Toutorsky Mansion

rdf:langString Toutorsky Mansion

rdf:langString Toutorsky Mansion

rdf:langString Toutorsky Mansion

rdf:langString Flemish Revival

rdf:langString Washington, D.C., United States

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rdf:langString Sixteenth Street Historic District

rdf:langString The Toutorsky Mansion, also called the Brown-Toutorsky House, is a five-story, 18-room house located at 1720 16th Street, NW in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Since 2012, it has housed the Embassy of the Republic of the Congo. The 12,000-square-foot (1,100 m2) mansion was completed in 1894 for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Henry Billings Brown. Brown spent $65,000 ($2,035,750 today) to build the house, including $25,000 to buy the land from the Riggs family in 1891. The house was designed by architect William Henry Miller, the first graduate of Cornell University’s School of Architecture, who modeled the exterior on 16th-century Flemish buildings, and the interior using a mixture of Gothic, Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Colonial elements. The house contains eight fireplaces and a main staircase featuring hand-carved griffins. "With its stepped and scroll-edged gables, insistent rows of windows, dark red brick, and strong horizontal stone courses, it is a rare iteration of Renaissance Flemish architecture in a city whose architectural ancestry is overwhelmingly English and French,” according to the AIA Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C. The house is a contributing property to the Sixteenth Street Historic District and may not be demolished or significantly altered without permission from the city’s Historic Preservation Review Board.