Covered and Screened Porches
Award-winning porch contractor in Northern Virginia
Holloway Company Projects: About Our Beautiful Custom Porches
Porches in Northern Virginia are so much more than mere add-ons to your house. When designed and installed with your home’s architecture and exterior landscaping taken into consideration, your custom porch can become a gorgeous, yet relaxing outdoor living space all its own. If you are looking to add one, you need an experienced covered porch and screened porch contractor in Northern Virginia. Holloway Company has built porches across Northern Virginia for three decades. Many have taken NADRA National+ awards.
Benefits of Adding a Custom Porch
- Increased Value. In addition to enhancing your home’s curb appeal, adding a custom porch often increases the value of your property. It can be a major selling point for many homebuyers when the time comes to sell.
- Additional Living Space. With a comfortable, cozy place to relax outdoors, you may be surprised at just how much time you find yourself spending on your new porch after installation. If you love entertaining, your guests will appreciate having the option to spend time outside while still having easy access to your home.
- Greater Weather Protection. In addition to keeping you dry while outside, your porch serves as an extra layer of protection against the elements.
See Your Porch Before It's Built
Open, Screened, or Enclosed Porches
Open, screened, and enclosed porches produce three genuinely different rooms at three different price points. Roofline, ceiling, how the porch meets the house, whether there is a fireplace: all of that follows from the first choice. For homeowners who want more than screening, glass enclosure options exist too, effectively turning the space into a three or four-season room. That’s a different project with different tradeoffs, covered on our Sunrooms page.
The recommendation comes down to how you want to use the space. The experts at Holloway can assist you with the design and construction that will best match the use you are looking for.
Open and Covered Porches
A roof, a floor, and columns, with nothing in between. This is still the right answer for a lot of houses, and it is the only version where the carpentry has nowhere to hide. Column proportion, railing detail, beam spans, ceiling material, and how the roofline ties into the house are all fully visible, so those details carry the entire design.
Front porches are usually built this way. The job there is approach and curb appeal, shelter at the door, and somewhere to sit that faces the street rather than the yard. Insects matter less than they do on a west-facing porch you plan to eat dinner on in July.
It is the lowest cost of the four options and the most open to the breeze. Our 2020 NADRA Open Porch award was won with a TimberTech open porch.
Fixed Screen Porches
The traditional answer, and still the right one for many homes. Screen panels framed into the porch structure, open to the air at all times, nothing to operate and nothing to maintain.
Why Screen Your Porch
Most homeowners screen a porch for one reason: the bugs. Mosquitos, bees, and everything else that makes a summer evening outside less relaxing than it should be. A screened porch solves that without sacrificing the reason you wanted to be outside in the first place: fresh air, a breeze, and a view that isn’t behind glass.
It matters most when you’re entertaining. Food and drinks left out on an unscreened porch turn into a losing battle with insects. Screen it in, and hosting outside stops being a trade-off.
Screening also cuts wind and holds warmth better than an open porch, so the season stretches on both ends, spring and fall, not just the middle of summer.
Motorized Retractable Screens
Holloway Company installs Progressive Screens with the patented MagnaTrack system, which uses magnetic side tracks rather than the zipper tracks most retractable screens rely on. Zipper systems are prone to hanging up and pulling out of the side track. The magnetic track self-corrects instead, which the manufacturer credits with eliminating 98% of service calls.
- Magnetic side rails rated to withstand winds up to 75 mph
- Deployable in winds up to 25 mph, with the heaviest weight bar on the market
- Gaposa motors with triple-try obstacle detection
- Remote control or smart home integration
- A choice of insect mesh, solar mesh for heat and glare, or vinyl for weather closure
The appeal is that the porch changes state. Screens down for a summer evening, and up for an open-air afternoon, all from a phone.
Vinyl Window Enclosures
Sunspace WeatherMaster windows convert a porch into a three-season room. The vinyl panels slide and stack so you can open the wall almost completely in mild weather, then close it against wind, rain, and pollen in spring and fall. This is the system used on our 2022 first-place porch.
An enclosed porch is warmer, quieter, and usable more months of the year. It is not a sunroom: it is not insulated and not tied into the home’s heating and cooling. For that, see our Sunrooms page.
Porches That Hold Up Over Twenty Years
The porch connects to your house, which means the details at that connection determine whether it stays sound.
We flash joists and beams on applicable structures so water does not sit against framing and start rot where nobody will see it for a decade. Support posts are commonly 6×6, and where a post extends below grade, post-protection systems separate the buried wood from soil and moisture. Low-maintenance PVC and similar finish materials go where long-term performance matters more than first cost.
These steps add time during construction. They are the difference between a porch that looks right in year one and a porch that is still sound in year twenty.