77 townhouses planned for Columbia Pike

This house on Powell Lane will be torn down to make way for a townhouse project.

Stanley Martin Homes plans to start work soon on the development of 77 townhouses on Columbia Pike between Powell Lane and Madison Lane. Two long-time businesses on that site, Rosslyn Auto Body and Nicholls Imported and Domestic Car Service, have relocated.

Site preparation for the Ambrose Hills community is expected to start within the next two or three weeks, and demolition would start in late September or early October, says J. Truett Young, director of land acquisition for Stanley Martin. Construction of the models would start in May 2015, with the first sales taking place around August.

These auto shops will be demolished within the next few months.

The property had been rezoned by Fairfax County about 14 years ago and approved for redevelopment, but the project stalled due to stormwater drainage and other issues.

The new townhouses would be about 2,000 square feet and would range from 19 to 22 feet wide. Some would have garages in the front; others would have rear garages. The prices haven’t been set, and Stanley Martin doesn’t have illustrations to share yet.

The company has submitted a request to the Virginia Department of Transportation to study the need for a traffic signal at Columbia Pike and Powell Lane. Young is confident that it will be approved and the signal could be installed next year. Access to the new development would be from Powell.

Site preparation will include filling in the land and possibly removing hazardous materials in the ground left over from the auto shops. In the 1960s, the land was even lower than it is now and had been filled in improperly with “nonstructural fill materials” from a building that had collapsed in another location, Young says. To prepare the land for building, Stanley Martin will carry out a “dynamic compaction” procedure.

Before all that happens, though, the underground stormwater facility will be improved and redirected to bring water from the other side of Columbia Pike to Holmes Run

The site consists of two properties. Stanley Martin purchased one plot from from Landmark Atlantic, which had initially planned to develop there, and the other from Arthur Walters. The Walters plot, next to Powell Lane, has a vacant, derelict house on it that will be torn down.

Landmark, which built the adjacent Madison Place townhouse community in the late 1990s, succeeded in getting the site rezoned in 1999 from a commercial use (C-8) to planned development housing (PDH-20), which requires the establishment of a homeowners association.

Heavy rains cause periodic flooding on Columbia Pike.

By the time Landmark started planning to develop on the site, the housing market collapsed. Meanwhile a stormwater study determined that to address flooding on Columbia Pike, the stormwater system needed to be relocated. 

The only way to make that work would be to install the pipes under Walters’ property but he refused to allow an easement and wasn’t interested in selling his property at that time. He later changed his mind so the project is going forward.