City Stickers: In Kalorama, an urban roost with room for all

Suzanne and Bob Stoll had been itching to get out of suburban Bethesda for so long that when a 2,700-square-foot Kalorama condo became available in 2003, they moved to the District immediately, two weeks before their younger child graduated from high school.

Though both Suzanne and Bob were raised in the suburbs (she in a small town outside of Boston, he in Camp Springs), they think of themselves as city people. They had left the District in 1994 for purely parental reasons, their need for a city lifestyle temporarily overridden by their wish to give their children Michael and Jessie, then 10 and 9, what they considered the best public school education in the area.

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While they made great friends and enjoyed a suburban lifestyle of grilling steaks on the patio and parking in a two-car garage, it was a long nine years for the Stolls in their 7,500-square foot home. They missed the immediacy of Washington’s museums, restaurants and zoo (which they had visited with the kids at least twice a week), and, most of all, the noises.

“In the suburbs, you can’t go anywhere without getting into a car. And it’s quiet. I understand why people value the quiet, but I don’t,” says Suzanne, 62, chief operating officer of the Raben Group, a public policy and lobbying firm, and a former chief of staff to three Democratic congressmen.

Suzanne met Bob, 54, commissioner of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, 30 years ago, when both were taking night classes at Catholic University’s law school. By then, each had established that they were die-hard city people and that surrounding themselves with family and friends was a top priority. Both sides of the family (Bob Stoll is one of five siblings) meet regularly for family trips and meals. Suzanne’s mother, sister and brother “followed her” (as Bob puts it) to Washington, and the extended Stoll family gathers every Sunday for brunch at Murphy’s, a downtown Irish pub owned by Suzanne’s mother, Audrey Marcus. As a couple, the Stolls entertain often, opening their home eight to 10 times a year for fundraisers, social celebrations and work functions.

That meant that any old city apartment wouldn’t do. It would have to have room for entertaining, and for friends and family to visit. When the couple saw the $900,000 apartment carved out of three spaces in a historic building on California Street in Kalorama, they recognized another important factor: views. With four exposures and two balconies, the fifth-floor apartment in the 1905 building constructed by T. Franklin Schneider, overlooks Washington National Cathedral to the north and the Washington Monument to the south.

“We bought the place because of the space and the views,” Bob Stoll says. “It had room for the kids to come back. That was the critical dimension. We thought of my mother-in-law, as well. She lives on her own just a few blocks away now, but she can move in here whenever she likes.”

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Although Suzanne wanted to remodel the apartment right away and see whether they could rent back the house they had sold, Bob wanted to move to the city as quickly as possible, even though Jessie still had two weeks left at Walt Whitman High School.