Z.A. Guerami is unashamedly proud of his 6,000-plus-square-foot, stone-faced new home at the dead end of Hesketh Street in Chevy Chase Village. He built it after living in and tearing down the brick colonial that formerly occupied the site. It had always been Guerami’s dream to live in Chevy Chase Village, he says. He loves his neighborhood and his neighbors, he adds, and he would like to believe they think his new home is tasteful and fits in nicely.
They don’t. At least not all of them. To critics, the house on Hesketh Street has become emblematic of a creeping “mansionization” that has roiled the Village and the neighboring Town of Chevy Chase for well over a year. Mansionization has preoccupied, even obsessed, many residents in the affluent crescent of lower Montgomery County. Increasingly, residents in incorporated communities, such as the Village and the Town, are attempting to take matters into their own hands by seeking stricter laws governing home heights and square footages.
So here is Guerami—who immigrated from Tehran before the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and who has been a builder for 30 years, and whose son, Reza, graduated from Walter Johnson High School—asserting without hesitation that “6,000 square feet isn’t that big.” In the greater scheme of things, he might be right. It’s no 20,000-square-foot palace.
But in the Village, some residents say the fight is as much about “character” and “context” as size. Large new homes on small lots, they argue, could alter the character of their streets. Homes built “out of context” overshadow and overwhelm the current neighboring dwellings, they say.
Two new houses that have replaced once wooded lots, and two tear downs replaced with two larger houses—including Guerami’s—have sparked the furor. It’s not exactly a tidal wave of McMansions, but enough to stir fears of more to come. This is, after all, a village that cares a great deal about appearances. “Curb your pet” and leash law signs are everywhere, with the admonition that offenders face a stiff fine.
The Village, the Town and several other municipalities—Section 3 and Section 5 and Martin’s Additions—comprise most of Chevy Chase. The municipalities are state-chartered corporations, each with its own government, trash collection, rules and regulations. The Maryland General Assembly last year granted local governments the power to legislate on such hot button issues as tear-downs and mega-mansions, and the Town, population 2,726 in the last census, leaped into the fray, closely watched—and followed—by the Village.
The battles have pitted neighbor against neighbor and have roiled once tranquil communities. This spring, the Town voted to limit the size of new homes and additions. As this was written, the Village had decided to strictly limit the size of new homes, but to forgo regulating the size of additions.
In addition, Montgomery County Council member Roger Berliner, whose expansive district includes Chevy Chase, has introduced legislation that would impose restrictions across the county that are less stringent. They would not apply in municipalities that have enacted their own regulations. Berliner says he is concerned that “tear-downs” are occurring disproportionately in his district.
Whatever the phenomenon is called, in the Village it has consumed hundreds of hours of citizen and staff time, “many multiple hundred hours of work,” according to Village Manager Geoffrey Biddle. The Village has paid a nationally-renowned planning consultant some $40,000 so far to guide it through a process that seems never-ending. There have been four different workshops, a community survey and eight different hearings. The Village Web site is flush with documents, and letters from property owners spew forth almost weekly, both pro and con. “There have probably been 60 to 80 hours worth of public meetings and interactions,” on the issue, Biddle says. “But there have also been behind the scenes drafting, discussions, staff analysis, other fieldwork…It’s been a measured process, but quite all-consuming.”
Pity Douglas B. Kamerow, the unpaid chairman of the Chevy Chase Village Board of Managers. He has patiently presided over countless meetings at village hall, hearing the same arguments over and over again, trying to be the even-handed moderator.
In fact, Kamerow says his home on Center Street has been overshadowed by two large new homes. They were built on two empty, wooded lots directly behind his house. The land on which they sit is higher than his, Kamerow says, so the houses appear to loom larger. “We were disappointed when they were built,” he says. “The two empty lots were thought to be unbuildable.” Kamerow doesn’t blame the new residents though. They merely purchased the homes from a developer. In fact, he says, “They’re very nice people.”
Kamerow, a family physician retired from the U. S. Public Health Service, now teaches at Georgetown University and performs research into health care and health care delivery for a nonprofit. He’s been a member of the Village board for 10 years, though this is his first term as board chair. Given the time he has devoted to the volunteer position, he jokes, “I wish I was getting paid by the hour.”
“The whole thing, when you’re dealing with private property rights, it can get a little emotional,” says Biddle, the Village manager. “But I’ve been very impressed with the way the board, especially Dr. Kamerow, has acted, with a little humor, a little grace, and everyone coming up to speak, all just deliberate and thoughtful rather than emotional and provocative.”
A who’s who
The Village itself is a product of thoughtful deliberation. It was developed by Nevada U.S. Rep. Francis J. Newlands and Nevada Sen. William M. Stewart at the turn of the 20th century. They incorporated Chevy Chase in 1890 as Washington, D.C.’s first streetcar suburb. As a 1916 sales brochure puts it, the developers’ intent was “to provide for the National Capital a home suburb, a community where each home would bear a touch of the individuality of the owners, where each home would possess an added value by virtue of the beauty and charm of the surrounding homes.” In the Village, the first section of Chevy Chase to be developed, there were strict building regulations and covenants to insure that the subdivision would live up to the vision of its founders.
The Village, population 2,043 in the last census, straddles Connecticut Avenue, starting at the District line and stretching north for several blocks. It contains 720 homes. Of these, 326 are in the Historic District, on both sides of Connecticut. They are grand old mansions, many built before the turn of the 20th century. West of the district are another 107 generally larger, older homes on bigger lots, and, further west, closer to Friendship Heights, 287 newer, smaller homes on smaller lots. There is something of a class division here, if such a thing can exist in a village where the median household income exceeds $200,000.
The Chevy Chase Village directory is a who’s who of Washington’s high-powered elite. Village board of managers Vice Chairman David L. Winstead, a former Maryland secretary of transportation, is the U.S. General Services Administration’s commissioner of public buildings service, responsible for 8,600 federal buildings. The late investment banker and philanthropist George M. Ferris lived here. His son, George M. Ferris Jr., board chairman of Ferris, Baker Watts Inc., continues to do so. Other prominent Villagers include Reaganite and neoconservative Richard Perle; lawyer and lobbyist extraordinaire Tom Boggs; eldercare mogul and hotel and real estate executive Stewart W. Bainum Jr.; and third-generation real estate developer David H. Bralove (his family owned the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., and nearby buildings).
Resident media heavies include Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball program, former New York Times Washington Bureau Chief Bill Kovach, television news pioneer Marvin Kalb, and syndicated columnists Mark Shields and George Will. Immersed in presidential politics, Will, who lives in a large 1898 yellow frame mansion on Grafton Street off Chevy Chase Circle, says he was unaware of the local struggle. Informed of the issues, he promised to pay closer attention and called the whole brouhaha “the latest example of why Chevy Chase Village is surely the most over-governed jurisdiction on the planet.”
An unhappy compromise
Even more than in The Village, the issue sharply polarized the Town, with warring petitions and repetitious meetings. The Town of Chevy Chase is bounded by Bradley Boulevard, East West Highway, Connecticut and Wisconsin avenues and, with 1,032 homes, is larger than the Village.
The last big public hearing, on Feb. 13, drew 84 impassioned speakers to an auditorium at the National 4-H Youth Conference Center on Connecticut Avenue. Residents testified for three hours: 53 opposed prolonging the Town’s new-building moratorium—inspired by a rash of some 30 tear-downs over the last five years—and 31 supported it. A Town consultant bolstered the moratorium supporters by concluding that building restrictions did not adversely affect property values.
In the end, the moratorium was deemed too divisive. The town council voted 3-2 against continuing the freeze on new buildings. In its place, a new law allows the total floor space of a new or enlarged building to equal 50 percent of the lot size, up from 30 percent. “Both sides had to compromise and were not really happy with the outcome,” says Town Manager Todd Hoffman. The new regulations went into effect May 17.
“The issue is over for now,” says Don MacGlashan, a resident who wanted the moratorium to continue. “They’ll give it a couple of years to see how it works.”
Just the beginning?
While the Town sorted things out, the Village underwent its own soul-searching. Its angst has been prompted by the fears of some citizens, particularly those on the more vulnerable west side where lots are smaller, that builders are poised to demolish the 1940s brick colonials and 1950s and ’60s ramblers, insufficiently sized for today’s lifestyles. With the large number of teardowns in the Town, it seemed to some only a matter of time and economics before the Village, too, was overwhelmed by mega-mansions.
Among those sounding the alarm has been Alison Powers, a member of Concerned Citizens for Village Preservation. On a cool spring day, she takes me on a tour of her west side neighborhood. It begins at her brick colonial on Oliver Street. The home is undergoing a major interior renovation, “but in the 1941 footprint,” she stresses. There is a large dumpster in the driveway, along with a portable toilet, and four contractor vans are parked in front. An interior decorator arrives, and the tour is delayed while she and Powers choose paint colors. A native of Washington State and a former ad copywriter, Powers came here two years ago from California. After checking out several Bethesda-area neighborhoods, she and her husband fell in love with the Village. They moved into their house in December 2006. “We were invited to a Christmas party. People were saying, ‘Have you seen the house on Hesketh?’ We assumed they had laws,” she says. “Then we saw the [Guerami] house on Hesketh and said, ‘Oh my God.’ That’s when we got involved.”
Powers was shocked to learn that “you could just tear down, and the neighbors would know when the bulldozers came,” unless the owners need a variance, requiring a public posting, a hearing and Village board approval. In one such case, she recalls, a sign alerted the neighbors that the house was slated for demolition, and the neighbors raised a ruckus. The would-be mansionizers wound up selling the house to another family “who’s perfectly happy with it.”
Walking past two large new homes, Powers says, “I wouldn’t mind having one. I just wouldn’t want to look at them because they are so out of character. There is no yard, because the house eats up all the yard. We’re worried about developers coming in because the land is worth more than the house.” But as she walks her dog along the leafy Village streets, the homes are mostly rustic and in-scale, and she marvels at the beauty of it all. “Look at this!” she says. “I can’t believe my good fortune that I moved into a community with all these lovely homes.” Village resident John B. Murgolo has a different view. He lives in a 2,165-square-foot, 1949 Dutch colonial on Park Street, not far from the fence that separates the Village from Friendship Heights, with its high-end shopping, offices and Metro station. He’d like to build an addition, as money permits, and doesn’t want Village rules to restrict what he regards as his inalienable property rights. “I’m bursting a little at the seams in my place,” he says. He owns another house, the one he grew up in on the west side, which he says was “considered the wrong side of the tracks” around 1950.
“I think people are overreaching, more out of jealousy and envy,” he says. Murgolo has lived in the Village since 1947, when he was 3, graduated from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in 1963 and is now vice president of a real estate management firm in Bethesda.
It’s raining heavily the day he drives around the neighborhood to show why bigger is better. “Look what’s happened in the last 40 years,” he says. “If you have two kids, you need at least two computer stations in the house; that sucks up a lot of room. People now have grandchildren coming to visit. You don’t have bedroom spaces for them. In Germantown, they have walk-in closets like another bedroom. Plus, you need a family room with a fireplace. If you don’t change, the market outgrows you and your home decreases in value.”
Once an assistant manager for a now defunct local department store, Murgolo adds, “The ones that change—Nordstrom’s—they survive. The others—Garfinckels, Woodies [Woodward and Lothrop]—they’re the ones that die. Chevy Chase Village will decline in value if people don’t change with the times.”
The house on Hesketh, he admits, is “probably a little overbuilt. Still, it’s gorgeous.” Of the smaller, 1940 house next door to it, which contains a mere 1,416 square feet of livable space, he says, “How can you live there? It’s crying to be rebuilt.”
From inside his Acura SUV, Murgolo points out another house on Montgomery Street that “really got” the critics. The 4,066-square-foot brick home, built in 2007 on a 12,623-square-foot lot, replaced “a little tiny rambler, a really ridiculous house,” he says. The larger house is “small compared to what they’re building out Democracy [Boulevard] or in any one of these places.” On Belmont Avenue, which backs onto the Saks Fifth Avenue parking lot, Murgolo drives by several 1960s-era homes he dismisses as “way, way too small.”
‘A long process’
At the Village Hall that evening, 100 residents crowd into a meeting room. A consultant hired by the Village has proposed a set of regulations that would limit house sizes, both those with additions and new houses, to 44 percent of the lot size. In builder-speak, that is referred to as an FAR (floor area ratio) of .44. Those worried about mega-mansions on small lots like the proposal; those who oppose it fear the regulation would restrict their ability to make their current houses larger. A random study of 117 Village houses, cited by opponents and challenged by supporters, contends that 58 percent are already out of compliance with the proposed regulations. It’s a long evening, with four hours of seemingly endless talk on both sides.
Kamerow, the board chair, begins by reading and commenting on an anonymous letter mailed to board members and residents. “I was embarrassed and angered to receive this,” he says, saying it contained “veiled threats” and “kickback” allegations. “This is wrong,” he says. He has taken the time to read it, he says, only to underscore how reasonable everyone else has been. Board member Peter M. Yeo, deputy staff director of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, echoes Kamerow. “This is a very small community” in which consensus is the goal, he says. “I think we thought at the outset we could wrap everything up in one package and deal with it,” says board member Gail Feldman, “but it’s too complicated, too many issues.”
Adds Betsy Stephens, another board member, “We started the process sensing there was enormous concern in the Village about the potential of mansionization. I think that concern still exists. Some residents feel the board wasn’t listening and rushed to judgment. My view is wait, let the dust settle. We need to propose something, but we’re not there yet.”
At 11:30 p.m., the board has scrapped all previous drafts and turns to a late-breaking suggestion from some residents that is less restrictive. The proposal would allow a floor-area ratio of 50 percent for new homes; additions to existing homes could be no larger than 40 percent of the current house size. Before the next meeting, the board decides to exclude additions from its regulations. The vote is 6-0 in favor, and the 40 or so citizens in the room applaud. “It appeared as if a true middle ground had been found,” said Village administrator Biddle. But Powers was outraged at the outcome. In a blistering letter to the board, she accused them of having “no appreciation for the significant negative impact that additions can have on adjacent properties, or—even worse—you couldn’t face the controversy that was developing around this issue.”A non-binding referendum was scheduled, to coincide with a 30-day period during which the County Council could object. If, as expected, it didn’t, the new rules were to become effective June 30, supplanting a twice-extended building moratorium due to expire on that day.
Says Kamerow: “It’s been a long process, with a lot of bumps in the way, probably more in the future. We’ve been through a number of drafts and a huge amount of public comment. Focusing on the most bang for the buck with the least repercussions for the largest number of people—that’s our goal.”
In the eye of the beholder
On Hesketh Street, the battle over mansionization isn’t just legal; it’s also personal and, if you will, historical. In keeping with its aristocratic pretensions, many Village streets are named for English nobility. Thus Hesketh is named for the Barons or Lords Hesketh, who lived at Easton Neston, in Northamptonshire. The manor house, built in 1530, was a true mega-mansion. A brick wing was added in 1661, and a third wing in the 1820s. In recent times, Alexander, the 3rd Baron Hesketh, was a Conservative Party politician who liked fast cars and founded a motorcycle company. So the name Hesketh does suggest a certain, shall we say, immodesty.
But to residents of Hesketh Street, it’s all about modesty and taste, and some—though not, of course, its owner—find the new house on the block downright distasteful. “This is my home,” Guerami says as he stands in front of the new, 6,000-plus-square-foot house. “It looks big, but it’s not that big,” he insists, as work on the house, assessed for tax purposes at $2.4 million, nears completion. “There are others much, much bigger. …We have a lot of big houses in Chevy Chase. … I got all the permits. I really want my neighbors to be happy.”
Guerami’s next door neighbor, Sheri Zaitz, acknowledges that the new house “is a vast improvement over what was there “before the tear-down. The house was empty for years,” she says. “We were glad to see them move in and finally do something to the [older] house.”
But what about the new house? Does it fit in with Chevy Chase Village? “It doesn’t,” says Zaitz, an interior designer who works from home. “It’s a little frustrating, but that’s how mansionization goes. You can’t dictate to people the aesthetics. It’s a nice house, but it doesn’t belong in the neighborhood.”
Eugene L. Meyer, a former Washington Post reporter and editor, is a regular contributor to Bethesda Magazine who lives in Silver Spring.
