Mr Jefferson had two estates

Famously, he fretted over his Albemarle County house, Monticello, on a peak of his father's considerable plantation. But he erected yet another neo-Palladian house in Bedford County, called Poplar Forest. If the former was encumbered by obligations to his ambitions, the latter is almost immaculately the domicile of desire. If anything shows the radical modernity of Thomas Jefferson, his prescient ease among the Romantics of the next generation as well as his mastery of the Classicism of his own, it is his indulgence of both dispositions with unanswerable liberty. Wealth, which was minor in his case, had little to do with it. He was a self-empowered man. 

And unfinished, unreconciled. Much of American history flows conflictingly from his delectation of mirror opposites in himself. What the world suffers from our volatile contradictions, oscillated first as pleasure points in his restless ambivalence. Only in architecture was he consistent, and ultimately coherent.

A single-story villa over an English basement, Poplar Forest is Jefferson's most exquisite design. Even more impressive than the luminosity inherent in his octagonal rooms within an octagonal whole, is the rationality of a plan which enables him the flexibility of direct access to every space by the central hall. The siting of Poplar Forest is inferior to Monticello's - as very little isn't - but here he achieved what he wanted, without pretense or hierarchy. If you could design a nation this open, this plain, it would be a republic of peace.