There’s been a fair amount of development along the Germantown Avenue corridor in South Kensington over the last few years, and the trend doesn’t seem to be abating. Assuming that the latest Gretz Brewery redevelopment project proceeds, the action will continue ramping up. With the ZBA signing off on the project this past week, it’s possible we’ll see activity on this site sometime soon.

But it was a zoning permit for a smaller project at 1441 Germantown Ave. that caught our eye this week. The stucco-clad building on the site today probably looked pretty good when it was built but has clearly seen better days. This building has an interesting recent retail history, with a day care operating here for over a decade. This day care replaced a beer store, a transition we confess we don’t see very often. This tired building will soon go the way of both businesses, and will be replaced by a mixed-use building with six apartments and ground-floor retail. Marketed as “Fourteen Forty One” the most noticeable design choice is the corner bay window over the first floor, which will create a three-story front to a building that spreads out to four stories in the rear.

While the property has a history of including retail, we’re not convinced that a commercial space is terribly viable at this location. We are inclined to believe that the developers are in agreement, as the roughly 600 sqft space they’ve specced out is exactly big enough to conform to the zoning code without necessitating a variance. We suspect that some commercial tenant will eventually occupy the space at the corner, though the small size will certainly limit the options. Even with the limitations to the retail, we thoroughly support the move, as the zoning risk of eliminating the commercial component would have presented other issues in terms of timing and overall project risk.

Like we said, the bay window at the corner, as shown in the renderings from Ambit Architecture, offers an interesting and atypical design detail for this project. With the smaller-sized retail space, the building will accommodate two of its units on the first floor, leaving considerable space on the upper floors for the remaining four units. This should result in another unusual feature, as we’d expect the four units on the upper floors will be larger sized, family friendly units. Most new construction these days seems to focus on smaller-sized units, so this will be a welcomed change of pace.

With by-right zoning permits in hand, we would expect construction to start sometime later this year on Fourteen Forty One. Once the building is complete, it will mark the near complete transformation of the 1400 block of Germantown Ave. over the last decade. Looking back, it’s amazing to see how far things have come, though the same could be said for numerous other blocks in this little pocket of the city.