They weren’t looking for a house. They had one already, a bungalow in Brookland. But this was 2020, the start of the pandemic, and so Chase Maggiano was diving down the Zillow rabbit hole, just for sport, when he happened upon a listing unlike any other. It was the Childs House in Chevy Chase, DC—a modern white marvel in a neighborhood of Colonials. “And he said, ‘Well, let’s just go look at it,’ “ recalls his husband, Chris Cormier Maggiano. “And as soon as we walked into the living room, we said, ‘Oh my God.’ ”
Designed and built in 1975 by the architect Pierre Paul Childs, who lived there with his wife, Evelyn, the house has long been a local curiosity: “a graceful tower poised among tall trees,” as Architectural Digest described it soon after it was constructed. When Evelyn died in 2019, following her husband’s passing decades earlier, the estate had listed it for sale. The place needed work: It hadn’t been lived in for many years, and the finishes—think wall-to-wall carpeting—were dated. Only one other offer had been submitted when Chase discovered the listing: from a developer looking to tear it down.
The Maggianos were smitten. Chris had studied architecture at Carnegie Mellon before becoming a political and philanthropical strategist and adviser. And Chase, the former executive director of the Washington Chorus, was a violinist who would later open a bow shop in the Watergate. Here was a house they could restore, a house where they could host concerts. They wrote a letter to Evelyn’s brother (“I don’t know if that swayed him,” says Chris) and their offer of $1.24 million was accepted. In the following months, they embarked on a thoughtful renovation that maintained the house’s quirky legacy. Now, after moving to New York, they’ve decided to pass on its stewardship to a new set of owners, listing the property for $2 million.
On a recent morning, I met Chris at the house. It sits on a corner lot, elevated above the neighborhood like a modernist lighthouse. Childs, a professor at Catholic University, had helped design the Metro system under the direction of the architect Harry Weese, and had helped lead the overhaul of Union Station in the late 1980s. The house he designed for himself is, as Architectural Digest described it in 1978, “faithful both to the mainstream vocabulary of Modern architecture and to his own imagination.” Step inside, and you realize his imagination was both free-wheeling and fanciful. “It’s a very fun, quirky house, and so we tried to lean into that,” Chris says.
Working from Childs’s hand-drawn plans, the Maggianos maintained his original spirit, even as they made the house their own. They removed the faded carpeting and replaced it with oak and marble flooring; modernized the finishes, updating the kitchen and bathrooms; transformed Evelyn’s studio—she was a ceramicist—into a guest and Peloton room; and added flourishes of their own, including a curved wall of tigerwood that leads into the master bathroom and harbors a hidden shoe closet. As for the vintage Sciolari chandelier that now hangs in the dining room? They discovered it at the famous Parisian flea market, Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen, and sourced much of the other furniture from Peg Leg Vintage in Beltsville. A vintage Eames lounger dates to the year of the house’s completion. In 2023, when a Civil War-era oak tree fell during a storm, damaging the side of the house, they gave the exterior a much-needed refresh.
The house produces a feeling of anticipation—a surprise lurking around every corner. When one sits at the dining room table, a view opens up through the fireplace cutout to the south-facing windows. From the rooftop, one can spy the top of the Washington Monument. A cantilevered, semi-circular window seat on the top floor offers sunset views. What will he miss most? “The light,” says Chris. “It feels like you’re in the country, even though you’re in the city. And the second thing is the dinners on the rooftop.”
Pierre and Evelyn had been famously private, and after the Maggianos moved in and the pandemic abated, they invited everyone in the neighborhood for a fall celebration: 35 guests congregating for dinner. In the mornings, at least before their daughter was born, they often started the day by drinking coffee in the hot tub they installed on the roof, birdwatching as the sun rose. “The feeling is that of being in a tree house, or in some futuristic crow’s nest,” as Architectural Digest proclaimed.
Was he wistful at leaving it all behind? No question. “It feels like we’ve been caretakers for the home,” Chris says. And they’re looking for someone else to bring the same preservationist ethic to the place. “Hopefully it’ll be around for a very long time.”
