Kahan Dhillon, Jr. calls it the Prince, and for the past four years, he’s worked on renovating this 1830 brick rowhouse in Old Town Alexandria. It’s not a reserved makeover. Inspired by his trips to France and Versailles, the project represents a “fusion,” Dhillon says, between our Colonial history and the French Baroque. “It’s bringing George Washington and Louis the XIV together. If they had a conversation, this would have been the outcome.”
The outcome—a six-bedroom, four-and-a-half bathroom property—is now on the market for $4 million. The listing agents are Andrea Courduvelis and Nihal Horne of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty.
Dhillon, a developer based in Old Town, acquired the house in 2021 for $550,000. He spent about seven months alone, he says, sourcing various antiques and fixtures, mostly from abroad: a fireplace screen from a French chateau, a marble armoire, historic doors from a church, trim imported from England. The renovation trades heavily on marble and gold inlays; even the toilet is gold. Dhillon added a new rooftop deck with a built-in grill and small putting green; hired a muralist to adorn the garage door that encloses the off-street parking with the name of the house; and created a museum-style display for an old Westinghouse dumbwaiter he discovered in a crawlspace. “I said to myself, This is a heck of an opportunity to create a one-of-a-kind landmark, an iconic property.”
If the Prince makes a bold statement, Dhillon’s own backstory is no less brash. In 2016, as an unknown political outsider, he began championing a $10 billion redevelopment plan for Baltimore—the Renaissance, he called it—and testified before a skeptical city council. In 2020, he made an aborted run as an independent for mayor of the city. Rumors surfaced, fueled in part by a podcast series produced by Baltimore Public Radio, that he was working with the FBI as part of an investigation into political corruption in the city—a claim Dhillon denied, writing in an op-ed that “the only thing FBI about me is that I am ‘For Baltimore’s Interest.’ “ As the child of an Indian father from Punjab and an African mother from Tanzania, he wrote, he was motivated to contribute to the city’s revival because of his Sikh faith.
Is his political career over? “I will never say never to anything,” Dhillon says. But he’s focused on his development work for now. He touted a forthcoming two-unit development on Pendleton Street in Old Town, each property to feature a new carriage house in the back. And he’s building a new cafe and patisserie on King Street in Old Town. Dhillon says his mother had a recent health scare, which “caused me to want to do something for her” to keep her “in strong spirits.” She’ll be the owner and operator of the cafe, called the Kingley.
