Kahan Dhillon, Jr. calls it the Prince, and for the previous 4 years, he’s labored on renovating this 1830 brick rowhouse in Previous City Alexandria. It’s not a reserved makeover. Impressed by his journeys to France and Versailles, the venture represents a “fusion,” Dhillon says, between our Colonial historical past and the French Baroque. “It’s bringing George Washington and Louis the XIV collectively. If that they had a dialog, this is able to have been the result.”
The end result—a six-bedroom, four-and-a-half lavatory property—is now in the marketplace for $4 million. The itemizing brokers are Andrea Courduvelis and Nihal Horne of TTR Sotheby’s Worldwide Realty.
Dhillon, a developer primarily based in Previous City, acquired the home in 2021 for $550,000. He spent about seven months alone, he says, sourcing numerous antiques and fixtures, principally from overseas: a fire display from a French chateau, a marble armoire, historic doorways from a church, trim imported from England. The renovation trades closely on marble and gold inlays; even the bathroom is gold. Dhillon added a brand new rooftop deck with a built-in grill and small placing inexperienced; employed a muralist to adorn the storage door that encloses the off-street parking with the identify of the home; and created a museum-style show for an outdated Westinghouse dumbwaiter he found in a crawlspace. “I mentioned to myself, This can be a heck of a chance to create a one-of-a-kind landmark, an iconic property.”
If the Prince makes a daring assertion, Dhillon’s personal backstory isn’t any much less brash. In 2016, as an unknown political outsider, he started championing a $10 billion redevelopment plan for Baltimore—the Renaissance, he referred to as it—and testified earlier than a skeptical metropolis council. In 2020, he made an aborted run as an impartial for mayor of the town. Rumors surfaced, fueled partly by a podcast sequence produced by Baltimore Public Radio, that he was working with the FBI as a part of an investigation into political corruption within the metropolis—a declare Dhillon denied, writing in an op-ed that “the one factor FBI about me is that I’m ‘For Baltimore’s Curiosity.’ “ Because the youngster of an Indian father from Punjab and an African mom from Tanzania, he wrote, he was motivated to contribute to the town’s revival due to his Sikh religion.
Is his political profession over? “I’ll by no means say by no means to something,” Dhillon says. However he’s centered on his improvement work for now. He touted a forthcoming two-unit improvement on Pendleton Road in Previous City, every property to function a brand new carriage home within the again. And he’s constructing a new cafe and patisserie on King Road in Previous City. Dhillon says his mom had a current well being scare, which “induced me to wish to do one thing for her” to maintain her “in robust spirits.” She’ll be the proprietor and operator of the cafe, referred to as the Kingley.
