Lawyerly Lairs: The Five Most Expensive Attorney Abodes in Washington, D.C.

Washington lawyers own some pretty spectacular real estate. Here are the five most expensive lawyerly lairs in D.C....

What can we say? We can’t get enough of Washington real estate. And neither can you, judging from the traffic generated by our recent look at some million-dollar homes in the D.C. area. So let’s return to that well.

Our last story was about homes in the $1 million to $3 million range. Let’s class it up a bit and look at Lawyerly Lairs ranging in value from $7 million to $10 million….

We turn, once again, to the pages of Washingtonian. This delightful magazine — to which I still subscribe, even though I no longer live in D.C. — recently issued a list of Washington’s 50 most expensive homes. And guess what? At least five of the 50 residences are owned by attorneys!

Let’s start from the bottom of the list. The lawyer with the lowest-ranked house happens to have the highest power and influence. Here’s the house that comes in at #50 on the list of 50 priciest properties:

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And information about it, from Washingtonian:

Known as the Robert P. Dodge house, this pale-yellow Italianate home was built in 1853 by Dodge, the son of a wealthy shipping merchant. During World War I it housed a nightclub, and in 1920 it was bought by Warren Delano Robbins, a cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1987, lawyer C. Boyden Gray paid $4.1 million for it — a jaw-dropping sum at the time.

A former partner at the law firm WilmerHale, Gray was White House counsel under George H.W. Bush and later US ambassador to the European Union. Gray’s place isn’t far from the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham’s former home — the two used to be tennis partners.

Ambassador Gray is a major D.C. power broker, as you would expect of a former White House counsel and Wilmer partner. He has been involved in numerous Supreme Court confirmation battles — sometimes behind the scenes, and sometimes on the front lines. He received his law degree from UNC Law, where he served as editor-in-chief of the law review.

(Boyden Gray’s fabulous daughter, Eliza Gray, is an assistant editor of The New Republic. As longtime readers of Above the Law may recall, prior to joining TNR, she wrote for ATL. How neat is that?)

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Boyden Gray earned his fame — and some of his fortune, although he also enjoys significant family money — through the practice of law. Our next two lawyer-homeowners, in contrast, are lawyers by training — i.e., rich people who happen to have law degrees….