TTR Sotheby's International RealtyWhen he was still getting his start, long before he designed a house for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on Martha’s Vineyard, or worked on the interior restoration of the Renwick Gallery and west terrace addition to the U.S. Capitol, the celebrated architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen constructed the Trentman House in Georgetown. The year was 1969, a decade after he had started his practice, and the house was one of the first modern buildings to rise in the neighborhood. Now, for only the third time, the property has hit the market, listed by TTR Sotheby’s International Realty for $4.2 million. “The best house is polite to her neighbors and never shouts,” Jacobsen famously said, before his passing, at age 91, in 2021. And Trentman reflects that mantra. Flanked by two brick rowhouses, and constructed on the site of a dilapidated 19th-century structure that was razed, it manages to defer to its historic counterparts even as it stands apart. “A Brutalistic departure from Federalism,” as his son, Simon, the principal of Jacobsen Architecture, calls it. Inside, Jacobsen’s obsession with light is evident: two 10-foot-wide cylinders housing the stairs and topped by circular skylights allow light to filter down through the interior. Before he hung out his shingle, Jacobsen worked for the controversial American architect Philip Johnson and was fired for, among other things, his poor draftsmanship. “If you were to look at some of Johnson’s interiors projects and look at the hardware and the skylights and the doors, you will see that in the Trentman House,” Simon says.  TTR Sotheby’s International Realty Built for Stephen Trentman, a CIA officer, and his wife, Emalea, the house passed through another owner before the current occupant, Leslie Wheelock, purchased it with her husband in 1998. She completed a renovation this year that updated the kitchen and bathrooms and added energy-efficient features, including double-paned windows. “You could sit there and watch the light and the shadows move through the house,” she says. “It’s just so beautiful inside.” The house foreshadowed what was to come. When it was built, Jacobsen’s office was above what’s now Stachowski’s Market on P Street, and his own house (recently gutted and flipped by a developer) was around the corner on 28th Street. Jacobsen labored prodigiously in Georgetown (Simon estimates he did renovations and other work on more than 300 houses in the neighborhood), in part because he had ingratiated himself with the Kennedy-era Democrats who had decamped there, dining with the likes of Katharine Graham, Ethel Kennedy, and Ben Bradlee. As his stature grew, so did his star-studded list of clients: Paul and Bunny Mellon, Pamela Harriman, Meryl Streep, James Garner, and, of course, Jackie O.   But before all that, there was Trentman. In a 2009 interview, Jacobsen recalled how Gordon Bunshaft, a partner at Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill, and Bill Walton, a painter, both of whom were then serving on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, pulled him aside and said, “We’d like to see a modern house in Georgetown.” More than 100 protestors tried to prevent the demolition of the existing rowhouse on the site, as Jacobsen recalled, but he had the necessary support. “The house is very polite to its surrounding buildings. It lines its cornices up, its windows are in line. It’s really like a soldier standing there,” says Simon. “Trentman really saw the beginnings of [Hugh’s] modernist, early Brutalist work … In 1973, just a few years [later], he designed the Mellon pool house in Middleburg. So you can see in that compressed time frame how quickly he rose.”The post Hugh Newell Jacobsen House Listed in Georgetown first appeared on Washingtonian.