“Charming rambler with country cottage vibe, nestled on nearly half acre amid towering trees and shrubs, a nature lover’s dream.”
Real estate ads are notorious for stretching the truth, but in the case of the Tauxemont neighborhood, touts like the one above are spot on.
Well, at least for now.
Since the 1940s, this historic district with woodsy charm halfway between Alexandria and Mount Vernon has been some kind of a special place to live. Although it does lie about 1,000 feet from the river, one writer called it “Walden Pond on the Potomac.”
Woodsy charm describes a lot of neighborhoods in the Washington region, but this one stands out in a particular way. Fairfax County has eight residential areas on the National Register for Historic Districts. Only two -- Tauxemont and Hollin Hills -- have earned that coveted status due to in great part to the way the developer set the low slung homes into the hilly landscape.
Similar to Hollin Hills, its nearby sister neighborhood, great care was taken to keep things natural. As one historian put it, the one-story homes (originally about 1,000 SF) don’t lie on the landscape, but within it. The neighborhood’s streets are narrow and have no unsightly power lines and poles. As from the beginning, residents get their water from one of the three wells. Appropriately, nearby sits the American Horticultural Society.
Winning awards and getting press coverage, Hollin Hills has garnered a lot more attention than Tauxemeont. Our guess is that suits Tauxemonters just fine. They’ve been happy in their solitude, a smaller and tucked away enclave.
But now, a new and potentially troubling chapter is unfolding in the neighborhood of about 100 homes. Slowly but steadily, Tauxemont is losing the unique qualities that have made it special. Seven of the original homes have been demolished and replaced with a McMansion home. One sagging, original home sure seems like an invitation for the next McMansion.
Out of scale and void of the trees and bushes found in front of the other homes, they stand almost like a taunt to everything the community has stood for all these years.
The landscape is not the only thing that is being lost. If McMansion homes continue to be built, Tauxemont could lose its status on the National Register for Historic District.
To be fair, the neighborhood does not just consist of the smaller original ones and the McMansions. Some of the homes built in the 1940s have been added on to.
Nevertheless, most of those help to retain the original look and feel of soft-scale homes set back from the narrow, bush-lined roads. In stark contrast, the builders of the McMansion cut down the trees and bushes and put up wide concrete driveways and garages. Square footage is as high as 6,700.
Some advocates have touted McMansions as a component of smart growth. That is, if they are built as infill near the density core and not in the exurbs, which promotes sprawl. Although it is not located in an inner suburb, Tauxemont is a case of the former.
On the other hand, there is the question of size. Jack Nasar, a professor of City and Regional Planning (“The Impact and Controls of Super-Sized Houses”) looked at the size of McMansions in relation to the other homes in a neighborhood.
He cites a study that shows, in essence, that in a block of small houses, it takes only a small increase in size for the infill house to stand out as incompatible. In a block of larger houses, it takes a larger increase in size to stand out. Nasar states one could therefore argue that it is not worth setting regulations on absolute size, but rather based on ratio.
Another facet on the topic of McMansions is the costs of tearing down old and building new. In her book, “The Past and Future City,” Stephanie Meeks explains how saving a building instead of demolishing it has financial benefits as well as environmental ones. She quotes architect Carl Elefante who said, “The greenest building is the one that is already built.”
The story of Tauxemont starts in the early 1940s when Southeast Fairfax County was mostly a quilt of farmland. Speeding cars on the two-lane U.S. Route One scared the daylights out of dairy farmers, fewer and fewer in number.
This part of southeast Fairfax County, about eight miles south of Washington, had benefited from mass transit in the 1890s in the form of the Washington, Alexandria and Mount Vernon Electric Railway. A squirrel hunter standing on the hills where Tauxemont now lies could see the passing trolley cars making their stop at the nearby communities of Wellington and Arcturus.
In the 1920s, Americans had fallen in love with being behind the wheel of their own car. Where the Washington-Alexandria-Mount Vernon Electric Railway tracks had ran past the future site of Tauxemont, the GW Parkway helped usher in a new era of getting around in 1932.
In the 1930s, FDR’s New Deal expanded the Federal government in Washington. Even before the boom that came during and after the end of World War II, a scattering of subdivision homes were built on Groveton’s Beacon Hill in 1937.
But it was the return of the GIs that kickstarted the rapid transformation of Fairfax County. Its population in 1930 (25,000), which was not that much larger than in 1850 (10,000) jumped to 40,000 in 1940. Twenty years later, a quarter of a million called the county home.
With a mass-production mandate to put up affordable homes during the Baby Boom era, bulldozers carved out the land with little regard to what was taken away.
Developer Robert C. Davenport (1906-2002) saw something different for a modest-sized parcel about halfway between Alexandria and Mount Vernon. Early residents of the neighborhood (first phase completed in 1941), named for a tribe of American Indians, formed a cooperative association. By 1953, about 100 homes, each about 1,200-square-foot, were completed. Many are one-story and sited with their gable ends towards the street. Some of the later additions were designed by Charles Goodman.
Some of the Tauxemonters, as they call themselves, are proud of the neighborhood’s progressive history. In 1946, Jane Wellemeyer served as the first President of the League of Women Voters of the Fairfax Area. In 1957, Edith Hussey served on the Fairfax County Council on Human Relations, which expressed opposition to segregation and the Massive Resistance movement.
Scott Surovell, State Senator, 36th District, Virginia, is a lifelong resident. His grandparents were among the first twenty families who founded the Tauxemont Community and Cooperative Preschool in the early 1940s.
On my first walk through the neighborhood I spotted a middle-aged lady walking her dog down Shenandoah Road. On a wide suburban street, I probably would not even have made eye contact.
In Tauxemont, where there are no sidewalks and the streets are barely wide enough for two cars, the stranger feels welcomed.
As she and her dog approached, I said hello. She returned the greeting with a smile. I asked about the McMansion homes. Without going into details, she said many of the residents were not pleased with them. Looking around, I noticed a McMansion home stood across the street from her home, as well as another next door.
I would have loved to have returned home and wrote up a glowing visit report on Tauxemont. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the story there is the McMansions and how they are affecting the sacrosanct nature of Tauxemont.
It’s true, developers build these home because they fit a need and people buy them. But I would have thought the last place in Fairfax County where even one of them would be built is this oasis of soft-scale living.
Seeking answers, we reached out to a handful of people and contacts. We started with the Tauxemont Community Association. Stephanie Kostro, TCA Secretary, promptly replied and said their covenant does not prohibit McMansions. If a community member wants to propose an amendment, the community would discuss and vote on it during their annual meeting.
We also contacted Surovell. He said that tax incentives are available for those who want to renovate their homes in a manner sympathetic with the modest nature of the neighborhood.
Previously, the community tried to adopt a covenant that would have limited the height and larger size of any new home. Residents, Surovell said, were uncomfortable putting restrictions on neighbors who didn't want them.
McMansions, derided as everything from “temples to American excess” to “the ultimate symbol of living beyond one's means,” to “garage Mahals,” are nothing new in the U.S. A CNBC report in 2012 reported that after five years, the oversized houses were making a comeback. This year, several reports note McMansions are once again seeing an uptick in sales in places like Dallas, Seattle, Denver and Indianapolis.
In Fairfax County, all one has to do is drive through older subdivisions to see them. Or, you can visit Kate Wagner's website, mcmansionhell.com. Coming in at number six on her list of "Worst Ones" in the country is one in Fairfax County. She lambasts it for its “snout garage, gaping vacuous window holes, steps of shame and asphalt landscaping.”
There’s a McMansion in our neighborhood. A valentine to the automobile, the front of the house is the garage.
I will say this homes does have some sympathy vis a vis its width, which is about the same as the others on the block. Additionally, having something new in a suburban landscape that is showing its age can be considered a good thing.
After completing Tauxemont, Davenport turned his attention to another crown of leafy land south of Alexandria and about a mile north of Tauxemont. By this time, the late 1940s, a handful of other suburban neighborhoods were being built in places that would be named Penn-Daw, Hybla Valley and Belle View.
With Hollin Hills, Davenport kept the landscape philosophy he used so wonderfully in Tauxemont. In a move that proved to be brilliant, he signed on Goodman to design the homes. The rest is history. As the Hollin Hills website notes, the mid-century modern neighborhood represents a "design aesthetic rarely expressed in the Washington Metro Area, and certainly not in such a concentrated way."
Unlike Tauxemont, not one McMansion has been built in Hollin Hills. Scott Wilson, a longtime resident there, explained that Davenport put a design review process in place from the outset for Hollins Hills. The tight-knit community has, he said, barred "non-conforming" structures, with only one or two minor exceptions.
Tauxemont, on the other hand, never put forth any design restrictions.
In Alexandria, Gadsby’s Tavern proudly proclaims “George dined here.” With access to the maps to prove it, residents near Mount Vernon can brag that “Washington farmed here.” Washington's planation spread across five farms. The northern border of River Farm ran across the land where Tauxemont lies today.
A half century after Washington slipped away at Mount Vernon, the plantation home he had built had fallen into a sorry state of disrepair. Inspired by her mother, who described Mount Vernon as a “blot on our country,” Ann Pamela Cunningham led the clarion call to preserve it. She formed the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and helped saved the national shrine.
Mary V. Thompson, a research historian at Mount Vernon and a resident of Tauxemont, knows a thing or two about preservation. Seeing a couple of McMansions go up in the neighborhood in the early part of the 2000s, she, along with Susan Escherich, went to work and wrote the nomination form to get Tauxemont on the National Register for Historic Places.
Approved in 2005, it reads in part,
Tauxemont’s significance lies in its conscious effort to blend in with the natural setting, which remains its outstanding characteristic today. In the late 1940s, several owners asked architect Charles Goodman to design additions to their basic Tauxemont houses. These additions, with large glass areas, are very much in keeping with the style of his award-winning houses in Hollin Hills and illustrate the continuity and similarity in architecture and land use between the two developments.
Michael Shapiro of Modern Capital took notice and wrote a report. He pointed out that although Tauxemont’s listing on the National Register for Historic Places provided incentives to maintain the neighborhoods low roof line character, they do not prevent the destruction of the homes.
Shapiro quoted Thompson, then Chair of the Tauxemont Historic Preservation Committee. She explained that the developers target places like Tauxemont because “they were organized and built before the days of restrictive covenants.”
Shapiro reported that The Fairfax County Department of Planning and Zoning and the Department of Public Works and Environmental Services was planning to develop regulations to “limit the looming affect that can be created by tall structures built in close proximity to their property line.”
Thompson said she believed the county’s ideas were a good compromise.
No such compromise ever came about. More McMansions were built across the county and in Tauxemont, including one built this year.
Could Tauxemont lost its historic status?
We spoke with Lena McDonald, National/State Register Historian at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. She said,
Should new development occur of a type and scale that isn't in keeping with the district's character, then it is possible for the district to lose its historic and architectural integrity to a point that it could be delisted from the Registers.
In a live and let live world, McMansions have their place. A local real estate agent told us they typically sell fast in Fairfax County where land, especially closer to Washington, is valuable.
In his article, “Spacious Vulgarity: The Aesthetics and Morals of McMansions,” Paul Mullins lends a sympathetic ear to their existence.
Our commonplace distaste for oversized homes may indeed be well-placed for various social, community, and environmental reasons, but we risk dismissing families’ desire for tract mansions, and we hazard ignoring why material things like McMansions allow scholars to unleash their own classist, suburban, and material stereotypes.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel concerned about Tauxemont. The balance is still in favor of the bushes and low rooflines. But if you want to see what has made the neighborhood such a special place, I wouldn’t wait too long to pay a visit. “Nature lover’s dream” could one day soon become just another stretch of the truth.
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