What Kinds of Real Estate do Public Figures Own?

U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE
​MADELEINE ALBRIGHT (1937 – 2022)

                       Photo by Getty Images

​Madeleine Albright served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001. She was born in Prague and emigrated to the United States with her family as a seven year old in 1948 after a coup d’état by Communist forces backed by the Soviet Union saw her country Czechoslovakia fall under the control of Moscow.
 
She was an influential and principled politician and diplomat who served her country well. She died a year ago (2022) and now her Georgetown row house has been placed on the market by her estate.

Many famous people in the world of politics foreign policy, national security, and diplomacy passed through the doors of that house after she and her then-husband Joe Albright bought it in 1968 for about $100,000 US. It is on the market for $4 million US.  The listing agency is Sotheby’s International Realty. 

The house was built in 1853, has four bedrooms, and has around 4,000 square feet of living space. I appreciate the distinguished feel or the place, inside and out, but also its lack of pretension, two qualities I observed in Ms. Albright during her tenure as Secretary of State.

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The house has a red brick façade, iron railings out front that are wrapped in ivy, and a stone fountain built into the brick wall in the rear courtyard. 

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The garden is large for the Georgetown area. There is also an oversized double garage which served as a watch room for security personnel when she was secretary of state. It contained  security camera monitors and secure communications links.

​Public spaces were limited to the first floor – Ms. Albright lived on the 2nd and third floors.

​The second floor contained her library where her chief of staff said she would watch the evening TV news, read, and review materials for the next day of diplomacy or teaching, which she did at Georgetown University.

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According to Ms. Albright’s chief of staff, she began hosting monthly parties for friends and colleagues at her residence about the time she and her husband divorced in 1983. The large, double living room on the first floor has two wood-burning fireplaces and would reportedly be packed with chairs so visitors could hear talks given by cabinet officials, senators, and other political dignitaries. 
 
Critics liked to call these gatherings ‘salons’, but Ms. Albright felt that description was too grand. In her autobiography she, wrote:
 
“The truth is my house is comfortable,  not elegant, and my dinners were simple buffet affairs – salad, roll, and a slice of something. As one participant told a reporter, anonymously, ‘We certainly don’t go there for the food.’”