Two houses in one of DC’s most upscale neighborhoods were “built to perfection,' according to their developer: Steve Salis, owner of Ted’s Bulletin and Kramers. But the homeowners allege they were defrauded into buying dangerous, $1.8 million lemons.
, he grew up in New Hampshire and played college basketball before dropping out and moving to New York. While working as a nightclub doorman, he began to amass contacts that would give him entrée into the restaurant world. In 2020, eight years after he and a cofounder debuted their first &Pizza on H Street, Northeast, Salis bought the 13,000-square-foot McLean mansion previously owned by Washington Wizards star Bradley Beal.
At first, the homeowners didn’t want to believe they’d poured their savings into $1.8-million lemons. Puri says she chalked up some of the headaches to kinks that simply hadn’t been worked out because no one else had ever lived in her home. “I didn’t totally freak out,” she says. “It was like, okay, I’m sure it can be fixed.”
Photos from 1516 Foxhall, according to its owners, show towels sopping up leaks and faulty HVAC equipment on the front lawn. One day, Puri noticed a blemish around a seam in the hardwood floor. She bent down to take a closer look.Disgusted, she texted a photo to Sadik. By then, given the water coming in, both families say they worried that mold was lurking behind the walls. Now here was actual fungus sprouting in front of their eyes.
Before buying, both families had conducted inspections, which turned up several concerns. But as a condition of closing, the owners allege in their lawsuit, the developers assured them that those items had been fixed. When she got to the Palisades for her planned home inspection a couple weeks before closing, she found that the house was still a mess. She rescheduled at least four more times, delaying the closing date, before a partial inspection could take place. Mims alleged that it revealed serious concerns, including holes in exterior walls and electrical fixtures that posed a fire hazard.
Tammy Gale, who first had the listing for Washington Fine Properties, was initially excited about the project, especially after touring the robotics factory. A big selling point of the technology, according to Salis and Thompson, was that it was much faster and more precise than building a standard house. The prefab parts could be assembled—like “grown-up Legos,” in Salis’s words—in mere days.
Gale says she advised Salis and Thompson to return the Russes’ deposit after their disappointing inspection. She was still around for the beginning of the Buffy Mims saga, too, but she says her listing agreement with Salis and Thompson soon expired and they parted ways. Despite months of toil and no commission, the agent says she was relieved to cut bait: “I’ve tried to block a lot of this out of my life.
The gimmick didn’t land any buyers. And after a few months, Margolis says, she and Salis and Thompson mutually decided to call it quits. When it became apparent that his buyer-clients wanted to make offers on both houses, Rankin says Mangas took over as the sole agent for the sellers, to avoid a conflict of interest. One late-summer evening in 2020, about a
Mims’s lawsuit had recently been resolved. All these years later, Mims still gets emotional recounting the disastrous inspections, the scramble to find a place to crash, her law partners informing her that Salis was involving the firm. “You start to get a sick feeling in your stomach,” she tells me before pausing, then: “I’m going to get upset.”
The next 48 hours were chaotic, with Sadik, the general contractor, and an engineering firm emailing and teleconferencing to craft a strategy to secure the structure. “It was like,,” says Sadik. Temporary bracing had to be installed to hold up the back of the house while the beam was replaced. Meanwhile, the neighbors—also homebound during the pandemic and watching the deluge of workers flowing in and out of the salt-and-pepper houses—were buzzing. “There were vans always there, taking things out. There were windows on the lawn. There was ductwork on the lawn. It was just constant,” says one. “We were astounded when there wasn’t a truck in front of the houses.”
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