Belle Haven Country Club is just south of Old Town off of Ft Hunt Rd (between Rt 1 and the river).
There's a lot of nice housing around there, and a lot of it is just at the age that it is turning over to young families. There's a good amount of diversity in the price ranges that the housing in that area goes for since different neighborhoods were developed at different times, with different sizes of house, etc. There's even a neat historic neighborhood of mid-century modern houses in the woods off of Ft Hunt really close to there. There's a biking/walking trail along the river, and the Parkway is one of the prettier major roads in the whole DC area I think -- not a bad way to start the day.
The schools situation around there is kind of odd. I think I already gave you
GreatSchools.net to look at, didn't I? The test scores don't look the best for some reason, but when my husband and I went to school around there, the schools used "tracking" to put the smarter kids together in their own classes, so as long as you got placed in the right track, you could get a pretty good education (except in Middle School. Carl Sandburg was awful when I went, but then they low-tracked me my first year there. Middle schools in general tend to be dumping grounds for bad teachers, etc. in every school district in the country I think).
West Potomac High School is huge, and hugely diverse, and it's a little harder to keep high school kids separated because kids that age will choose whatever friends you don't want them to have, and there's really nothing you can do about it. When my husband was there 15 years ago, there were the normal fights and annual shooting you almost expect at a high school nowadays. I've heard from my in-laws who have had kids in there more recently that the violence has gotten worse because of the gangs. So there are gang problems at that school, but the gangs mostly harass ethnic kids. There are also (or were when my husband went) really rich (mostly white) kids driving themselves to school in cars that are still and will forever be too rich for my blood. So it's a mixed bag of weird competing influences.
There are private schools around too. And a competitive magnet high school (take a test, write an essay) called Thomas Jefferson H.S. for Science and Tech that your kids would be eligible to apply to from there or anywhere in Fairfax County. That's where I went. There was exactly one punch thrown between students the whole time I was there, and it happened off of school grounds. Kids skipped class to study for other classes. The place was way too steeped in silly educational fads when I was there (smooshed english and history classes together into an amorphous nothing called "humanities" where we didn't even learn, say, how to write a good essay, for example) But the kids there were high-achieving and wholesome, which is about the best you can hope for.
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