A new office tower is proposed for 15th Street between Welton and California in central Downtown Denver.
The Patrinely Group, headquartered in Houston, is currently planning a 606,500-square foot, 32-story office tower for across 15th Street from the Hyatt Regency Denver Convention Center Hotel. The project is named Block 162 for the site’s block number on the original plat map of Boyd’s East Denver survey of 1859. I’ve had a lot to say about Block 162 on this blog and, in a future post, I’ll update the saga of the block’s redevelopment that has led us to this point.
Here is a Google Earth aerial showing the building’s footprint, followed by a rendering (courtesy of Patrinely Group) of the proposed tower within the Downtown Denver skyline:
The project is still in the pre-application stage with the Denver planning office, so the following images (courtesy of the Patrinely Group) represent preliminary designs only and are subject to further modifications and refinement. The Block 162 redevelopment plan also includes a hotel tower at 16th and California that is shown in the first two renderings below. However, the hotel component is currently not part of Patrinely’s proposed office tower project and is only conceptual at this point.
View looking west with the proposed Block 162 office tower on the left. Center foreground is the intersection of Welton (left) and 16th (right):
View looking east at the corner of 15th and California. On the left is part of the base of the Hyatt Regency Denver Convention Center Hotel:
Detailed view of the building lobby at the corner of 15th and California:
The proposed tower includes three levels of below-grade parking, ground-floor lobby and café, 10 floors of above-grade parking, and 21 floors of office space above that. Here’s the tower’s stacking diagram followed by the ground-floor plan:
The 12th floor—the first level above the parking podium—contains a fitness center, social lounge, meeting rooms, an outdoor terrace, and some leaseable office space. Here’s the floor plan followed by a rendering of the outdoor terrace and social spaces:
Patrinely Group is currently marketing the tower but has not announced a construction schedule, if the tower will be built on a speculative basis, or if a pre-leased minimum is required.
The proposed Block 162 office tower will certain fill a major hole—one of the largest remaining—in Downtown Denver’s urban fabric. That’s good news!
Jeez, almost half the building is dedicated to parking and it’s a block from a light rail station. I would imagine the ROI on office floors is better than the floors with parking.
Most parking in Denver is fee-based. If there are say, 1000 spots at the average rate of $8 per hour, that’s 192,000 per day, and ~$70,000,000 per year. Seems like a good ROI.
From what I can tell office space is rented out at about $22/sqft and the parking levels are bigger than the office floors by about 33% and the office floors are 29,400sqft which is $647,000 year per office floor. At 33% more, that’s $860k a year per floor.
Yeah, and no garage is going to rent 100% of its spaces all 24 hours a day. At best — and I mean VERY best — you might get peak utilization for eight hours in the daytime. Mark, your total is very likely off 50K per day.
Forgot to type the “1” — I mean that’s off 150K per day.
Is an architect designing this building? Who? the rest of the design team?
Every time I see the roof of the convention center I think about how amazing a green roof could be.
I couldn’t agree more with this statement. I see it from my office floor all the time it just makes me sad. Not even any solar panels on it.
but there are solar panels, south west corner of convention center, 1000’s. Not sure how big the array is, but it’s large.
You’re right. I just can’t see them from my building. Compared to the whole roof space they should really expand it. I would say 1/10 or less of the roof has them then. It is something though – and could be something much better.
Wow, great to hear others have thought about this. I live in the Spire and look at that roof every day and think about a green roof. It would be visually stunning. It would be much smarter environmentally to have a cooler roof than that black roof. Finally, it would be a huge boost to Denver’s reputation. The Pavilions mall building would be another candidate.
Seems it would be expensive and long term project. Anybody know how to get the discussion started?
It would have to come from the building owners. The convention center would be easier to do probably over the pavilions.
I thought the reason why the green roof was never done had to do with the future expansion plans which would occur on the existing roof or somewhere along that line. Perhaps I am wrong.
I’m curious why so many projects being built are to be hotels instead of (even luxury) condos or high-rise apartments to not only get tourists and visitors downtown, but also Denverites. Not to mention, with the population of Denver growing at a staggering rate and from what I have been told is a lack of condos and housing downtown.
There’s actually been loads of housing added downtown in the past few years in the form of rental apartments, which is in response to demand from millennials.
Denver tourism is setting records and hotel vacancy super low so hotel projects are probably far easier to pencil out than condos with the requisite presales (made possible pre-2008 by easy lending standards) and insurance premiums due to construction defect litigation (lots written on this topic).
There has been a lot of building going on in response to all the millennials moving to Denver, but the amount being built per year is not adequate to what our net population increases we’ve been seeing since 2012. We’re gaining approximately 50,000 people/year and to accommodate that approximately 30,000 housing units are needed (10K rentals & 20K for sale housing). Last year I think we we’re pretty close to 10K rentals, but weren’t nearly close enough to 20K for sale housing (probably about half that or slightly more). The hotels are a great sign for tourism & convention business and I do know convention business is a big reason we’re seeing all these hotels around downtown go up and long term it will be great for our GDP. The issue of construction defects and the lack of condos being built is huge. I wonder if we will see condo construction now that municipalities like Denver, Lakewood, Lone Tree & Commerce City for example passed more favorable terms for developers and also I know that there are 4 insurers out there who will now insure condo developments (even though they’re more expensive than apartments) compared to 1 less than 2 years ago?
Denver is not growing 50,000 per year. If that is true, we’d be a million people in Denver in like 5 years, and housing prices and rents would have gone up 50%, not 10% y-o-y
Lakewood hasn’t even had any condos proposed since they introduced new legislation.
It is well documented that the vast majority of these millennials renting these apartments do not have the ability to get loans, negating their ability to purchase a condo, if in fact, they wanted to even own one in the first place.
Insurance premiums for developers no doubt has something to do with the lack of condos, but consumer preferences and consumer ability to get cheap installment loans also does.
Yeah, I think it’s more like 18,000 people per year.
I was referring more to the Denver metro area compared to the actual city of Denver based on statistics cited from numerous economists around the State.
Also, does 13 floors of parking (3 underground) in a 32-stroy building seem excessive to anyone else? This is even more ludicrous when the website demonstrates that a light rail stop is less than a block from the building! That’s over a third of the building dedicated to parking in a building highly accessible by public transit! What is the point of replacing a parking lot when, although accommodating more office space, one only commits Denver further to the continued use of cars which will invariably only increase gridlock downtown immediately adjacent to the pedestrian zone of the 16th Street Mall. Wouldn’t the space be better served by including a residential component or further offices rather than a day spa for empty vehicles?
Denver is growing, and needs to ditch it’s small-city mentality when it comes to cars.
If this were a paid garage, this would be enough parking to supply the entire downtown, all the way through LODO and all the way through the Capitol. If this were approved (which it should not be), it would be appropriate to then ban parking entirely in the rest of downtown.
This is a *lot* of parking.
Yes, this is an excessive amount of parking. And right next to a train station? We will get the city we build for, and this project is building for traffic and gridlock.
“Denver is growing, and needs to ditch it’s small-city mentality when it comes to cars.”
If we were really serious about increasing urban density (and I agree we should be), we might explore expanding light rail and/or go underground.
You know, for all of this infill development and replacing parking lots, we’re still being left with a lot of dead zones and shortage of pedestrian oriented retail. I understand that this is more or less a conceptual rendering, but more than 1/3 of the structure is being dedicated to parking, and less than 1/10 of the ground floor to activating the street, with a single storefront being dedicated to a “cafe”.
Hopefully planning / city / architects focus on getting this right, or 10+ years from now, people will be looking back, shaking their heads in dismay at all of the shortsighted planning and design.
More retail would be nice downtown. I really wish Cherry Creek wasn’t the popular shopping destination. I told a retailer near downtown the only reason I came to them versus the Apple store is that they’re downtown and I didn’t have to venture to the cluster of Cherry Creek’s parking lot oceans. I wish Apple and a few other retailers would open up a store directly downtown.
I feel bad for people that live in the Denver Dry and face this. Hopefully the facade treatment on the 12 floors of parking is tasteful.
The parking allotment sounds like something designed for the sprawled city of Houston, where the developer is located. How much do these developers scout the territory where they are building?
I don’t mind this office building (dull as the design is), but I would never support the demolition of the McClintock Block on the 16th Street corner for a hotel tower. They can certainly find a way to squeeze in a hotel without demolishing that piece of historic infrastructure.
Mark, the idea is that the hotel tower would rise up from the roof of the McClintock Building, stepped back 20 feet or so from the California and 16th Street facades.
That is interesting. I was wondering that myself. It seems as though the project eventually plans to utilize the entire block at some point but for now just the one building.
Stay tuned for my follow-up post where I’ll talk a bit more about the hotel.
Well that sounds okay, then. The McClintock is such an eccentric piece of architecture, and it adds so much personality to the Mall. Properly renovated and re-tenanted, it could be spectacular.
The parking is pretty serious yuck. That’s a 12 floor elevator trip for every single office worker from the first office to the ground. Doesn’t encourage the workers to interact with the city.
Lol…screw Welton – Architect
Looks like a well-designed multi-use project, with an eye to hotel and retail parking, besides office use. If you compare this project’s footprint to 1144 15th, it’s very similar — 600,000-plus square feet, over about a dozen floors of parking. Maybe these developers know something about the parking/convenience market. Anyway, it’s their money, and this is a nice building.
A well designed parking garage, you mean. Does Denver really need another huge parking garage?
I wonder if there will be any decided bike storage in the parking area? It seems that other new office buildings are including bike storage for the office workers.
Ken, will the Hotel and office tower be sharing one parking structure?
Sorry to be negatron but YAWN.
The parking seems overkill – but it would be awesome to use that as a leverage to get rid of on street parking and promote more wide and protected bike lanes or some other pedestrian use of the on street parking space.
Losing on-street parking and car lanes for bikes makes for a great sound bite, but goes along way from solving real transportation problems. Until Denver gets serious about BRT or a street car type mass transit system for the inner, surrounding neighborhoods, we’re going to need about ten more of these 12-story parking podiums.
I know everyone is ragging on the parking situation, but maybe the massive increase in parking will increase supply enough to make all the other surface lots around the block there points and converted more quickly to something useful.
A man can dream.
who is architect?
Would you add information regarding the General Contractor
The parking probably is the way it is because many large office tenants still require at least 2.5 parking stalls per 1000 sq. ft. of office space regardless of being near transit or not, which looks like probably exactly what they designed for. The developer is just building to the demands of the clients, and if they cut themselves short then they might be limiting their potential tenant base.
Heck, there are still office tenants out there (banks and such) that expect 3.5 or 4 parking stalls per 1000 sq. ft., which is absurd in 2016, but is still the case which is why so many end up in the tech center because its just cost prohibitive to meet that downtown.
Keep in mind this is a relatively smaller lot size (~45,000 sq. ft.), which isn’t very conducive to a good parking layout, which means more floors of parking.
I’m still confused as to why this design includes no publicly-accessible street level component (retail/restaurant/etc). In such close proximity to 16th street, the convention center, and the area’s multiple hotels and residential buildings, it would seem like a no-brainer. I hope that’s addressed in the review process.
Seems to me that many storefront businesses have had a difficult time along the upper 15th St. corridor (especially in the last five years). The bar scene has gradually moved northward and none of the retail can compete with 16th St.
I think some of this is simply density related. Not enough feet on the ground to justify retail in every building, although this project would help with that equation.
Take a look at the ground floor retail along 16th between Millennium Bridge and Union Station. Most of it has been vacant until very recently.
But I guess that would be a good argument for retail space to be included on a speculative basis.
This project would probably actually reduce feet on the ground. It’s designed to isolate the office workers from the surrounding city by putting them in a bubble atop a 12-story mountain of parking.