Russia House Was Once the Irish Free State Legation

For almost twenty years, you could walk into 1800 Connecticut Avenue NW, order a vodka flight, and have no idea you were drinking inside the old Irish Free State Legation.

That was Russia House. It is gone now.

The building it lived in has one of the stranger résumés in Washington. Irish diplomats, Russian vodka, a Soviet dissident out front, and now a seafood house with a small inn upstairs. Same mansion, very different flags.

A mansion where the old city ended

The building sits on the prominent corner where Connecticut Avenue meets Florida Avenue. Florida used to be called Boundary Street, the original northern edge of the city of Washington. This was the line where the planned city stopped and the countryside began.

The mansion went up around the turn of the last century, a turreted pile of Romanesque Revival stone with Classical Revival touches. It is grand enough that the federal government later documented it for the Historic American Buildings Survey.

Home to the Irish Free State Legation

In the photo at the top of this post, taken around 1925, this mansion is the Irish Free State Legation.

The Irish Free State was brand new then. It was created in 1922 as a self-governing dominion under the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and it lasted until 1937.

One of the young state’s first tasks was to open a mission in Washington. On October 7, 1924, Timothy A. Smiddy presented his credentials to President Calvin Coolidge as the first Irish Minister Plenipotentiary to the United States.

That made Smiddy the first envoy sent to Washington by any member of the British Commonwealth. He held the post until 1929.

The legation’s first offices were downtown, in the old Munsey Building on E Street. By the mid-1920s its Washington home was here at Connecticut and Florida, which is where the Harris and Ewing studio photographed it for the glass-plate negative now held by the Library of Congress.

Russia House, and a Soviet dissident at the door

By the early 2000s, the mansion had become Russia House, a restaurant and lounge that leaned all the way into the theme.

The walls were hung with red silk and Russian oil paintings. The bar poured more than 160 vodkas. Downstairs, a dining room sent out chicken Kiev and beef stroganoff.

The strangest detail stood outside the front door. A bronze sculpture of Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist who helped build his country’s hydrogen bomb and then became its most famous dissident, was dedicated on the sidewalk out front in April 2002, a gift from the Russian-American sculptor Peter Shapiro.

Sakharov won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. For two decades, his likeness watched the door of a Russian restaurant on Connecticut Avenue. It is hard to think of a more Washington image.

What the invasion changed

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a Russian restaurant on a busy DC corner became a target. Russia House took roughly $20,000 in property damage, and the Sakharov bust disappeared from the sidewalk.

It was not stolen. The bust had been taken down and put into storage for safekeeping.

Owner Aaron McGovern told the neighborhood blog PoPville in the spring of 2022 that he still had hope.

To date we’ve experienced nearly 20K in property damage and an undetermined financial loss of business because of these circumstances. Russia House’s future is uncertain and we still have faith that it will one day provide DC with another 20 years of amazing experiences.

It did not. Russia House never reopened.

What’s in the building now

The same owners tried again quickly. In February 2023, an oyster bar called Brine opened in the old Russia House space. It lasted less than a year, closing that November with its owners citing crime and a tough economy.

The current tenant is Pesce Seafood House, a women-owned restaurant that moved in during 2024 and is still serving today.

The upper floors changed too. A 2019 renovation turned them into a boutique short-stay inn called the Residence of Kalorama.

So the mansion that once flew the Irish tricolor now pours oysters on the ground floor and rents rooms above. It sits a short walk from the rest of Dupont Circle, one more building in a neighborhood thick with old embassies and legations.

Here is the building today, at Connecticut and Florida Avenues NW.

Map: Google Maps.

Irish diplomats, Russian vodka, a Nobel dissident, oysters, and overnight guests. Few buildings in Washington have worn so many lives behind one stone face.

If you like a building that outlived its diplomats, we have two more good ones: the old Korean Legation in Logan Circle and the lost German Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue.