Tregaron

This twenty-acre Country Place Era house and garden is located on the edge of Rock Creek Park. The land was acquired in the 1880s by Gardiner Greene Hubbard, founder of the National Geographic Society. Hubbard subsequently divided the property between his two daughters, one of whom – Mabel Hubbard – married Alexander Graham Bell. The Bells never lived there, selling the land to James Parmelee, a Cleveland financier, who named it “The Causeway.”

Background

In 1912 Parmelee hired Charles Platt to design a Beaux-Arts house and grounds. The estate’s original buildings – which include a greenhouse, gardener’s cottage, and carriage house – are sited atop a steeply sloped hillside overlooking formal gardens and woodland, with the city in the distance. The layout of the property follows Platt’s design of an entryway (in this case a causeway leading over a large stone bridge) bending toward an arrival court. Platt employed Ellen Shipman to design the gardens and surrounding woodlands. Shipman produced a seemingly natural but carefully composed landscape of plantings and built features. From the back terrace of the house, visitors encounter sweeping views: to the south, a meadow, woodland and a pond and cow pasture beyond; and, to the east, extensive woodland, traversed by bridle and woodland paths. In the 1930s diplomat Joseph Davies and his wife, Marjorie Merriweather Post, bought the estate and renamed it Tregaron. Post’s alterations included the addition of a dacha, or Russian folk cottage, obtained when Davies served as ambassador to the Soviet Union, regrettably placed within Shipman’s formal walled garden.

The estate was designated a local historic landmark in 1979 and listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1989 as Platt’s only surviving house in Washington, D.C., and as one of only three surviving Platt-Shipman collaborations nationally. In 1980 the Tregaron Limited Partnership (TLP) and Washington International School (WIS) jointly purchased the property and divided it into two parcels. The school purchased approximately six acres, including the hilltop and all the landmark’s historic structures. TLP retained ownership of the surrounding fields and woodland with the goal of residential development. The development plans were vigorously opposed by the non-profit Friends of Tregaron (FOT), which fought to maintain the property’s historic character. In 2003 TCLF designated Tregaron a Landslide at-risk landscape. Three years later a settlement was reached under which the thirteen acres in question were donated to the newly formed Tregaron Conservancy, to be preserved in perpetuity. The estate opened to the public in 2009.

In its initial years, the conservancy was faced with the daunting task of stewarding this severely degraded landscape. As landscape historian Thaisa Way and Steve Callcott, now Deputy Historic Preservation Officer for the District of Columbia, noted in 2009, “[t]he rehabilitation of woodlands and wild gardens is a relatively new area for landscape preservation…. The challenge” for the Tregaron Conservancy “[lay] in conserving the plantings, restoring the circulation systems and aesthetic experience, rehabilitating ecologies, and interpreting the place as a designed/wild garden.” To guide their work, the conservancy consulted with the District’s Historic Preservation Office and commissioned a Cultural Landscape Report (CLR) prepared by Heritage Landscapes, completed in 2007. The CLR identified six “character areas” of the landscape from the Platt/Shipman era and their key defining features, offering recommendations on the landscape restoration and rehabilitation of those areas. The conservancy’s preservation and stewardship work garnered national attention. Nevertheless, the landscape was again threatened in 2018 when the WIS proposed to build a large classroom building and parking garage on Tregaron’s protected hilltop, which would destroy the experience of the surrounding woodland landscape.