This Georgetown Mansion Is Now a $15,000-a-Night Villa Rental
Plus, United puts the screws to loyal fliers, two dreamt-of rail routes become a possibility, and a new documentary casts a shadow over NEOM.
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Washington, D.C. has never been a flashy city. Sure, there are pockets of vulgarity in McLean and Potomac. But there’s an almost WASP-like tendency here to eschew the things you might expect to see in wealthy neighborhoods—houses are large but not palatial, and cars are expensive but not conspicuous. As the town is awash in money, people wear “nice” clothes, but you wouldn’t find yourself habitually stopping because you’re floored by an outfit somebody has on.
And while I will gleefully defend D.C. as arguably the American city with the highest quality of life and a place I love returning to after trips, its social events don’t have nearly the same frisson of excitement that those in NYC, Paris, or even Los Angeles do.
But a few weeks ago I said yes to an opening party in Georgetown. It was for a novel concept here, and a startling one in that it had flown completely under the radar. A couple had turned an old estate on an acre of gardens in the heart of Georgetown into a villa rental that would be going for tens of thousands of dollars a night.
LXIV D.C. is the villa’s name, an anything-but-subtle reference to that pervasive influence of on-the-nose luxury for the last four centuries, Louis XIV. It’s just off the M Street shopping corridor on 30th Street in a sprawling clapboard mansion in Georgetown. The compound is formed from two houses—one dating back to the 1840s—that were joined by Ruth Hanna McCormick, the daughter of Ohio Republican Party boss Mark Hanna. She was one of the first women elected to Congress (in 1928), the first to win a party nomination for Senate (she lost), and the first to run a presidential campaign (1940s for Dewey, who lost). She was also married to Medill McCormack, heir to the Medill publishing and McCormack industrial fortunes, and later to another congressman, Albert Gallatin Simms. The gardens at the house were laid out by Rose Greeley, a contributor to House Beautiful who designed a number of the estate grounds in D.C., and Perry Hunt Wheeler, who laid out the White House Rose Garden.
Without getting pulled too far into the early 20th century when D.C. was a glamorous town throwing legendary parties with guest lists that filled the tabloids, let’s just say that this was a house that comes with a pretty high pedigree of history.
In 2022, it was bought by D.C. developers Ezra and Jessica Glass for nearly $9 million. They spent the last two years transforming it into a contemporary luxury offering that will compete with the top suites at hotels like The Jefferson, Four Seasons, and Rosewood (which also has townhouses) for visiting heads of state, CEOs, and high net-worth individuals.
The house is protected, so its exteriors remain untouched, but wandering inside you’d be hard-pressed to imagine yourself in a historic Georgetown residence. Rather than lean into the quaint and creaky, the choices remind me most of the type of decor you’d find in the houses of oligarchs in London—historic outside, barely restrained contemporary inside.
It was an intentional choice, given the geographic variety of potential guests. And while you or I might find the quirks of an old house charming, a CEO prepping for a congressional hearing paying at least $15,000 a night likely will not.
The walls throughout are covered with hand-applied Matteo Brioni plaster, the bathrooms modern and clad in stone, and the furnishing sharp. Spread out over a rabbit-warren-like 12,000-square-foot house are six suites, 14 bathrooms, a parlor, a living room, a dining room, a ballroom, and an orangerie.
The house’s interior was designed by Jessica Glass and Eric Chang. One of the perks they’re offering guests is that everything in the house is for sale—if a guest sees something they like, it can be bought in the LXIV app and shipped to their house. The house is also a sort of “smart house” with a voice-activated concierge (as well as an actual concierge) whose job is to make the wishes of its demanding clientele come true.
The real show-stopper, and what makes this truly unique right in the middle of the city, is the acre of manicured gardens with a spa, enormous pool, gated entrance in the rear, and a spa house with a sauna, hammam, and cold plunge.
A twee AirBnB this is not.
I’ve rarely focused my reporting on the highest end of travel, so I don’t have a bet on the property’s success. But it’s a fascinating project for a few reasons.
The first is that luxury travel as a whole post-pandemic has been utterly transformed. This is in large part due to the explosion of ultra-high net-worth individuals (defined as having assets of more than $30 million). In 2017, 226,450 people fell into that category worldwide. As of 2023, that number is 426,330 and it’s expected to hit 587,650 in the next half-decade. That’s a sizeable enough market of potential customers to ensure a steady stream of growth for luxury goods. (In my conversations with Glass, this was a big part of their bet—that the ultra-high net worth market is now so large, that properties like this are needed.) LXIV is planning more projects, with the next ones in New York City and the south of France.
This fits the second reason this fascinates me—the private villa trend is exploding. Abercrombie & Kent is leaning heavily into it. Every few days, my inbox has another pitch from travel PR about a high-end villa concept somewhere in the world. One can only hope this has a trickle-down effect on better boutique villa rental concepts given just how bad AirBnB and Vrbos have gotten in terms of quality of design and experience.
Few SNL skits have nailed something as well as this recent classic on AirBnB design.
The final reason LXIV D.C. excites me is that it’s happening as Georgetown is having a mini-Renaissance. Once synonymous with anything nice in D.C., the last decade and a half has seen Georgetown become a sleepy afterthought. The best restaurants and bars, as well as anybody who wasn’t ashamed of not living in New York City, headed further east to Logan Circle and beyond. Emblematic of how Georgetown had fallen behind was that legendary developer Herb Miller left it for 14th Street.
But Lutèce on Wisconsin has been one of the buzziest restaurants in recent memory, and the line for Yellow (a new fast-casual concept in a city that created Sweetgreen and Cava) is always up the block. Jose Andres is building his first hotel here. And the long-awaited Stephen Starr transformation of the former Dean & Deluca on M Street into a D.C. outpost of Nancy Silverton’s Osteria Mozza opened. (I went to an opening party a couple of weeks ago and it was wonderful to see the space glammed up. There’s no doubt in my mind it will have transformative effects on the area.)
Maybe the one-ubiquitous phrase “Georgetown set” will even make a comeback.
DEPARTMENT OF GRIEVANCES
I don’t have particular insight into why United made the move to make its premier levels even more absurdly high. But my best guesses are that they’re doing it in part to push customers to the higher-fee credit cards that allow you to earn more from general spending. Also, because so many people were at their highest levels, perks like PlusPoints were meaningless since competition to redeem them was so stiff. My colleague in the industry, Melanie Lieberman was polling her followers on who was even going to bother trying to get status next year given the changes. I certainly won’t be. Instead, I’ll likely shift my focus to Alaska (which is generally considered the best or one of the best when it comes to rewards programs) or American because of their hub at DCA.
But speaking of United, one fascinating bit in their recent earnings report. Jason Rabinowitz flagged that the airline’s “on-time departures stat for October was 75.2%, but when they remove purposely delayed departures due to Connection Saver it jumps slightly to 77.6%.” The airline says that Connection Saver (its new automated process for figuring out which flights to hold for connecting passengers) has saved 54,000 customers’ connections.
Paris City Hall announced this week that its long-anticipated move to restrict traffic in its city center will go into effect tomorrow. In reading the text in Le Monde, it does seem like there are a hell of a lot of exceptions made (how much “through traffic” is there really?), but it’s nonetheless an exciting move. I still remember walking its streets with Chris Dickey (my mentor, the legendary Washington Post and Newsweek journalist who passed a couple years ago) who grew up visiting a dark Paris, because all the buildings were blackened by pollution.
I generally want this to be a space removed from politics, since politics is nearly impossible to avoid of late. But history is a big part of why so many of us travel, and so I will say that I think it’s shameful for any history organization to gloss over, hide, or obfuscate historic information to placate people on the right or left as it appears the National Archives has been caught doing.
Two big rail news items this week feel like tantalizing teases. The first is the news that Canada is moving forward with high-speed rail between Toronto and Quebec. Every Canadian I giddily texted this responded with various degrees of jaded scorn that it would ever happen. The second is a federal grant to upgrade a freight rail line on the front range of the Rockies in Colorado that could eventually be turned into a passenger line connecting Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Denver, Boulder, and Fort Collins. I do think it’s only a matter of time for something like this, but I’m betting it will be a loooooong time.
The emblazoning of Ricardo Bofill’s La Fabrica with the Louis Vuitton logo enraged me a few months ago—is nothing worth leaving un-logoed??—but I must say I enjoy the Louis Vuitton flagship in New York City dressed up as the company’s trunks. It comes right up to the line of tacky, perhaps even crossing it, but it’s fun and festive and perhaps we could all be a little less grumpy.
In the hotel design world, one of the biggest stories post-pandemic has been the death of minimalism, or at least the rise from the dead of maximalism. So I enjoyed this little TikTok from this creator calling for a backlash against the modern coffee shop aesthetic. Will we “never again walk into a coffee shop and feel a cozy vibe?” she laments. “We’re always going to have to be forced to pay $8 to be somewhere your voice echoes against the concrete avante-garde raw untreated floors and you have to sit on a cold metal chair.”
The acceptance speech by Daniel Roseberry of Schiaparelli is worth watching for a number of reasons, but I think his reminder to the fashion world about how it’s devalued the word luxury, making it a “mass concept” and confused “desirability for popularity,” worth some reflection by the hospitality industry.
There’s nothing I would enjoy less than a theme park made up of haunted houses, but Universal Studios’ plans for Universal Horror Unleashed in Las Vegas sounds pretty cool.
As TikTokers are discovering, there is no longer an “offseason” for Rome. And visitors are very unhappy with the makeshift pool they’re using to toss coins in while the Trevi Fountain is drained and cleaned.
And the war on AirBnB and Vrbo continues, as the mayor of Marseilles announced a ban on key safes. He says city officials will remove any of the self-check-in enabling devices if they see them.
INDUSTRY NEWS
Abercrombie & Kent unveiled visuals for their upcoming Amazon riverboat:
TGI Fridays files for bankruptcy
Ned Russell takes a look at Pittsburgh’s post-hub future
The massive fight over widening Aspen’s runway goes to a vote on Tuesday
Jaywalkings has been legalized in NYC
Orca splashes poop into audience at SeaWorld San Antonio