Timberwood of Washington: Mid-Century Neighborhoods Tour

The ten houses forming Timberwood of Washington are located on either side of a heavily wooded pipe stem on the north side of the 5300 block of MacArthur Boulevard NW in the Palisades (5341-5359 MacArthur Blvd). All of the houses, adhering to a single design model, line the somewhat meandering lane which leads up a steep incline before it dead-ends. The houses are tall, three-story A-frame structures set upon raised brick foundations with carports, and clad with wide, vertical board wood siding. In standard Mid-Century fashion, wrap-around balconies and decks at the upper levels, in addition to large expanses of glass windows and sliding glass doors, help bring the outdoors in.

Timberwood of Washington was built in 1968 by the speculative development team of Matthews & Schwartz and designed by Cross & Adreon, a successful and well-established architecture firm that specialized in Modern residential design in DC, Maryland and Virginia. Eason Cross trained at Harvard University under Walter Gropius and during the 1950s, was an associate with Charles Goodman & Associates. While large-scale residential subdivisions adhering to a Modern design aesthetic, like Hollin Hills--designed by Goodman--were popular in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs in the 1950s and 60s, Matthews & Schwartz recognized the limitations of that model in DC and instead crafted a small-scale speculative development on steep terrain, creating a hidden and tight-knit wooded community they called Timberwood of Washington.