken over the RA headquarters and stayed up 23 hours a day for the last four months finding ways to save us all money on our annual assessments. Here's what we've found so far: 

Swimming pools. 15 of them is way too many, especially when we have all those lakes, just sitting there! Sure, there are some algae blooms and whatnot, but a tube of Neosporin is a heck of a lot cheaper than a pool pass. 

Sunrise Valley and Sunset Hills. Clear waste—why do we need two roads when one would do? Call it Midday Motorway and be done with it. 

Yard waste pickups. We have common areas for a reason, right? As an added bonus, dumping all our leaves into those otherwise underused spaces will deprive Reston's dreaded invasive plants of sunlight. Win-win. 

Color palettes. Why do we need all these wasteful colors like Sea Foam and Copper Taupe? Look at our neighbor to the east, Vienna, and just paint everything a nice uniform brown. 

McTacoHut. Clear inefficiency. We've already lost the Hut, resulting in 33% savings, but why do we need two drive-throughs when one could dispense both round meat discs and tubular meat sacs? 

Library. There's talk about building a new one, but who reads books these days? There are plenty of quality free newspapers and blogs out there. 

Electric car charging stations. We do need those, for reasons, and preferably near Terraset Elementary, which bears an uncanny resemblance to our fancy new stainless steel pickup truck. 

Tot lots. Why coddle the youngest Restonians? Just give them some rocks and sticks and let them play in the parking lots. Again, Neosporin. 

Two golf courses. Don't worry, some out-of-towners are already hard at work on that one, the end.

This post was originally published in the Reston Letter.

Meanwhile, in the Anti-Reston: Herndon is Apparently Big Game Country, Just Barely

It's been a while since we've chronicled the exploits of our friendly neighbor to the west, in large part because we haven't chronicled much of anything of late the arrival of Metro has made the town a less distinctive part of the much larger, more uniform sprawly "Dulles Corridor," whatever that is.

But we digress! Yesterday, we learned that the town, despite its easy access to the Silver Line and some fun artisanal tunnels, is officially bear country! Grab your tranquilizer gun and read some good nature time blockquote from our BFFs at Channel 4:

A black bear who spent hours in a tree on a busy street in Herndon, Virginia, on Monday was safely captured and taken to Shenandoah National Park, wildlife officials said.

The ordeal prompted a crowd of onlookers to gather nearby — even as police told residents to keep their distance.

Herndon police blocked off the 800 block of Elden Street around 3:30 p.m. in both directions after the male bear was spotted in the tree. Earlier in the day, residents saw him roaming their yards in a neighborhood.

The police dubbed the bear "Elden," because why not, it's fun. 

So long, Elden, we hardly knew you!

Update: Turns out it's not just unruly undomesticated mammals who appreciate our neighbor to the west.  HOA-hating posters on the Face Books apparently do too:

Lake Anne Rebranding: Get Your Mind Out of the Gutter, or at Least the Fountain

The perennial rebranding of Lake Anne Village Center got a little more, um, titillating this week when our BFFs at Reston Now pointed out that the current logo is a tad, ah, "suggestive." Give us some good PG-13 blockquote, BFFs at Reston Now:

The current Lake Anne logo has a somewhat retro feel — though the “A” part of the symbol, intended to evoke the fountain in the middle of the lake, did draw some Freudian sniggers on the social media site BlueSky.

You mean the Children's Fountain? Sure, RN, blame it on the sickos on BlueSky, and not your own fevered imaginations.

Because Restonian is always On Your Side, we walked over to the Plaza to see just how suggestive things are, and despite some extremely tame unpleasantness that riled people up nearly 15 years back, we can report there's simply nothing to see here these days, nosiree! Nothing at all, even when you go out back and -- oh, wait:

Computer, ENHANCE:

As noted planned community enthusiast Sigmund Freud once famously wrote, sometimes a flagrant DRB violation is just a flagrant DRB violation, the end.