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A brief history of the street, the residence and the gallery

Our street, Rossdhu Court (pronounced Ross'-dew), was named after the castle that stood where the cul-de-sac is today. Many old-timers remember the huge house and skated on the pond that formed its "moat." Rossdhu Castle was built in 1927 by Captain & Mrs. Clarence Calhoun on a 90 acre site. The house was modeled after Rossdhu House, ancestral home of the Clan Colquhoun and now Loch Lomond Golf Club, in Scotland. Cornerstones for the Calhoun's extravagant house came from ancient Scottish castles, and the great hall measured 60'x40'. A conservatory opened onto a terrace and bowling green with Scottish turf, overlooking the gateway lodge and pond. The 1929 crash ended the Calhouns' fortune, and they moved into the Gatehouse. Rossdhu Castle became a nightclub in the 30's, was divided into apartments in 1937, and was demolished in the late 1950's.

The original gatehouse still stands, now a private residence on Woodbine Street. The demolished castle's site was subdivided for seven 60's-70's contemporary-style homes on Rossdhu Court, amid the traditional/colonial haven of Chevy Chase. Number 7608 was built by Herbert Haft, founder of Dart Drug and Shopper's Food Warehouse. The house was designed by his brother Leonard Haft, partner in CHK Architects (Cohen Haft Karydis). Herbert Haft visited us often after we acquired the house, and told us that it had won several architectural awards. He'd asked his brother to include a full basement under the concrete beams and terrazzo flooring of the ground floor, making a huge bomb shelter in keeping with the cold war mentality of the times.

In 1975, the Hafts sold their home to the East German embassy, which maintained it as their Embassy Residence until shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The cental spaces were used for elegant entertaining, but the upstairs, the rooms on each end of the house and the vast basement were subdivided into small apartments. When we bought the house, after it had stood empty for three years, we found a key pegboard in the basement that indicated 36 people had lived there. There were 11 bathrooms, 7 kitchens, and uncountable rabbit-warren-sized rooms. Other basement curiosities included a darkroom and a large room that had no doors; when the East Germans left, they removed whatever was kept there by knocking out a 4' x 4' piece of a concrete block wall.

Returning the Embassy to a single family residence was fun but challenging; the East Germans were not required to follow building codes. We virtually gutted the interior, replaced all of the floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding glass doors, the roof, and most of the wiring and plumbing. We turned many small rooms into fewer large ones, added a sunroom and built in plenty of bookshelves for our offices. When we no longer needed two of the apartments for business use, we created the gallery spaces that are now Rossdhu Gallery.