Inside The 900-Unit Project Opening Soon On The Former Marriott Wardman Park Site
In a few months, the first residents will begin moving into a nearly 900-unit apartment complex in Northwest D.C.’s Woodley Park neighborhood on a site that held one of the city’s largest hotels for over a century.
Carmel Partners is nearly done with the first phase of its Wardman Park project situated on the 9.5-acre hill that once held the Washington Marriott Wardman Park.
The company began preleasing for Aerie — the higher-end, 290-unit tower on the Connecticut Avenue side of the property — over Memorial Day weekend, and the first move-ins are scheduled for August. Zephyr, the 17-story tower with 577 units, is expected to deliver near the end of the year.
The Marriott, which closed at the beginning of the pandemic, was one of the city’s largest conference venues, with 1,152 hotel rooms and 195K SF of event space. The original hotel was built in 1918 and redeveloped in the 1970s. The nine-story Wardman Tower, built in 1928 as part of the original hotel, still sits on the site and operates as a condo building.
Carmel Partners purchased the hotel property at an auction in July 2021 for $152M after its prior owner, an affiliate of Pacific Life Insurance Co., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Carmel secured a $360M loan from Wells Fargo Bank in August 2023 to build the complex.
The 867-unit project is part of the last wave of buildings to come online from the city’s pandemic-era multifamily boom before higher interest rates and construction costs contributed to a slowdown in development.
Some 7,700 rental units are expected to come online in D.C. this year, but just 1,363 units are expected to deliver in 2026 — a 10-year low, according to the Washington DC Economic Partnership’s annual report. Only 932 rental units broke ground in 2024, down from 9,028 in 2022 and 4,474 in 2023.
The Woodley Park area has had little new product built in decades. The stretch of Connecticut Avenue between Dupont and Cleveland Park is lined with older apartment buildings from the 1970s and 1980s.
“This is definitely an upgrade for Woodley Park rental living,” Greystar’s Bradley Halverson, the general manager of the Aerie building, told Bisnow.
At Aerie, one-bedrooms start at $3,155 per month — those are between 645 and 1,113 SF, according to Halverson. Two-bedrooms start at $6,195 per month and range from 1,181 to 1,327 SF, And three-bedrooms start at $8,780 per month and are between 1,549 and 1,819 SF.
Halverson didn’t share pricing for penthouse units, but two listed for lease on Aerie’s website show a 1,675 SF penthouse unit priced at $13,020 per month and a 1,703 SF unit priced at $13,130 per month.
The pricing for Zephyr hasn’t been set, but it is planned to be slightly more affordable than Aerie.
In D.C., Class-A rents across all unit types averaged $2,857 per month in the first quarter, according to RealPage data cited by Berkadia in its Q1 report.
Aerie has 25 units and Zephyr has 47 units reserved for residents making between 50% and 60% of the area median income. A neighborhood group in 2021 called for D.C. to purchase the former hotel property and build affordable housing on the site, a push that was backed by at least two D.C. council members but was ultimately unsuccessful.
Aerie is nine stories and Zephyr is 17. But because the site is situated on a hill, Zephyr’s eighth floor is on the same level as Aerie’s first.
The buildings encircle a 1-acre courtyard that will hold a resort-style pool with cabanas, hibachi and grill stations, a children’s play area and a bocce court.
They have four pools between them — the shared courtyard pool, a shared indoor lap pool with a sauna and hot tub, and a pool on each rooftop reserved for the residents of each property.
The 20K SF shared fitness and wellness center, which includes the lap pool, also has a hot tub, an infrared sauna and four private fitness studios.
The buildings are dog-friendly and each has a dog park and pet spa. They also both have coworking spaces. The buildings will have 875 total parking spaces.
Aerie has higher-end appliances and more three-bedroom units than Zephyr. It also has a penthouse private dining area next to a fireside lounge. Zephyr has studios, while Aerie doesn't.
Zephyr, which is on the side of the property closer to the Naval Observatory, will have an “observatory amenity space,” which may have some kind of “lookout” equipment, Halverson said.
Both buildings have penthouse units with the same high-end appliances and finishes.
The north side of the property on Woodley Road will remain a publicly accessible open green space, as it was under the hotel’s ownership. The 1.5-acre lawn has been historically used by nearby schools, and the new landscaping will retain that usage.
Shalom Baranes Associates designed the project. The buildings have separate interior designers — Champalimaud Design worked on Aerie and Rodrigo Vargas Design designed Zephyr.
Aerie’s custom German blue-green terracotta exterior is a nod to the coloring on the adjacent Omni Shoreham and Wardman Tower’s cupolas.
Halverson compared the project to other Northwest D.C. developments like Roadside Development and North America Sekisui House’s 687-unit City Ridge, Lowe and National Real Estate Advisors’s 195-unit The Hepburn in Kalorama and EastBanc and Mitsui Fudosan America’s 172-unit Silva in Adams Morgan.
“The opportunity to bring something like this to such a well-known, stately neighborhood here in D.C. is super exciting,” he said.
