New Rowhouse Rooflines Raising Eyebrows in D.C.

"It makes me so sick I want to scream," said Avis Anderson, a neighborhood resident and a real estate broker as she walked by the building in the 4100 block of New Hampshire Avenue, just south of Grant Circle.

Anthony Cornish, the developer who is converting the single-family home to a condominium, said he used siding for the third floor because "brick is more expensive."

The property needed a wholesale alteration, he said, because he is constructing two duplexes and wants it to look like an apartment building.

As for aesthetics, Cornish said the building, when it is complete, will be far superior to the dilapidated, vacant property he bought last year for $425,000. "To each his own," he said of those who object to such additions. "If they don't like it, they should have gone and bought it themselves."

In interviews, several developers who are turning single-family homes into condominiums said they added a floor to fit more apartments and increase the value of their investments.

Mehdi Ghorbani, a developer, added a floor to a 14th Street SE rowhouse that he is turning into two duplexes he hopes to sell in the range of $600,000. He bought the building for $365,000.

With some prodding from the adjoining homeowner, who is now the real estate agent for the building, Ghorbani said he has spent extra to make the front more consistent with others on the street. That meant using hand-cut slate on the roof, he said, constructing top-floor windows in a historic style and preserving the metal porticos. A year from now, he promised, a visitor to the street won't know if the building was constructed "in 2007 or 1907."

Jeannie Day, a drug- and alcohol-treatment specialist whose mother has lived on the street for 60 years, said she will never be confused. "When I first saw it, I said, 'What in the world is this?' " she said. "I felt like it was disrespecting the neighborhood."

Homeowners are also building rooftop additions, though they said they are motivated more by a desire for space than for profit.

Mikel Husband, 36, and his wife not only put an addition on the back of their century-old row house in Northeast, but they also built a third floor. Their 4,000-square-foot house, which now has three bedrooms, two offices and a nursery, is large enough to accommodate his and his wife's relatives when they come to visit.

Husband said he sometimes finds it "odd" that his roofline no longer matches his neighbors. But he said he had no misgivings because "we just did what we needed to have done."

Richard Layman, a Capitol Hill community organizer, has noticed Husband's house as he has traveled the city, taking note of pop-up roofs wherever he sees them. He is among a handful of activists who have called attention to the additions, saying that the District should alter zoning, if necessary, to make it more difficult to build up in rowhouse neighborhoods.

"There's nothing that considers design or architectural style," Layman said of the city's regulations as he gazed up at Husband's addition. "This is why we have to declare these neighborhoods endangered."

The District's zoning code, which was drafted in 1958, allows for rowhouses in many neighborhoods to be built up, perhaps because officials did not recognize the significance of the architecture, Maloney said.

Travis Parker, an associate director with the D.C. Office of Planning and a leader of an effort to modernize District zoning, said the agency is well aware of pop-up roofs, as well as owners who tear down houses and replace them with larger ones.

One solution, Parker said, might be to draft development guidelines tailored to specific neighborhoods "that define its existing building types and set that as the existing standard."

No matter how the District rewrites its regulations, it won't affect Shirley Evans-Lee, who recently added a floor to the brick house on the edge of Capitol Hill where she has lived since 1970. Instead of three bedrooms, she now has six, enough space for the three grandchildren who live with her and for out-of-town visitors who otherwise might have to stay in a hotel.

No one in the neighborhood has complained about her addition, she said. Nor is she bothered by the homeowner across the street who added a third floor to his house. Or the homeowner around the corner who added a brick box of a third floor that soars above the neighbors' houses.

"It's their house," Evans-Lee said. "People should do what they want."