C. Boyden Gray’s house in Georgetown is on the market for $13.5 million. The listing agents are Jamie Peva, Nancy Taylor Bubes and Lenore Rubino of Washington Fine Properties.
Known as the Robert P. Dodge House, the circa 1850 residence is named after its first owner, an important merchant and shipper who was a consulting engineer for the C&O Canal. Dodge hired Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux to design the home.
Downing, better known as an American landscape architecture pioneer who laid the groundwork for Central Park in New York, was also a sought-after architect in his time. Downing and Vaux designed the house in an Italianate style, but subsequent alterations have stripped it of most of those features.
The house has gone through several notable owners. Warren Delano Robbins, a cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, bought the property in 1920. Robbins, who served in the State Department, was said to have a special attachment to Dodge House because his grandfather’s house in Newburgh, N.Y., had also been designed by Downing.
Edith Morton Eustis bought the house in 1936. She was the daughter of Levi P. Morton, who was Benjamin Harrison’s vice president. Her husband, William Corcoran Eustis, chaired the inauguration committee for Woodrow Wilson in 1913 and started the Loudoun Hunt in 1894.
After Edith Eustis’s death in 1964, Martin F. Malarkey, a cable communications executive, bought the house. Malarkey sold it in 1978 to Edward Fleming, a Washington psychiatrist. When Gray bought the home in 1987 for $4 million, it was the highest price paid for a single-family house in Washington.
Gray, who served as White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush and as U.S. ambassador to the European Union from 2006 to 2007, was an influential Republican strategist and fundraiser. He died in 2023.
The four-level, 11,000-square-foot residence has eight bedrooms, seven full bathrooms and two half bathrooms. It has 12-foot ceilings, an elevator that runs to all levels, five fireplaces, a catering kitchen, and a wine cellar. The large formal living room was decorated by Richard Keith Langham, a New York-based interior designer who worked for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The grounds include a large lawn with terraces, a crescent-shaped drive and a two-car garage.
Correction: A previous version of this story stated the house was back on the market at a new price. It is being listed for the first time. When the Wall Street Journal reported a higher price for the house in January, it had not yet been placed on the market.
