Aviator House opened Oct. 14 in Dupont Circle, the first office-to-residential conversion backed by Washington, D.C.’s Housing in Downtown program to welcome residents. The eight-story former Air Line Pilots Association headquarters at 1625 Massachusetts Ave. NW now holds 157 apartments, runs on all-electric systems and is targeting LEED Gold.
Clark Construction built it. Eric Colbert & Associates is the architect, with facade input from DXA Studio and interiors by Gaëtane & Co. Design. National Real Estate Development developed the project for National Real Estate Advisors, Bank of America provided construction financing, and Bozzuto runs the building. Multifamily Dive reported it was just over 70% leased and more than 60% occupied at opening, with 14 of 16 affordable units taken and concessions on offer to fill the rest before year-end.
An all-electric office conversion, and what it kept
The structure is the sustainability story. Vlastimil Koubek designed the building in the early 1970s, and the team kept the frame while swapping the systems. The developer’s list of green features is short and concrete: all-electric building systems, green roofs, extensive stormwater management and street-level landscaping, per a National Real Estate Development release from the project’s permanent-power milestone last October.
Nobody has published an embodied carbon number for Aviator House. That’s a gap, because reuse is the main climate argument for conversions, and owners keep making it without measuring it. Schedule slipped too. The developer targeted spring 2026 completion a year ago; residents arrived in mid-October.
The money behind it matters as much as the engineering. Aviator House was among the first projects to win a 20-year property tax abatement under Housing in Downtown, the city’s incentive for converting underused office space.
C-PACE is carrying D.C.’s largest office-to-residential conversion
The Geneva shows how far green financing now reaches into these deals. Post Brothers is converting two 15-story mid-century office buildings in the Kalorama Triangle Historic District, 604,000 square feet in all, into 532 apartments with 60 permanently affordable. Handel Architects designed it. The total cost is $575 million, and $465 million of that is commercial property assessed clean energy financing from Nuveen Green Capital, with a $110 million senior loan from Mavik Capital Management behind it.
That’s about 81% of the capital stack tied to energy and resilience improvements: triple-glazed windows and all-electric apartments among them. C-PACE gets repaid through a property assessment, so it survives a sale. It also forces a defined list of qualifying measures, which is a cleaner accountability trail than a marketing brochure.
Next up on the conversion list
A third D.C. job is lining up. Jemal Real Estate Strategies and DivcoWest formed a venture Oct. 7 to convert 1255 23rd Street NW in the West End into an estimated 323 apartments, with FILLAT+ Architecture designing and CBG Building Company as builder. Exchange also tracks the Aviator House conversion as a project listing.
The pattern for contractors is consistent: electrification is now the default scope on D.C. conversions, not an alternate. The next question owners should have to answer is how much carbon the kept structure actually saved.