Washington, DC is a town known for many things, but extreme real estate sales usually isn’t near the top of the list. That was, until this month, when the former Textile Museum sold for $19 million as a residential sale after two years on the market. The selling price was $3 million less than the original listing.
“This record-breaking sale is a testament to the strength of the growing luxury market in not only D.C., but in the Mid-Atlantic,” said Rick Hoffman, regional sales vice president of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, Mid-Atlantic. “Selling a property of this caliber takes dedication and perseverance. We are very proud of Sylvia, Marin and Joseph on this tremendous accomplishment.”
The Textile Museum’s founder George Hewitt Myers—heir to the Bristol Myers fortune, a businessman, forester and a prolific collector of oriental rugs and textiles—commissioned esteemed architect and Neoclassical master John Russell Pope to build the property at 2320 S St., NW, in 1912. Pope also designed the Jefferson Memorial, the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, the Scottish Rite Temple and the National Archives and Records Administration building. Completed in 1915, the stately, Adam-style estate originally served as the Myers family’s home.
The Pope-designed house remains a point of interest to architectural scholars and features a grand foyer opening onto checkerboard marble tile floors. Rooms on the ground level are paneled in Italian walnut, American oak and cedar from Myers’s own timber mills.
In 1925, Myers purchased the adjacent residence at 2330 S St., NW, which was designed by prominent architect Waddy Butler Wood. An established architect of private residences, Wood also designed the Woodrow Wilson House, the U.S. Department of the Interior Building on C Street NW and the Masonic Temple that would eventually become the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Myers’s growing collection of textiles was moved into the manor at 2330 S St., NW in 1925. After his death in 1957 the original family house gradually became staff offices and museum storage. Together, the mansions served as the Textile Museum’s home through the end of 2014, when the museum closed to prepare its move to a new location. In March 2015, the museum re-opened as the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum located on George Washington’s Foggy Bottom Campus.
The two structures are connected by a second story limestone-faced bridge. Together, along with the former garage and chauffeur’s residence on Decatur Place NW, they total 26,000 square feet of floor space. The 34,100-square-foot lot includes a garden that is laid out formally in geographic designs with brick arcades with latticed arches. Pope planned the home with the garden in mind, and in the 1960s Washington D.C.’s first licensed female architect, Rose Greely, updated the design and completed the project.
See some photos of the incredible home, below. What do you think?
