By Emily Heil and Kathy Orton
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — D.C.’s Kalorama neighborhood just keeps getting swankier: Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has bought the former Textile Museum, a 27,000 square-foot property, intending to convert it into a single-family home, according to a person with knowledge of the sale.
Bezos’ neighbors will include President Barack Obama and his family, who are renting a property nearby for their post-White House home, as well as future first daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, incoming presidential adviser Jared Kushner.
Bezos’ new home — the largest in Washington — sold Oct. 21 for $23 million in cash (a million over its list price) to a buyer described in public documents as the Cherry Revocable Trust. But word about the identity of the new billionaire next door has been circulating around the enclave that ambassadors and Cabinet secretaries have long called home.
Bezos, wife McKenzie and their four children live in the Seattle area. When he purchased The Post in 2013, Bezos said he didn’t plan to relocate to “the other Washington.” “I won’t be leading The Washington Post day-to-day,” he told Forbes. There are no indications he will move here permanently.
The home is expected to be an East-coast pied a terre for the family — allowing him to avoid hotel bills — but the ample square footage means there’s plenty of room for entertaining.
The property at 2320-2330 S Street NW spans two historic mansions, which housed the Textile Museum for nearly 90 years until it moved to George Washington University’s campus in 2013. The two mansions were sold together in May 2015 for $19 million, the largest residential sale in the District of Columbia that year. They were put back on the market in 2016 at $22 million.
The property has drawn interest not just because of its sprawling size but its architectural pedigree. In 1912, Textile Museum founder George Hewitt Myers hired John Russell Pope, architect of the Jefferson Memorial, to design his home at 2320 S St. A decade later, Myers bought the adjacent mansion, which was designed by noted Washington architect Waddy Butler Wood. Both properties are on the National Register of Historic Places.
Don’t look for moving vans just yet, though. Renovation plans drawn up by prominent local architecture firm Barnes Vanze are under review by the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
