The trouble began when a family decided to sell their home on a tree-lined street in the Washington, DC suburb of Bethesda, MD (median household income $117,723 and average 4-bedroom home price of $806,817 in 2010). Concerned that their street would turn into the McMansion version of a Renoir painting, three brave neighbors "pooled $2 million to buy, modernize and resell the old home":
“I knew the only way we were going to look out the window and have a home we want to look at is if we did something about it,” said Diane Rosenberg, who owns a real estate law firm and is one of the three sellers. “Looking at what we did with this house versus what you’d get with a McMansion, our quality is unsurpassable. If you’re showy, and you want people to say, ‘Look at this humongous house,’ that’s not what you’re going to get.”Indeed, the house is a paltry 5,360 square feet with 6 bedrooms and 4.5 baths (that's enough for four people with full-blown diarrhea and one just mildly constipated) with an estimated monthly mortgage payment of $8,062 (assuming $435,000 downpayment on $2,175,000). For comparison, McMansions are any houses over 3,000 square feet. So the only apparent difference from McMansions is whether the house includes towel warmers, a desk with a USB phone charger, and wine coolers, as the would-be developer, Carole Sherman, builds into her houses. Still it didn't come cheap:
Rosenberg estimates that they spent at least $600,000 to double the size of the 2,200-square-foot home and update it with white wooden kitchen cabinets, an oversize Viking gas range, a stone fireplace and an adjacent living room big enough to host Super Bowl or office cocktail parties.Super Bowl and office cocktail parties? And yet, somehow, for the three neighbors, an interior designer, a real estate lawyer, and a senior Department of Justice (haute-WASP and daughter of a past chairman of the Trilateral Commission), avoiding the specter of tackiness was uppermost in their minds:
Creer, whose kitchen designs have been featured in glossy home magazines, worried that a huge new house on a street filled with older, smaller homes would look tacky and, worse, would necessitate cutting down trees.We at the Hate Read would like to subject Mr. Creer to a lie detector test to see how much he really cares about the trees, seeing as a law was already passed in the county to require builders to plant new trees after Occupy Bethesda protested tree cuttings. Still, their gamble hasn't paid off. The house has apparently sat on the market for more than two months and suffered a reduction in price:
The now-renovated home at 7812 Oldchester Road in the Bradley Woods neighborhood of Bethesda has been on the market since late August, its price having dropped from nearly $2.4 million to $2.175 million.
The developer they blocked from tearing down the house isn’t surprised.
“I think they’ve learned their lesson. The home’s not selling,” said Carole Sherman, owner of Bethesda Too. “We’re building what people want.”What is it that people want? Well, Ms. Sherman's unspeakable monstrosities, the kind the DC Urban Moms blog mocks as "garage Mahals." One gets the feeling the three Bethesda musketeers don't go for bathtub Madonnas, Christmas lights, or dining at TGIF much. But, as the original owner put it, they sure like "dignity":
“There was a lady down the street, and she met me when I was visiting and said she was getting sick to her stomach about it,” she remembered. “I just reassured her that there was no way I was selling to anyone who’s going to kill the dignity of Oldchester Road.”So what's really at stake here, we wonder? The horror of looking out the window at people with less "dignity" than it is due to Oldchester Road? Or is it something else? Well, it appears Mr. Creer, not content with glossy magazines, harbors a sort of Harrison Ford-as-cop fantasia:
Creer thinks Harrison Ford would approve, too. In the movie “Random Hearts,” Ford played a D.C. police officer who lived in one of Oldchester Road’s homes across the street from the 1940s Cape Colonial. The filmmakers, Creer said, wanted a charming neighborhood.
“They would have never picked it if there were a bunch of McMansions on the street,” Creer said. “Even if there was one.”If he only knew Ford lives in a 14,000 square foot house and was paid as much as 100 times more than his costars in Star Wars. But maybe Ford can call up his friend George Lucas to help him buy up 7812 Oldchester Road and build some "dignity" (cough, affordable housing, cough) into its 16,000 lot? Nothing like when the rich troll the rich.
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| Occupy Bethesda has united to preserve tastefulness |
