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Aaron Shipman House, a bed and Breakfast
on Q Street, is decorated in full Victorian
Christmas manner (living room,
Christmas tree, dining room and
central stairwell).
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When you think about it, decorating for the holidays is really a gift we give our guests, our neighbors and ourselves. For the past 31 years, the Logan Circle Holiday House Tour has been one of Washington’s gifts that keep on giving. Every year, homeowners and sometimes business-owners orchestrate a Christmas concert of color and creativity. And at this concert, every seat in the house is like a front row seat, as you often walk through people’s most private living areas on the tour.
As I was a good little boy this year, I got the opportunity to pre-tour some of the spaces on this year’s list. While most of them had halls yet to be decked, there was one or two at their Christmas best, ahead of schedule for the Dec. 6 unwrapping. If there is a bow that ties together the places that I saw, it comes from a well-recognized design principle. That is to let the architecture of the house dictate how much or how little one decorates. Logan Circle is of course known for its grand Victorian homes, many of which have been painstakingly restored to their Gilded Age glory. These are the places that probably most people go to see because this is what makes Logan Circle, Logan Circle. But, as the area becomes more populated with younger more design-forward-istas, many of the older facades are just a covering for completely remade, austere, loft-like settings that hold no hint of what used to be. And, for the most part, the holiday decorating styles match the style of the interior.
Here We Are As In Olden Days
For example, I visited the 1887 Aaron Shipman house, a four-time tour veteran, located at 1310 Q St. NW. The house, a large four-level, six-plus bedroom mansion, was restored over an eight-year period to look like what it might have looked like when Shipman built it. He owned one of the city’s first construction companies. Pretty much wrecked inside when the present owners bought it in the 1970s, the house has been a bed and breakfast for about the last quarter-century. The Shipman house tastefully combines modern conveniences and restful decors with a bit of 19th-century boastfulness, especially in the dining room. The holiday decorations are decadent in a Victorian way. From the living room mantel covered in holly and candles to the large Christmas tree with red bows and white lights to the main stairwell all decked out in holly and red bows as well, the house is a testament to the time when millionaires in city’s like Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Boston built beautiful mansions, often located around traffic circles or squares. At holiday time these mansion and mini-mansions were decorated to the hilt.
Only about two blocks away in distance but more like two centuries apart in terms of design style is Fathom Creative, an interactive/graphics design company. This is a combination home and office located at 1333 14th St. NW, appearing on the tour for the first time this year. In fact the building, formerly the Jensen Brake repair business, is also new to its owners. The 1885 building originally built as a grocery store, is a complete renovation. The ground level serves as the graphics design business space, and the two upper levels are home to the owners.
In the renovation, the owners incorporated some great features from the previous business into their design, including some early 20th-century garage doors and also a frosted glass front door that served to advertise the Jensen business. They even found a tattered and grease-stained stars and stripes flag with 48 stars in the walls when they were renovating. I hope they decide to display it prominently. How many times do you stumble across one of those?
Silver Bells and Pom-Pom Trees
The space is very clean and modern, and the holiday decorations are minimal. Although they had not completed their decorating at the time I visited their space along with sultan of design Ed Rudock of Spacelift Staging, the owners said they would probably limit it to putting up a tree in the middle of the second-story meeting space/dining area and keeping a color scheme of green and silver. The clean, modern look and the white brick walls could not sustain the heavy, traditional Victorian Christmassy stuff. Instead you get a hipster holiday vibe here.
This year the tour committee put a special focus on “mixed use” spaces, says Tim Christensen, a Logan Circle Community Association board member and last year’s tour chair. He is also proud to have on the tour participants who have transformed former industrial properties into residential spaces, such as Fathom Creative. It isn’t requisite that tour participants decorate for the Christmas holiday, Christensen confided, although, most homes do, he added.
The 2009 tour consists of 13 residences, two office studios and an art gallery. Six of the 11 homes on the tour were built during the Victorian era and retain their Victorian facades. About six are 21st-century contemporary, including two penthouse units in the Metropole at 1515 15th St. NW; one condo at the Icon, located at 1320 13th St. NW, designed by a former “Sex and the City” set designer who also appeared on Bravo’s Top Design; and two rental apartments at the Rippeateau, located at 1530 14th St. NW, above the Plan b gallery, new to the tour as well.
At the time I toured it, the Icon condo didn’t wear any holiday decorations because the owner was working in New York where she and her husband, a New York Times reporter, still maintain an apartment. But, I could imagine that she would put up a 1950s silver pom-pom Christmas tree replete with color wheel, to match her mix of vintage mid-century modern and contemporary modern pieces bought at stores in Brooklyn and also along 14th between Logan Circle and U Street.
Last year, on a cold day in early December, about 600 people took the tour. The record high attendance is about twice that. Organizers say that proceeds from the tour underwrite the ongoing charitable work of the Logan Circle Community Association. According to Christensen, the Logan Circle Holiday House tour draws visitors from all over the Washington area and also tourists who visit the city. “It brings people into the real Washington, DC, beyond the museums and memorials on the Mall and gives them a taste of how people actually live here.”
At Christmastime, Logan Circle, a destination neighborhood that has emerged as one of the city’s most spectacular, shines even more brightly. |
