House next to Huntington Metro station set to be demolished

A familiar building next to the Huntington Metro station will soon be no more.

The brick colonial-revival style house that sits at 5801 North Kings Highway will be torn down later this summer, according to Neel Teague of Stout & Teague, the company that owns the land. The house has been empty since early 2015, although the fire department has used it for training and the Huntington Farmers Market sets up weekly in the parking lot. Teague said the demolition will not affect the farmers market.

Jay Roberts, a local history and development blogger, was the first to report the building’s upcoming demolition.

Permits for the demolition of the house are still being completed according to Teague, but work on dismantling the inside of the building has already begun. Stout & Teague has partnered with Details Deconstruction, a non-profit that specializes in taking apart old houses and repurposing the materials in an effort to reduce waste.

A new development will be built on the site but construction will not start anytime soon. The development will actually be the third phase of a project that began early last decade when Stout & Teague purchased roughly 60 acres of land adjacent to the Huntington Metro station from the Washington Metro Transit Authority. The first two phases saw the completion of 50 townhouses and the Courts at Huntington Station apartments, as well as Mount Eagle Park.

The third phase was originally supposed to see the construction of a high-rise apartment and office building, but Teague said that idea is on hold for the moment. His company is studying other possibilities, and also keeping an eye on the progress of Embark Richmond Highway, which envisions a major overhaul for transportation options and density in the Richmond Highway corridor.

“We’ve been waiting to review what really makes sense for that spot,” Teague said, adding that Stout & Teague would be meeting with the community over the next few months to discuss the project.

Long, somewhat murky history

The nearly 70-year-old building has served as a residence, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center and a substation for the Metro Transit Police. But finding detailed information on the house has proved hard to come by– even the exact date of its construction seems to be unknown.

Roberts, who had hoped to get a historic designation for the house, was able to track down a great deal of information about the building’s history. He determined through aerial photos taken at the time that the house was built sometime between 1945 and 1949, and that a family named Varnick were the first folks to live there.

It’s not clear when the house stopped being a residence, but Fairfax County used it as a home for the Crossroads drug and alcohol rehabilitation center for minors from sometime in the 1970s to the late 1990s.

The Metro Transit Police was the building’s last tenant, using the old home as substation from 2001 until early last year.

Roberts said that while saving the North Kings Highway house is a lost cause, he’s hoping that other older properties in the northern section of the Richmond Highway corridor can be saved as the area gets more and more redeveloped. He pointed to the complete loss of other historic houses such as Spring Bank, Mount Eagle and City View II, which were all torn down in the 1960s and 1970s.

“If you just look around this part of southeast Fairfax County, what is old and historic? Nothing except Historic Huntley … that’s it,” Roberts said. “It’s all gone.”