A Brief Bio - Dennis Woodriff

Dennis is a native of Orange County, Virginia, where he grew up on the family farm in the Somerset area. After college at the University of Pennsylvania, the US Army (remember the draft?) and then graduate business school at New York University, he lived in Colombia, South America for five years, where he started an import-export business, explored the rain forest and the paramos, and worked on a development on the island of Baru, just off the Caribbean coast near Cartagena, Colombia.

Since his return to Virginia in 1974, he started and ran Instant Shade Nursery, the family farm and also planted and managed a beautiful 20-acre vinifera vineyard in the Somerset area for ten years. He has continuously worked remodeling homes and with investment property in Orange County and Charlottesville. One house was a beautiful Victorian home that was rescued from demolition and moved four blocks, then renovated in the Woolen Mills area of Charlottesville. He has understandably spent a great deal of time raising his family of five children with the direction of Mary Ann, his wife. Mary Ann and Dennis live on a mountaintop in the Southwest Mountains where they have a bed and breakfast in two of the three houses nestled together there. He enjoys the outdoors and all that entails, having worked outdoors all of his life, and has extensive knowledge of farms, estate properties and land management. Real estate is a natural way to continue working in the area and dealing with people, homes, farming, and agriculture. He has been active in supporting the interests of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation and the Piedmont Environmental Council.