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Street façade of the Sonnet. Photo © Anice Hoachlander Sonnet reception area.
roles, but so, too, will smart design, as shown by the Sonnet and
Portner Flats, an adjoining pair of new apartment buildings
in Washington’s U Street corridor designed by Eric Colbert &
Associates (ECA), a firm that has designed many of the city’s
stylish new multi-family residential buildings.
The Sonnet and Portner Flats occupy a 1.1-acre site that
fronts onto both U and V streets, NW, about halfway between
14th and 15th streets. A couple of doors down, at the corner
of 14th and U, is the Franklin D. Reeves Municipal Center, a
government office building that the city built to help jump-start
the area’s revitalization. The success of that revitalization effort,
particularly in the last 20 years, has led to the construction of many
new residential and commercial buildings in the neighborhood,
including a number that have been covered in these pages.
The 1.1-acre site was previously the location of the Portner
Place Apartments, a three-building affordable housing project
that the city constructed in 1980. Described as townhome or
garden apartment buildings, the three-story structures were
sheathed in brown brick and provided a total of 48, two- and
three-bedroom subsidized apartments for lower-income renters.
The Portner Place buildings over time became distressed
due to deferred maintenance and security issues, and their Sonnet lobby with ornamental perforated metal screens.
suburban-style design fell out of keeping with the higher-
density urban environment that had developed around them.
Rather than attempting to extend the buildings’ lives, a decision
was made to take better advantage of the high-value site by
replacing them with a new, higher-density development in
which a market-rate apartment building would help subsidize
the construction of 96 new affordable apartments, or twice the
number provided by the Portner Place buildings.
The resulting redevelopment project was done in
collaboration with the Portner Place Tenant Association,
which exercised its right of first refusal under the city’s Tenant
Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA). The association eventually
assigned its rights under that law to a joint venture team, and
ECA was then hired to design the new buildings.
The city’s inclusionary zoning regulation envisions
individual new rental apartment and condominium buildings
being built with a mix of market-rate and affordable units.
Under this approach, separating the affordable units into their

74 A FINE PAIR
Sonnet residents’ rooftop amenity space.