This Week's Find: Downtown Design Meets Mid-60s Traditional in Berkley

• December 8th 2010

by Mark Wellborn

In DC’s Berkley neighborhood, just to the west of Georgetown, there are a number of detached homes built in the mid-1960s that look similar to one another. But This Week’s Find is, by the owner’s design, quite different from its neighbors when you get inside.

“I wanted a house that felt a bit more like a downtown space,” current owner Michael Abrams told UrbanTurf. “I wasn’t ready to move downtown, but I didn’t want the interior to feel suburban.”

Abrams bought the home in 2003 and then started renovating the interior in 2005. He used O’Neil and Maniom, a Bethesda-based architecture firm that primarily does commercial work, but also dabbles in residential. Taking inspiration from Cady’s Alley, Abrams worked with O’Neil and Maniom to incorporate contemporary design into the traditional architecture of the home. For example, the garage door on the front of the home was replaced with a floor-to-ceiling window to let in more light, the French doors were taken out to open up the living spaces and the drywall columns were replaced with industrial steel beams.

“it was nice to be able to take a traditional house in another direction and still have a yard that my kids could play in,” Abrams said.

• Address: 2323 49th Street NW (map)
• Price: $1,369,000
• Bedrooms: Four
• Bathrooms: Three
• Square Footage: 2,446
• Listing Agent: Claudia Donovan, W.C. & A.N. Miller
• For the full listing, click here.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/this_weeks_find_downtown_design_meets_mid-60s_traditional_in_berkley/2745.