The Best Listing of 2013: Bauhaus in Brookland

• December 18, 2013

by UrbanTurf Staff

3201 15th Street NE

UrbanTurf featured hundreds of homes for sale this year and combed through many thousands more, so picking out the top listing of 2013 was no easy feat. For a number of reasons, we decided on a four-bedroom Brookland home that we wrote about back in February.

A liberal definition of Bauhaus architecture would say that the style is about being modern and economical with materials, two tenets that Reema Gupta adhered to when renovating her 15th Street NE home.

Gupta and her husband purchased the two-bedroom house in 2005, and by June of the following year had set about renovating the entire property. The main changes included extending the home out 11 feet in the back to create a deep, bright living room, and adding on another level and two more bedrooms.

Living Room

UrbanTurf thinks very highly of this home for two reasons. For one, it looks like it belongs in Southern California, not a neighborhood in DC’s northeast quadrant.

When Gupta, an architect embarking on her first residential project, finished the job in June 2007, the result was a conventional colonial from the outside with a sleek, modern design inside. The first level now has an open floorplan with soaring ceilings and a wall of windows in back. The upstairs was transformed from a loft space to one that now has two separate bedrooms.

Second, we liked the lengths that Gupta went to to find salvaged materials for the home, as well as make it eco-friendly.

Despite being on a tight budget, Gupta incorporated energy-efficient features like bamboo flooring, low e-glazing and Kal-wall windows (translucent with high R-value) into the renovation. She also was able to find inexpensive, quality materials from around the city to use. For example, many of the stain grade doors in the home were purchased from a lumber liquidator and stained by Gupta and her husband.

UrbanTurf was not the only one to fall in love with this house. It hit the market on a Friday in February for $649,000 and found a buyer by the following Monday for $10,000 above asking.

Photography courtesy of CB4 Photography. The home was listed by Carlos Garcia of eng garcia properties.

Other entries in UrbanTurf’s Best of 2013:

• Best 15-Year Vision: Georgetown 2028
• Best Rumor Heard in 2013: Eataly to Uline
• Best Signs of DC’s Hot Housing Market: Above Asking and Multiple Bids
• Best Alternative to a Studio: DC’s One-Room House
• Best Way to Live and Learn: Buy the Pierce School Lofts
• Best Design of The Year: Montgomery County’s Tallest Residences

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/the_best_listing_of_2013_bauhaus_in_brookland/7933