You Can’t Do That

GM got a tip the other day about a controversy brewing on Dumbarton St. The lovely house you see above is at 3107 Dumbarton. It once housed John Foster Dulles. Although the reason it’s being discussed is not its history but rather its architecture.

According to the local ANC rep, this house has been the subject to repeated stop work orders for unauthorized and unpermitted work.

There was even a stop work order over this last weekend. Yet despite that, the workers kept on working and now it looks like it does in the above photo. Looks fine, except before the weekend it looked like this:

(Well obviously the foliage wasn’t there.)

The owners stuccoed the house. This was not approved by the Old Georgetown Board. Now maybe you think it looks better with the stucco, and maybe it does. But if you own a house in Georgetown for better or worse, you don’t get to make that decision on your own. You need all the proper design approval from the city and Commission of Fine Arts. If you don’t like that, there’s a whole bunch of houses all over the city that don’t have those constraints. Go knock yourself out.

What happens next is unclear. Certainly the owner could be fined, but GM’s not sure if the owner can be forced to undo the changes. They could seek retroactive approval as well (stores that don’t get approval for signs do this all the time) but the Old Georgetown Board may withhold approval. We’ll see…