The Old Angler’s Inn is looking for community support in its effort to add a ballroom and eight overnight suites to its historic Potomac property.
The restaurant and event venue filed a zoning application in March with Montgomery County for designation as a “country inn.”
Sara and Mark Reges, the husband-and-wife team who took over ownership of the restaurant after Mark’s mother, Olympia, died in 2005, said they reviewed a number of possibilities for the site before concluding that adding the “boutique inn” was the best choice.
The suites could be used for guests at private events hosted by the restaurant.
“Although the short-term vision for the restaurant was simple: give it some love, clean it up and try to re-brand its image, moving it away from the special occasion venue only, to a place where our neighbors go on a regular basis to enjoy bon’ homie with friends and family, the long-term vision for the full utilization of the property was more complicated: How to best develop the asset that we inherited in order to yield the best return not only for the Reges family but for the community at large and to save this neighborhood gem,” the couple wrote on the restaurant’s website.
Sara and Mark Reges started a petition to help their cause in the zoning case and have invited anybody to take a tour of the grounds. They’ll also be hosting an open house with food and drinks and an opportunity to talk to the project’s engineers and architect.
“Through these last ten years, many of our friends and supporters including many of our surrounding neighbors, have experienced first-hand the trials, tribulations and successes of our journey to save the business and reinvent it to meet our neighbors’ expectations of this neighborhood institution,” the couple wrote.
The zoning case is expected to be taken up later this year.
If approved, the project would take Old Angler’s Inn back to its roots. The place opened in 1860 and served people traveling into Washington, D.C., and many of the wealthy families that set up estates in Potomac and the rest of the Maryland countryside.
During the Civil War, couriers, officers and soldiers from both the North and the South would stay at the Inn.
In 1957, prominent area attorney John Reges bought the property, which is when his wife, Olympia, restored it.
