One more downtown D.C. office tower is headed for a residential reboot, and this one comes with a rooftop pool and a nine-figure price tag. Developer Duball has quietly bought 1090 Vermont Ave. NW and plans to convert the aging office building into roughly 150 apartments over new street-level retail, with amenities that include a rooftop pool, fitness center, communal workstations and a community room. The corner of L Street and Vermont Avenue NW is set for a full lifestyle makeover.
According to Bisnow, Duball and an unnamed institutional partner paid $23.1 million in all cash for the building in a sale that closed Wednesday. The team expects the total tab for acquisition and construction to land around $100 million. Marc Dubick told Bisnow he aims to close on a construction loan within the next two months and start work in the fourth quarter of 2026, with a construction schedule of about 20 months. Bisnow also reports the sale has not yet shown up in D.C. deed records.
What Duball Is Building
Plans call for about 150 residential units stacked above roughly 6,800 square feet of renovated ground-floor retail. Residents would get access to a rooftop pool, community room, shared workspaces and a fitness center, turning what had been standard office floor plates into a full amenities package.
Reporting identifies Hickok Cole as architect of record and McCullough Construction as the intended contractor, with Hartman Design Group handling interiors and Vika Capitol serving as engineer. Duball lists 1090 Vermont as its next downtown conversion and hints that more details on the building’s reimagining are coming.
Where This Fits In The Conversion Wave
The move slots neatly into downtown D.C.’s broader conversion push. A RentCafe-based analysis summarized by Building Design+Construction puts Washington, D.C. at about 8,479 office-to-residential units in the pipeline, second only to New York City. Nationally, roughly 90,300 conversion units are in various stages early in 2026, a backdrop that helps explain why developers are aggressively hunting well-located office buildings that can pencil out as apartments.
Why The Tax Abatement Matters
Dubick told reporters he is not pursuing the District’s 20-year Housing in Downtown (HID) tax abatement for 1090 Vermont. He said the site’s zoning would have required a set-aside of affordable units that, in his view, would have strained the project’s capital stack.
The HID program, administered by the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, offers a 20-year property tax abatement for eligible commercial-to-residential conversions but ties that benefit to affordability and other program requirements. That incentive has been a deciding factor for several larger downtown projects and can change how developers size deals and design their unit mixes.
What To Watch Next
Dubick told Bisnow the team expects to lock in construction financing in the coming months and break ground in late 2026. If the roughly 20-month construction timeline holds, the new apartments would deliver in 2028.
The project follows Duball’s earlier downtown conversion work, and the company says it is actively scouting more deals in the central business district. Neighbors, office landlords and downtown retailers alike will be watching how quickly Duball can line up preleasing and what kind of retail mix lands at the base of 1090 Vermont as the property moves from acquisition to construction.
