The Woodruffs’ Vallonia

sears Vallonia on Franklin

It’s always fun to follow up on some old blog posts, and even more fun when we can announce a historic mail-order home for sale in the process! A few years ago, we wrote about a popular Sears catalog model, the “Vallonia.” Its arts-and-crafts style and spacious expandable interior hit the taste of the 1920s and was loved in our area as well; about a dozen still existing specimen in DC and its close-in suburbs have been authenticated so far. We featured Vallonia owners Kathryn and Simon back then, and here’s the exciting news: You can see their lovely home from the inside now, and you could even purchase it! It’s listed for $619,000 and open this weekend.

The home’s first owner was a certain Miles L Woodruff, who–according to the DC City Directory from 1928–lived in the house with his wife, Myrtle, née England. Myrtle and Miles had only been married since 1923, when Miles was 24 years old and Myrtle was 22. The kids certainly got on with their lives a little faster a hundred years ago, didn’t they! They listed Sears Roebuck as the “architect” on their 1927 building permit, and the closest railroad tracks for the delivery of the parts was barely a couple of blocks away. We don’t know what Miles did for a living, but Myrtle was listed as a “dictaphone operator for the Aviation Institute of the US”. (Check this out if you have no clue what that might even have been.)

Fast-forward to the pandemic year of 2020, and you will find a fabulous 5-bedroom home with an awesome 21st-century kitchen and a huge backyard. (And in case you’ll ever find yourself going to an office again, the place is just about three and a half miles away from the U.S. Capitol.) It’s a nice mix of historic architectural detail (those narrow-width floors!) and modern conveniences. We loved Miles and Myrtle’s radiators and some iron ovens that perhaps could still heat up the basement.

As for Simon and Kathryn, we’re not at liberty to say where they ran off to, but just want to congratulate them on their adorable new baby boy. He’s a total charmer, and one day, they’ll probably take him back to visit 3003 Franklin St NE in Langdon. Brace yourself!

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Sophisticated Suburban Spaces

(Click Here For The Full Listing) Please join us for our first open house at 5924 Johnson Ave, Bethesda MD 20817 on Sunday, March 1st, 2020.

It’s a spacious Bethesda colonial with warm tones and inviting Craftsman-inspired finishes. The smart, circular flow of the main floor is ideal for entertaining. In the front of the home, a large reception hall with coat closet and powder room leads to the generous formal dining room and a living room with built-ins. Both connect to the sunny, south-facing back of the home where an inviting eat-in kitchen opens to the family room with its cozy stone fireplace. A hall leads to the extra-wide 2-car garage with level 2 car charger, the laundry room and a private oce with a second half bath. An oversized skylight illuminates the stairs leading to four large upstairs bedrooms, including the master suite with a luxurious spa-style bath (did we mention the gorgeous heated floor?!) and a hall bath. On the lower level, there’s a wide playroom/recreation space with endless storage and possibilities. Fenced-in backyard. 5 bedrooms, 2 full and 2 half baths. (5th future bath roughed in on lower level.) One block to Ayrlawn Park and bus to Metro. Offered at $1,275,000. Open Sun 1-4.

Bridging The Path

Getting the house ready for the market with the Compass Concierge program – now even easier for sellers who want to move first

It’s a scenario we are all too familiar with: That 2-bedroom apartment looked huge when you bought it as newly-weds. But now that your second baby has arrived, it seems to burst out of its seams. You’d love to move. But how can you? Your equity is tied up in the condo, and qualifying for an entire second mortgage on the new home is out of the question.

What to do? Sell first, put the proceeds in the bank and move the family to a temporary rental? It’s a conservative solution but not necessarily a cheap one, and it would entail moving twice, possibly renting storage and could mean missing out on good offerings and low interest rates.

Alternatively, you might consider making an offer on your new house contingent on the sale of the current one — an option that is less likely to fly if you are buying in a more competitive market. It also often means you are forced to move the old home quickly, have less time for preparation and will likely sell for less money.

The third option is a bridge loan. But it’s often a scary one. While certain lenders might offer bridge loans to you based on your income and the equity in your home, this option makes many sellers uncomfortable. Just how long can they afford to pay two mortgages? And what if the house doesn’t sell right away? Where will the extra money come from that might be needed to move and make market-ready improvements?

That’s where our rather amazing new Compass bridge loan program — rolled out today — comes in. Combined with the interest-free Concierge loans (which can pay for cosmetic home improvements and sometimes even temporary living arrangements for the sellers) the bridge loan program potentially fronts you 6-months-worth of mortgage payments on the new residence, providing quite a bit of (previously unavailable) flexibility and control. Assuming you sell within those 6-months, you won’t have to pay any of this back until your current condo or house settles.

We don’t want to brag here, but it’s just one more way we can make your transition easier (or possible in the first place!) Find more info here, or just call us or fill out the form below to get started!

Why we love Compass Concierge!

Concierge lets you easily prepare your home for sale by fronting the cost of home improvement services like staging, painting and more. Let us help you sell your home faster and for more money.

No hidden fees, no interest charged—ever.

BEFORE
AFTER

Strategic

Your Compass agent will work with you to determine which services will help sell your home.

Efficient

The entire process is designed for speed, so that work can begin—and your home can sell—as soon as possible.

Simple

Your agent will be by your side throughout the process, advising you along the way.

Clear

You’ll never have to worry about hidden costs or interest fees: just repay the money spent upon closing.

Exclusive to Compass, our Concierge program is among a suite of services designed to prepare your home for the market. Whether it’s roofing repairs, painting, moving and storage costs, or additional needs, your Compass agent will work with you to assess every opportunity to elevate your home’s value and improve your selling experience. 

Once the necessary improvements have been determined, Compass will cover all upfront costs, collecting payment for the services rendered at the time of the property’s closing. By investing in your home’s potential, we aim to provide a swifter, more profitable sale.

Are there any services not covered by the program?

Our goal is for Concierge to help as many clients as possible. The program is intentionally flexible; we’ve developed Concierge to be used with most vendors for your convenience.

What costs are associated with Compass Concierge?

Compass will invoice you during or post-closing for the total cost of work covered through the program, and nothing more. There is no added cost for participating or interest owed to the company.

How can I find out if I qualify for the program?

Easy! Call your Compass agent today to discuss eligibility.F

Marcie Sandalow 301-758-4894 Marcie@Compass.com

Catarina Bannier 202-487-7177 Catarina@Compass.com

“A Pleasing Perspective From Every Angle”

Sears “Elmhurst” in Alexandria, VA

The “Elmhurst” was one of Sears Roebuck’s more unusual kit house models. For one thing, the Elmhurst’s asymmetrical and rather intricate floorplan and Tudor styling don’t give away its mail-order kit origins too easily. It’s also richer in detail than many other Sears homes of that size. And for the DC area, it has the amazing advantage that it truly fit in with the brick- and Tudor-loving taste of the 1930s here. You can see the historic ad copy below.

There are 3 known Elmhursts in the metro area: one in DC’s Forest Hills, one in Silver Spring, MD, and one in Alexandria, VA. The latter – a beautifully kept and renovated specimen – is on the market for $1,195,000 right now, and will have an open house from 2-4 pm this coming Sunday. It’s been on the market through the holidays, and we’re surprised it hasn’t sold yet. We thought it was really worth seeing–check out the photos!–, and was definitely adapted beautifully to a 21st-century lifestyle. Let us know if you need to get in on another day.

Page from the 1929 Sears and Roebuck catalog courtesy of Antique Home.

 

The fireplace in the the Sears “Elmhurst” in Alexandria today, after being enclosed in a new mantel …

… and as seen in the 1929 Sears catalog

The 4-digit stamp on a piece of lumber under the basement stairs proves the Elmhurst to be authentic and not a copy. The coded numbers helped put the giant kit together.

For extra fun, have a look at the Silver Spring and DC “Elmhursts” for comparison:

Authenticated Sears Elmhurst In Silver Spring, MD

Authenticated “Elmhurst” in DC

 

For my collection of historic kit houses currently for sale in the DC area, click here.

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The All-American Americus

Foxhall kit house for rent
A 1925 “Americus” from Sears Roebuck currently for rent on Foxhall Rd in Washington, DC. Photo courtesy of Harding Polk and Jennifer Drews of Compass via MLS

A Sears “Americus” that’s currently available for rent in DC’s Foxhall neighborhood reminded us how popular this particular model was in the 1920s. The mail-order company described it as a “fine home that any American can be proud of and be comfortable in.” If you chose this model, you were assured to buy a house that was “dignified, substantial” and would “never go ‘out of style’.”

This must have been a convincing pitch at the time, at least in the nation’s capital. The “Americus” was the one most popular kit house model built in town; there are nearly 20 surviving specimen known in DC, and several more in the close-in suburbs.

While its design is a basic square with a hipped roof and full-width front porch, the “Americus” also has the advantage of some characteristic elements that make it easy to spot. One of the bedrooms, for instance, extends into the porch roof — an unusual feature we’ve never seen in any other home. And there are those decorative triple brackets on all the corners of the roof and porch. The brackets have sometimes fallen victim to renovations, but you can usually see that top room jotting out.

The “Americus” was more of an end-user house even here in DC, documented by the fact that most of them were purchased by the people who would live in them (and many had original mortgages from Sears Roebuck). The Foxhall house, permitted in 1925, has seen numerous updates and expansions over time, but it still retains a bunch of original details that are fun to look at. Check out the gallery for some of those, and for more pictures of “Americus” kit houses in DC, Bethesda, Kensington and Takoma Park.

……

As always, if you’d like to see the rentable Americus, or any other home on the market, just give us a shout! (For my collection of historic kit houses currently for sale in the DC area, click here.) Happy Holidays!

Please use the form to tell us about your discoveries, about any house history you can share, or let us know about any kit houses coming on the market:

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What The Windsor Went Through

Before & After pictures can be exciting – there is something so positive and encouraging about the potential (or the decay, or even the misguidedness) they show. The B & A here (with MLS pictures from August and November of 2017) isn’t quite as interesting as the comparison of this one to another home. They were two incarnations of what started out as pretty much the same house.  Earlier this month, we featured a sweet little time capsule in Woodridge – a more or less completely untouched Sears “Windsor.”  Today, we’ll show you one that was just flipped. Note: the fun lies in the listing slide shows.

The “Windsor” was one of the more modest “Modern Homes” models from Sears Roebuck & Co. There are 6 known Windsors in DC, and only one of them can be found in the NW quadrant. The 1926 specimen in Chillum sold this summer pre-emptively for $315,000, and it has now reemerged fully renovated, available for a stately 649,990. The modest exterior only held on to a few of the original details, but it also belies an airy interior. Quite lovely, actually, and it definitely beats having the house torn down! Yes, we know–there’s not much left of the old little mail-order bungalow beyond its bones, but sometimes, we’ll take what we can get.

In the meantime, it remains to be seen whether the faith of the Woodridge Windsor will be any better, or perhaps worse. It went under contract after the first weekend. We’re not sure whether the buyer was an end user, a builder, or a flipper.

……

As always, if you’d like to see the renovated Windsor, or any other home on the market, just give us a shout! (For my collection of historic kit houses currently for sale in the DC area, click here.)

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In the following form, please tell us about your discoveries, any house history you can share, and let us know about any kit houses coming on the market:

 

 

The “Azalea Man’s” Modest Abode

Time set the record straight. After a WTOP story on “DC’s Million Dollar Kit Houses” ran earlier this year, and sometimes after we write about kit houses for sale that are priced even higher than that, we receive messages from unhappy readers reminding us that the majority of existing historic mail-order homes, even in our area, will not sell for a million dollars.

Of course, that’s true. We got emails from owners in Hyattsville and Anacostia, describing the pride they took in preserving their Sears homes. And perhaps we don’t venture off to other parts of town often enough. But the truth is, we’ve lately been focusing on the Chevy Chase kit houses for a reason, and ironically, it’s often easier to find well-preserved architectural features in historically higher priced neighborhoods.

So today, we’re taking you to DC’s Woodridge, where a sweet Sears “Windsor” from 1922 just hit the market for $399,000. The place could actually be a great deal for first-time buyers who want to stay close in. It’s about a mile from the Rhode Island (Red Line) Metro station, about 3 miles from downtown DC, close to parks, shopping and dining, and it has a WalkScore of 80 (“Very Walkable”). The price is 18% below the 3rd quarter median ($485,500) for the 20018 zip code, and the lot is large; it even has a well-groomed rose garden! [continued below the photos]

 

The Windsor was a popular bungalow-style house with Arts and Crafts elements, but it was one of the smaller of such models. How about the first owners? Were they end users who put the home together with friends and family in order to live in it like most of the purchasers of more modest kit houses? Or was it a developer who built the house on spec, according to what might have sold best in the neighborhood?

Turns out it was neither. The first owners were Benjamin Edwards, according to the 1930 census a Kentucky-born “Real Estate Operator,” and his wife Amanda. They owned and sold lots of properties in the 1920s. This particular home was built as an investment property, although it wasn’t rented out for too long. The Edwards financed the construction with an original 5-year mortgage from Sears of $3800, which wasn’t released until 1927 but which they simply passed on in the form of another mortgage to Evelyn and Joseph Gilmore, who bought the house in 1924. Yes, today, this would be considered fraudulent.

Joseph Gilmore, a young WW I vet, became the “Azalea Man,” a local celebrity who was widely credited with bringing the flowering bushes – which now color practically every corner of the city each April – to Washington. He cultivated Azaleas in his garden, and his customers won flower shows, but during the day he worked at the nearby railroad repair yard. In fact, his wife Evelyn, a clerk, made more money than he did. According to his Washington Post obituary, the couple lived in their “modest home” until Joseph died there of a heart attack in 1951.

We didn’t notice any azaleas, but there certainly are dozens of rose bushes lining the yard.

(For my collection of historic kit houses currently for sale in the DC area, click here.)

 

Launching the Chevy Chase Kit House Database

chevy chase mail-order houses - map
Click on the image for our interactive kit house map with house photos and catalog pages

It was exactly a year ago, during a talk we gave at Historic Chevy Chase DC, that the idea was born to somehow make our research public, not only to the local kit house owners, but also many other people who were fascinated with the unique concentration of larger mail-order homes here. After (not kidding here!) thousands of hours, we can now present the first results — a color-coded interactive map and a corresponding database of homes/models and historical information. We’re working on integrating the material into the Historic Chevy Chase DC website and hope to interlink it with much more house history, artifacts and oral history in the future.

Chevy Chase, DC (zip code 20015), has a unique (both in quality as well as density) collection of historic catalog houses. Nearly 100 existing homes and 61 different models have so far been authenticated, and there are several more suspects. The homes are from four different manufacturers (Sears Roebuck & Co.; Lewis Manufacturing Co.; International Mill and Lumber a.k.a. Sterling; and Gordon-Van Tine) and were built between 1915 and 1932.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the most popular models here were the Lewis “Chevy Chase,” the Sears “Americus” and the Sears “Martha Washington!” The following catalog homes show up more than once in Chevy Chase/DC:

One of Chevy Chase DC’s three picture-perfect Sears “Puritans,” decked out for Halloween

Lewis “Chevy Chase” (4 times)

Sears “Americus” (4 times)

Sears “Martha Washington” (4 times)

Sears “Rembrandt” (4 times)

Sears “Woodland” (4 times)

Lewis “Ardmore” (3 times)

Lewis “Cambridge” (3 times)

Lewis “Winthrop” (3 times)

Sears “Barrington” (3 times)

Sears “Kilbourne” (3 times)

Sears “Puritan” (3 times)

Sears “Walton” (3 times)

Lewis “Marengo” (2)

Sears “Alhambra” (2)

Sears “Lewiston” (2)

Sears “Priscilla” (2)

Sears “Rockford” (2)

Sears “Westly” (2)

The likely top runner, however, might be the Sears “Maywood” (5 times), although we don’t have full proof yet for the authenticity of those homes. (All 5 of them were built by a small builder who doesn’t name Sears Roebuck on the permits, but rather the original architect who published his rendition of the Maywood more than 10 years before Sears carried it in their catalogs!) We’re working on it, though, and will update you once we are a hundred percent sure.

In the meantime, we’d be happy for you to test-drive and explore our proud creation. Comments, questions and suggestions are always welcome!

Magnificent Malvern

1922 Lewis Mfg. Co. “Malvern” mail-order homes in DC’s AU Park neighborhood

This weekend, there’s a special treat available for fans of historic catalog homes in DC. A 1922 “Malvern” from the Lewis Manufacturing Co. just hit the market in DC’s AU Park neighborhood for $2,250,000. It’s listed by TTR Sotheby’s, and there will be an open house on Sunday from 1-3 pm.

Our kit house researcher friends in other parts of the U.S. will probably cringe a little. There’s the price point, of course, but some historic preservation purists will also dislike the fact that the home (a more stately model to begin with) was expanded by more than a hundred percent, and that the interior was pretty much completely gutted. (Although we were lucky enough to find a few marked original beams in the furnace  room toward the original front of the house!)

Comparing the old with the new floor plan that is given in the brochures, there is little overlap. The living room (now staged as the dining room) fireplace is still in the same place, of course, and so is the kitchen. But the entry has been moved to the side street (the address changed from 4312 Fessenden St NW to 4926 43rd Pl NW); the former front porch is a private side “terrace,” and the original front hall is now a “mud room.” In place of the original staircase are now a powder room and a pantry.

The same house in an MLS photo from 2005 before the renovation (photo courtesy of MRIS)

But… as far as I’m concerned, it’s also a really lovely home with a nice yard and in a super walkable city location. A sensitive architect tried to recreate many of the exterior elements for the back of the house, and while the side (aka current front) doesn’t look quite as balanced, the whole house gives off a very welcoming vibe.

Many of the materials and styles used are reminiscent of what used to be there. The living floor inlays, for instance, are matching the original ones I’ve seen in other Lewis houses. The expansion overall was made very thought- and respectfully. (And I admit: the magnificent red velvet movie theater in the basement of the addition doesn’t hurt.)

It’s a shame the virtual tour from the old 2005 listing no longer works — technology has certainly changed as well since then — but at least we get a glimpse at the exterior. And that’s a great match to the catalog image.

And while you’re there, if you want to see another one, go no further than the other end of the block on Fessenden. That’s because the Mandler-Brodt family, who put the house together in 1922 built two of them at the same time, both on corner lots. (See a picture of the other home here.)

 

 

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Are you Interested in Kit House History? We can help!

Cati and Marcie are Realtors by day and house history enthusiasts by night. We specialize in NW DC and close-in Montgomery County, MD, but cover the entire Washington metropolitan area. House History–the hidden stories behind the walls of the homes we sell or walk by every day–has long been a passion of ours (In fact, for Cati, a former journalist, it was what ultimately brought her to the world of DC real estate).

We have written about many house-stories in our individual blogs over the years, and we sometimes have surprised (and delighted!) clients with our research findings. When the time allows, we love digging in archives, city records and historic collections. What we find, is sometimes funny, sad or scary, but it’s always a part of the DC area’s story as well. And when it comes to history of any kind, there could not be a better place for that than the metropolitan area of the Nation’s Capital!

Our special interest is in the mail-order homes of the early 20th century. In many Washington, DC, neighborhoods and in the city’s older suburbs, we can find an abundance of those historic kit houses. (More often than not, the owners have no idea that some 90 or 100 years ago, their house arrived neatly packaged on a railroad car, in thousands of numbered pieces.)

You can learn more about catalog homes here, “like” our Facebook page for updates or email us with questions or suggestions for houses to write about.

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*Catalog images provided courtesy of Internet Archive.