Architects Olvia Demetriou and Theodore Adamstein made this open, airy home from a typical 1940s center-hall brick colonial. The rear living room has floor-to-ceiling windows and doors that open to a rear patio and pool. / Photo by Piers Lamb.
Nothing says Palisades more than a Sears bungalow-style house made from a kit, a kit that contained 30,000 pieces of material and a 75-page manual plus blueprint. Although the Sears houses are hard to document, timing and some early appraisals strongly suggest this was a kit house. Though it has undergone a recent renovation, the owners strove to retain much of the craftsman simplicity of the original design. / Photo by Piers Lamb.
This 1949 mid-century-modern house was designed by modernist architect Chloethiel Woodard Smith. The current owners brought in architect Robert M. Gurney to add rooms and reinvigorate the home without abandoning its roots. / Photo by Piers Lamb.
This 1921 gabled Victorian backs onto parkland and that’s what clinched the sale for the 1978 purchasers. Since that year the house has been transformed time and again. Says one of the owners, an architect: ” We saved the shell and the main front stairs.” / Photo by Piers Lamb.
Judge David Bazelon and wife Miriam were inspired by a ceremonial Japanese tea house to build this 1958 home. A decade later they sold it to the young senator from South Dakota, George McGovern. The current owner is an attorney with many Japanese clients. / Photo by Piers Lamb.
This 1891 Victorian farmhouse is the only one left of the three original houses built by the developer of the new Wesley Heights neighborhood. It has been carefully “enlivened” by architects Hugh Newell Jacobsen and Stephen Muse. / Photo by Piers Lamb.
Three local Washington, D.C., architects have worked on this mid-century classic: Thomas Stohlman, a student of Louis Kahn’s, who built it for his family in 1957; Robert M. Gurney, who reconfigured the interior space in 2004; and Mark McInturff, who five years later designed a rooftop addition and green roof. / Photo by Piers Lamb.
The owners built this contemporary house in 1989 complete with a ground-floor apartment for the 68-year-old parents of one of them. Today, the 94-year-old mother still lives in the apartment. And their son has already said, “When it’s time, I’ll live upstairs and you two can live in the apartment.” The house is unusual in that its components are factory-engineered panels and roof trusses that were assembled on the steeply sloped site. Just another kind of “kit house” for Palisades. / Photo by Piers Lamb.
This 1957 brick ranch house got a top-to-bottom renovation from its current owners–one of whom is a residential architect and interior designer. They purchased it in 2009 and have regraded the property, added water-wise landscaping and totally redone the interior, pushing out an addition that added space but did not betray the home’s mid-century roots. / Photo by Piers Lamb.
YOU CAN LEARN a few things from house tours. Whether you might like to live in the neighborhood. What the inside of “that house on the corner” really looks like. How x solved the problem of y, the y being the same problem you have in your house.
Most of all, house tours are a good time. The ticket money often goes to a worthy cause, and the mood is generally jolly as you make your way from house to house.
In the case of the Palisades Village House Tour this Saturday, October 17, 2015, the money ($30 in advance online, $35 the day of the tour) goes to Palisades Village, a nonprofit organization that helps people in the area age in place in their own homes.
Three of the houses on the tour were designed by architects, including one mid-century-modern home that predates by a year the fabled mid-century-modern houses of Hollin Hills, in Fairfax County, Virginia.
There are, as might be expected in this leafy, once-country-ish part of the city, a couple of farmhouses and traditional Victorian-style gable-roof manses on the tour and an example of the Sears bungalow, made from a “kit” (a number of these dot the larger neighborhood here along the Potomac River; in fact, according to estimates provided by Palisades Village, 10 percent of the 242 building permits issued for Palisades properties between 1922 and 1929 were for Sears bungalow-style “arts and crafts” homes).
There are nine houses in all.
–Nancy McKeon
Tickets for the Palisades Village House Tour, plus a map of the homes and historic sites, can be picked up starting 10:30 am Saturday at St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church, 4700 Whitehaven Parkway NW.