Tenleytown School's Expansion Includes Mixed-Use Buildings with 340 Units

• May 15th 2015

by Lark Turner

The Georgetown Day School is planning to build 340 residential units as part of its massive campus expansion in Tenleytown.

Last year, the school announced its purchase of a Safeway and Martens Volvo/Volkswagen dealership, a deal that totaled $40 million, in Tenleytown. The properties are adjacent to Georgetown Day’s high school campus at 4200 Davenport Street NW (map). The school hopes to consolidate its lower, middle and upper schools on the new campus.

As part of the plan, the school will demolish the Safeway and build two mixed-use buildings on the site of the Martens dealership, which will front Wisconsin Avenue NW between Ellicott and Chesapeake Streets.

The north building will have around 120 units and the south building will have about 230 units, both situated above ground-floor retail.

Alison Grasheim, the school’s spokeswoman, told UrbanTurf that the buildings will include 30,000 square feet of retail — including, hopefully, a replacement for the neighborhood’s popular Safeway, which this spring signed a two-year lease with the school. Other than Whole Foods up the street, it is the only grocery store serving the neighborhood, and the prospect of its closure has drawn ire from neighbors.

Esocoff & Associates is the architect on the project, and JBG is advising the school as a development partner. The school is waiting until after its application receives approval from the Zoning Commission to contract with a developer to build the site through a request-for-proposals (RFP) process.

There’s no timeline for the construction yet, Grasheim told UrbanTurf.

“​Our plan is for the school to be complete by fall 2020,” she said. “The mixed use timeline is influenced more by market conditions, and we will know more about the exact timing as we go into the RFP process.”

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/tenleytown_schools_expansion_includes_mixed-use_buildings_with_340_units/9892.