Your Next Place

The brainchild of bleeding-edge designer Chryssa Wolfe, this beautiful, sprawling house is both luxurious and morally upright, thanks to the cutting-edge green technology used in its construction.  It's like a Lambourghini that runs on fair trade coffee, or a pair of cashmere Toms.

Seriously though, this house is light years ahead of anything else on the market right now.  With a geothermal heat pump system, a rigid insulation envelope, high-performance insulated windows and doors, and energy recovery ventilators, this house is as energy-efficient a house as present-day technology could produce, aside from some sort of hermetically-sealed fart-warmed life capsule.  This is what all new construction should be like, but isn't, because ... because I don't know why.  It really made me step back and marvel at how inefficient the typical turn-of-the-century DC rowhouse is, with gas-fired furnaces pumping hot steam up through metal coils scattered throughout a swiss-cheese-like brick-and-mortar shell.  It's no wonder that it costs $250 a month to keep my apartment at 62 degrees in the winter.

But this house isn't just environmentally-efficient - it's also beautiful.  With gleaming (responsibly harvested) hardwood floors and an open floor plan, the house is full of light, and spacious.  The coffered ceiling of the family room and cutting-edge color palette of the formal dining room and kitchen belie a design aesthetic as up-to-the-minute as the construction.  There's a huge screened-in porch with panoramic views, and out back is a fantastic in-ground pool, next to which is a wide flagstone-lined lounge area that features an outdoor stone fireplace, where you can recline in sunglasses and surreptitiously judge everyone else's swimsuit bodies.

And since it's a green house (not to be confused with a "greenhouse," which is where our parents grow their glaucoma medicine), the buyer will receive a $35,000 geothermal tax credit, which is almost as much as I get for my made-up family of dependents, Pablo, Marian, and the triplets.  (Hey, as far as I'm concerned, if Mitt Romney pays 14% taxes, all bets are off.)

5420 Galena Place NW
6 Bedrooms, 6 Baths
$2,785,000