Yes, it’s true — this Aladdin “Pomona” is still one of our favorites. It’s not too far from our office, and we’ve watched the current owners of 8 years renovate and expand it, in a beautiful and sensitive way. At least that’s what it looked like from the outside. We once knocked at the door and even left a note for the owner about the home’s history (built in 1921 by one Charlotte E. Haskell, it was another woman-owned DC kit house in its day), but we’d never seen the inside until now.
The “Pomona” hit the market for $1,399,000 yesterday, and it’s just as beautiful inside as out. The updates are sleek and have brought the home into the 21st century, but they don’t violate its core or completely sacrifice its architectural integrity, even though the floor plan and size have been significantly expanded. (Yes, some bungalow purists might disagree on this. But the reality is that in high price neighborhoods, the alternative might be a tear down. And we’d always take an awesome house over the destruction of history.)
Washington DC-area homes by the Lewis Manufacturing Co. from the 1910s and 1920s
Earlier this week, Rachel Nania from WTOP ran an awesome story about the historic DC kit houses and our research over the past few years. In the interview itself, we focused on a project for Historic Chevy Chase DC that we’ve been working on over the past few months, and that we hope to make publicly available very soon: cataloging the catalog homes in Chevy Chase. The neighborhood is a unique playground for exploration because many of the homes are particularly well preserved and protected, and because there is a large number of models that were considered more luxurious at the time. Many of them were built on spec by developers.
Since the story ran, we got about half a dozen emails from kit house owners in other parts of the city, a couple of whom felt left out or felt the numbers we were talking about were incorrect. So, perhaps it’s time for some clarification.
The number of roughly a hundred kit houses mentioned referred to Chevy Chase DC alone. And even there, it’s only the number of homes that we actually have authenticated, either via historic building permits, mortgage data, or other certain proof such as specifically marked lumber, blue prints found in attics, etc. More than half of those houses came from Sears. The second largest number–including many of the larger, more stately homes–came from the Lewis Manufacturing Co. in Bay City, Michigan.
All over DC, we had about 300 homes whose owners received original financing from Sears Roebuck. Michigan researcher Andrew Mutch mapped those homes (and we added a few from other sources). This great image shows how they were mostly located along train or street car lines:
The majority of the houses actually still exist, although many have been stripped of much of their original detail and do not retain a lot that anchors them to the time they were built. Of course, most of the homes are not selling for a million dollars!! We’re sorry if we created that impression. As mentioned before, neighborhoods like Chevy Chase, the Palisades, Cleveland Park or Observatory Circle are unique in that respect as well.
We will publish more specific numbers in the near future, but for now, may it be enough to point out that we are aware of at least a couple of hundred other kit homes in DC and the close-in suburbs, apart from those with Sears mortgages. There are other Sears houses that didn’t have mortgages, but also some from other kit houses companies such as Lewis, Aladdin, Gordon-Van Tine, or the Harris Bros.
Yes, it’s true — this Aladdin “Pomona” is still one of our favorites. It’s not too far from our office, and we’ve watched the current owners of 8 years renovate and expand it, in a beautiful and sensitive way. At least that’s what it looked like from the outside. We once knocked at the door and even left a note for the owner about the home’s history (built in 1921 by one Charlotte E. Haskell, it was another woman-owned DC kit house in its day), but we’d never seen the inside until now.
