Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Buys D.C. House, Once a Museum
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff
Bezos is reportedly the buyer behind Washington, D.C.’s largest house, a
two-building spread that used to house the city’s Textile Museum.
The Washington Post, which Mr. Bezos owns, attributed the news to a source with knowledge of the sale.
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The Washington Post, which Mr. Bezos owns, attributed the news to a source with knowledge of the sale.
Combined, the two
buildings add up to a massive, 27,000-square-foot property. The buildings
sold Oct. 21 for $23 million to a buyer called The Cherry Revocable Trust,
according to D.C. property records.
The two historic brick
buildings on S Street in the posh neighborhood of Kalorama would put Mr. Bezos
a few minutes’ walk from Ivanka Trump and her husband, senior Trump adviser
Jared Kushner, who recently bought a new home on Tracy Place. Mr. Bezos is also
a few blocks from a house the Obama family will occupy until their youngest
daughter, Sasha, is finished with high school. She is currently a sophomore at
Sidwell Friends.
Mr. Bezos, 53, has said in
the past that he had no plans to move to the nation’s capital, despite buying
the city’s iconic newspaper. But the new home offers more than enough space to
entertain while he’s there.
While extensive renovations are required to turn the long-time museum into a residential home, the combined buildings offer a total of 10 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms and 11 fireplaces, according to a listing with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage.
Both buildings date back to
the early 20th century. American forester and textile collector George Hewitt
Myers built one of the buildings, known as the Myers House, in 1912, hiring
Jefferson Memorial architect John Russell Pope to design the home, according to
the National Register of Historic Places.
Meanwhile, Myers was
accumulating a variety rugs and other textiles from Eastern Asia, the Middle
East and North Africa. To accommodate his growing collection, he eventually
bought the house next door, known as the Tucker House, and turned it into a
private museum.
Architecturally, the two
buildings, both on the National Register of Historic Places, are an eclectic
mixture of Georgian Revival and Beaux-Arts styles. A limestone-faced bridge connects
the two buildings.
The Textile Museum operated
out of the buildings for many decades after Myers’s death, but in 2013 moved to
George Washington University’s Foggy Bottom campus.
The two buildings were
packaged as one property and put on the market in June 2013 with Coldwell
Banker.
The property sold in 2015
for $19 million, according to the former listing, but returned to the market a
year later for $22 million—meaning Mr. Bezos paid $1 million above asking
price.
An email seeking comment
from Mr. Bezos via Amazon was not immediately returned.
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