You may recall before the 2008 economic meltdown that Sage Hospitality was working on bringing a W Hotel and Residences to the corner of 16th and Market where the Office Depot is currently located. Unfortunately, like so many other proposals, that project didn’t survive the crash.
Now, four years later, the economy is much improved and new projects are popping up everywhere in the Downtown area, so it should come as no surprise that Sage is again moving forward with developing their 16th & Market property, one of the best development sites in Downtown. This time, however, it’s not a hotel, but a combination office and apartment project. Since the site is located within the Lower Downtown Denver Historic District, the development’s design must receive approval from the Lower Downtown Design Review Board. The project is currently working its way through the design review process with the LDDRB and earlier this month, the LDDRB Board give the project conditional approval for mass, form and scale.
Here are some preliminary project facts: 1350 16th Street will be a ten-story building with 47 residential apartments (floors 7 through 10) sitting above approximately 115,000 square feet of office space (floors 2 through 6) and about 13,000 square feet of retail, along with lobbies and other functions on the ground floor. There will be two levels of underground parking. Part of the project includes a four-story section that stretches along Market Street over to the empty Rocky Mountain Seeds building near 15th Street.
Here is a rendering of the proposed development that was submitted earlier this month to the LDDRB. Of course, this is a preliminary design that will continue to evolve until all approvals have been secured. Nevertheless, this gives you some idea of the project’s conceptual design:
At the April LDDRB meeting where the project received approval for mass, form, and scale, the two conditions the Board added as part of that approval included 1.) a refinement to the alley side of the residential portion by adding additional setback, more facade articulation, or both, and 2.) a redesign of the facade of the top six floors that face 15th Street. According to the city, the project will likely be back before the LDDRB in June with the latest refinements to the design.
Let’s hope this project moves quickly through the city’s approval process and gets under construction later this year. 1350 16th Street will certainly be a fantastic improvement over the current building on site. When the project moves forward, Office Depot will move to another location in Downtown.
