For a quarter of a century, the house at 2619 Wisconsin Avenue was the most infamous private dwelling in D.C.’s Glover Park neighborhood.
Part of the reason was because across the street was the home of the Russian Embassy and the important governmental agency that was assigned to keep an eye on them.
The popular story is that the FBI went to the owners of the vacant home and asked to rent it, and then they transformed it into an observation post, which led to its popular name, the “D.C. spy house.”
The house has been renovated and it’s fair to now call it a showplace.
During a private tour, Joey Yaffe, president and CEO of the real estate development and real estate consulting firm NewCity, said the goal was to honor the home’s history and create a really special place.
“It was a bit of an open secret in the neighborhood,” Yaffe said.
The neighbors saw the patterns in and out of the house didn’t match a family. Instead, they saw people coming and going at regular hours as if shifts were changing.
“They didn’t do a lot to hide the fact that it wasn’t a normal thing,” Yaffe said. “People’s garage doors would randomly go up and down, probably because of electronic interference and things like that.”
The house’s skylights were another modification that grabbed people’s attention.
“You can go on the internet, and you can fully see the cameras that were up in the skylights,” Yaffe said. “Like I said, a bit of an open secret. I don’t think that they were truly hiding from the Russians.”
In the transformation of the home, Yaffe said they paid tribute to the family that owned the house and to its spy house legacy.
“The grandson told us that his grandfather used to make wine underneath the porch, and so we turned that into the wine room in the house,” Yaffe said.
Since it’s in the Spy House, it’s not just any wine room — it’s a secret, hidden wine room behind a bookcase in the media room.
There’s a hidden powder room under the stairs and there’s another room fit for 007.
“If you walk into the master bedroom, it feels like a regular bedroom, but if you close all of the doors from the inside, they disappear. So you’re actually in a room that appears to have no doors,” Yaffe said.
The house includes an accessory dwelling unit over a three-car garage, six bedrooms, six and a half bathrooms, and at just under 5,000 square feet, it could be yours for $3.85 million.
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