Lower Highland’s booming Platte Street is set to receive another new infill development to add to its pedestrian-oriented mix of historic and contemporary buildings.

Platte Fifteen is a proposed five-story, 160,000 square foot project planned for the corner of 15th and Platte Street. Currently, about three-quarters of the one-acre site is covered by a surface parking lot, with the balance occupied by a 20,000 square foot building holding Vitamin Cottage Natural Grocers on the ground floor and Confluence Kayaks in the basement. Below is a Google Earth aerial showing the site location:

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The Platte Fifteen project is being developed by Crescent Real Estate and MDC Property Services with Legend Partners handling the retail leasing and Newmark Grubb Knight Frank managing the leasing of the office space. Denver-based OZ Architecture is designing the project. Thank you to everyone at OZ for providing the excellent images and assistance!

Platte Fifteen includes approximately 14,000 square feet of retail on the ground floor and around 135,000 square feet of office space on the upper four levels. Courtesy of OZ Architecture, let’s start with this overview rendering of the project showing the Platte Street (left) and 15th Street (right) corner:

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The ground-floor retail spaces and building entry along 15th Street at the corner are set back by almost 20 feet with a covered paseo to provide extra room for pedestrians:

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As this ground-floor diagram shows, the project features retail spaces facing both 15th and Platte streets. The development includes a few ground-level parking spaces plus two underground parking levels with a total of 236 automobile and 74 bicycle parking spaces. The vehicle entry is along Platte Street approximately where the current parking lot driveway is located:

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View of the building lobby:

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The four office levels will include about 10,000 square feet of outdoor space including terraces along Platte Street and a rooftop deck along 15th Street with great views of Downtown Denver:

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Here is a building stacking diagram for the 15th Street elevation:

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One very cool aspect of this project will be its use of Cross Laminated Timber. Platte Fifteen will be the first large-scale office building in Denver to be built using this construction technique that brings the warmth and aesthetics of large timber beams common in historic buildings into a modern open floor plan environment in a high-tech, sustainable way.

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Here’s one more overview rendering with Platte Street in the foreground and 15th Street on the right:

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Through a contextually scaled building with a modern glass and brick design and pedestrian-friendly ground-floor uses, Platte Fifteen will nicely anchor an important corner in Lower Highland and increase the vitality of what is already one of Downtown Denver’s most appealing and walkable mixed-use districts.

Construction should begin in 2017 with completion scheduled for late 2018.

2016-06-10 Edit: Gross building square footage revised to 160,000 SF per new information received from the developer.