Amazon founder buys $32m Washington mansion
UNITED STATES: The president of the United States, family members of the president-elect and billionaires nominated for the cabinet have all been mansion hunting in Washington.
Yet even the grandest of these home-buyers has been outdone, and outspent, by a fellow from Seattle who wanted a pied-a-terre in the capital.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and proprietor of The Washington Post, has bought the city’s largest house for US$23 million (NZ$32.4M).
The purchase was made anonymously late last year through a private trust, but Bezos was identified as the buyer by his own newspaper, which cited an anonymous source involved in the sale.
A commissioner from the local neighbourhood planning committee confirmed the story and said that architectural plans submitted to renovate the home, which once housed the Textile Museum, were approved last week.
The 10-bedroom home represents what retailers like Bezos might call a two-for-one package: two vast brick neo-colonial mansions in a single household.
One was built in 1908, beside the former home of Woodrow Wilson and eventually housed administrative offices and storage space for the Textile Museum.
The grander house next door was built from 1912 to 1913, for George Hewitt Myers, a founder of an investment bank and avid rug collector.
It was designed by John Russell Pope, an architect who was then building town and country houses but would go on to design the National Gallery and the Jefferson Memorial in Washington.
According to the National Register of Historic Places, which added the property to its list in 1973, Myers bought the house next door in 1916 and the two were connected via a stone bridge on the second floor, which was probably built in 1925.
Inside lie grand marble and limestone hallways and large sitting and dining areas panelled with teak and walnut that look like suitable settings for the smokefilled rooms of an earlier era.
It lies 3.5km from the White House, in the Kalorama neighbourhood, a district of embassies where the Obama family will rent a house upon leaving the White House and where Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, have found a home too.
The mansions housed Myers’ huge textile and rug collection until 2013, when the Textile Museum moved to the campus of George Washington University.
– The Tmes