Katharine Graham’s Fabled Washington Home Is Kept Empty by a 22-Year Battle

The home of Katharine Graham, the former Washington Post publisher, was once a hub of power and comity. But after an “insane” renovation spat, its new owner is looking to sell.

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The Beall-Washington house before a garden brunch in April. When the owners hired a team of building and landscape architects to plan an expansion in 2014, their ambitions set off an immediate uproar.

President-elect John F. Kennedy was there for dinner the night before his inauguration. Years later, President-elect Ronald Reagan was there too. So were Truman Capote, Princess Diana, Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, diplomats, financiers and thousands more who came to a hub of bipartisan Washington power where guests dined, debated and often parted as friends.

“It was a special place to grow up,” said Donald Graham, a former publisher of The Washington Post, remembering his childhood home.

For nearly 60 years, Katharine Graham, Mr. Graham’s mother, presided over the grand Beaux-Arts house at 2920 R Street in Georgetown, first as the young bride of Philip Graham, the publisher of The Post, and then as publisher herself after her husband’s death. After she died in 2001 her estate sold the home to Mark Ein, a venture capitalist and philanthropist who owns Washington City Paper and has a stake in the city’s N.F.L. team, the Commanders, and in its world-class tennis tournament, the Mubadala Citi D.C. Open. He paid $8 million.

Mr. Ein, then a bachelor, had no plans to entertain in Mrs. Graham’s grand style and did not move in. But after he married Sally Stiebel in the home’s garden in 2013, the couple decided to raise their family there. It seemed a new chapter had begun.

It was not to be. Neighbors, who had already clucked about Mr. Ein’s failure to shovel his sidewalks to their standards, complained about the couple’s plans to renovate and expand the house. A review panel repeatedly rejected the couple’s plans, including in a hearing that nearly ended in a fistfight.

The Eins gave up, and the house has sat vacant, its iron fence rusting and its front lawn pocked with weeds. Inside, its once-grand dining room attests to a long-ago Washington where legislators from both parties got together on weekends instead of fleeing the fractious capital. The evolution of the storied house tracks the city’s own journey into polarized camps where presidents rarely, if ever, drop by private homes.

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