Tobey House (Site)

These coordinates mark the exact spot where the house once stood. No visible remains exist.


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Here follows an excerpt from the 1970 Fairfax County Master Inventory of Historic Sites which contained entries from the Historic American Buildings Survey Inventory:

Tobey House:
The house was built in two stages for Mrs. Charles W. Tobey, widow of the Senator from New Hampshire, by her daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Michael Straight. It is situated on the southeast corner of the Straights' Green Spring Farm property. David Condon, of the firm of Keyes, Lethbridge and Condon, architects, used a structural design incorporating post, beam and decking elements. This technique is sometimes used in California, but seldom in the Washington area. The exterior is made of horizontal ship-lap cypress siding finished with grey creosote stain. The interior is done in vertical cypress wall paneling, exposed beam and plank ceilings, and wooden parquet floors.

The first section, erected in 1954, included a living-dining room, kitchen, bath, carport and two bedrooms. The addition in 1957 replaced the carport with a larger living room, converted the former living room into a study, and added a bath, a new carport and a fountain court. The total area of the structure is 2,062 square feet.

Interior designers were Top Recker and Patricia Holsaert; the landscape architect was Eric Paepcke. Extensive plantings of deciduous and evergreen trees and shrubs screen the property from the heavily travelled Little River Turnpike (Route 236).

In 1958 the Tobey House won the top residence design award given by the Potomac Valley Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

A tenant now lives in the house, and Mrs. Tobey's antiques and objets d'art have been removed to her apartment in Washington, D. C.

Commercial zoning for this portion of the property has recently (July 1970) been authorized by the Board of County Supervisors.


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Here follows an excerpt from the Friends of Green Spring website:

Lost to Progress at Green Spring
by Debbie Waugh,
Green Spring Historian

The Tobey House: A small, modern, open-plan home set a little back from Little River Turnpike, was built for Belinda Straight’s mother, who lived there from 1954 to 1968. It won a 1958 design award from the American Institute of Architects and was featured in a two-page spread in House and Garden Magazine in 1959. But commercial rezoning of that section of Green Spring Farm placed the house in the middle of what would become the neighboring Ford’s auto dealership. Cue the wrecking ball.

Inevitably, bygone ancillary farming structures are lost to the sands of time and buildings fall to progress. Regrettably, these parts of Green Spring’s past are lost forever, but we will take great care to preserve our photographic records of them.