Tag: Historic Mail order homes in Washington DC

What The Windsor Went Through

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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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A Favorite DC Kit House

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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.)

You can find a listing summary here and the MLS photos here.

Catalog image courtesy of the Clarke Historic Library: Aladdin Pomona-1919_fall_annual_sales_catalog