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New Lower Downtown Project: 1350 16th Street

Posted by on April 27, 2012

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.

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Filed under Infill, Lower Downtown, Office, Residential.
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New Union Station District Project: Alta City House

Posted by on April 26, 2012

Colorado-based East West Partners is teaming up with Georgia-based Wood Partners to develop the 280-unit Alta City House apartment project in Downtown Denver’s hot Union Station district.

The Alta City House project at 18th and Chestnut Place will be conveniently located next to the new Union Station light rail platforms and the 18th Street Pedestrian Bridge. Here’s a GoogleEarth view with the site identified:

If all goes as planned, the project will break ground later this summer and be completed by Fall 2013. For a lot more detail on the project, I’ll direct you to John Rebchook’s Inside Real Estate News blog, where he recently did a nice report on the project.

Finally, we love big color renderings here at DenverInfill, so here’s a view of the project’s 18th & Chestnut corner. While the design has been tweaked since this image was produced, it’s close enough for now to give you an idea of the project’s overall character (image courtesy of East West Partners). As always, click/zoom to embiggen.

This is an exciting project that will add more people living in Downtown, which leads to more and better retail in Downtown, which leads to more people living in Downtown, which leads to…

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Filed under Infill, Residential, Union Station.
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Union Station District Project Update: 20th & Chestnut

Posted by on April 26, 2012

It seems everyone is anticipating the groundbreaking of the proposed 20th & Chestnut project by the Nichols Partnership in Downtown Denver’s booming Union Station district, which will not only give Downtown its first full-service grocery store, but also put that store within two blocks of the region’s largest multi-modal transit hub. Here’s a quick progress report on the project and two slightly updated renderings, courtesy of Nichols Partnership project manager Dan Schuetz.

The first image is a view of the project’s 20th and Chestnut corner; the second image, the 19th and Chestnut corner:

The development’s groundbreaking was rescheduled from March to June, due to some final tweaks to the building design. Now, the project’s entire ground floor will have 28-foot ceiling heights. The consequence of this is quite exciting. The interior ground-floor parking area reserved for grocery store customers will now feel much more spacious with a ceiling that high. Also—and this is the really cool part—with a 28-foot floor-to-ceiling height, this has allowed the Nichols Partnership to add an L-shaped mezzanine level to the grocery store, increasing the store’s overall size. Sweet!

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Filed under Infill, Residential, Retail, Union Station.
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Community College of Denver: Student Learning and Engagement Building Update

Posted by on April 22, 2012

Back on January 12th, 2012 the Community College of Denver broke ground on their own Student Learning and Engagement building. This is a very similar idea to what Metro State did with their Student Success Center. This development will be a 4-story, 87,000 square foot building located on the corner of 7th Street and West Colfax Avenue.

Basic structure work is being completed. The elevator cores appear to be topped out. In the picture on the right you can see the steel that is lined up ready to be put in place on the building. Always a neat sight when a building is just getting off the ground.

 

None of the true building’s elements are showing but for only being three months in, quite the progress has been made. The rooms will also have a great view of the Denver skyline. Just from the ground you can see that there is a pretty unobstructed view.

 

This building is designed by OZ Architects as well as Boora Architects (renderings can be found by clicking the Boora link) with construction performed by G. H. Phipps. This will be home to Community College of Denver’s admissions, registration, financial aid, a testing center, the cashiers office, advising, and their own student success program. No details have been released about LEED certification but the college is being rewarded a $100,000 energy rebate for having ‘green’ elements such as chilled beams, radiant floors, and a green roof. They are expected to be completed with this project by summer session of 2013.

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Filed under Auraria, Education, Infill.
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New Ballpark District Project: 2300 Walnut

Posted by on April 21, 2012

From roughly the 1950s through the 1980s, when Downtown Denver’s skyline blossomed with skyscrapers, many property owners on the periphery of the Central Business District cleared their land of buildings to provide parking for all those new office workers and to have a “clean site” to entice developers to buy their land for the next high-rise project. This phenomenon occurred in the Golden Triangle, Uptown, Arapahoe Square, and Ballpark districts, leaving us with a four- to five-block wide “no man’s land” zone of surface parking lots separating Downtown from these adjacent urban neighborhoods. These rips in our city’s urban fabric are still evident today, but we have made great strides over the past two decades in knitting back together our city center districts with Downtown.

One area where that progress is quite obvious is along Market/Walnut Street through the Ballpark district, where 2300 Walnut by Mill Creek Residential Trust is ready to begin construction. Recent infill projects such as 2101 Market, Premier Lofts, 24 Walnut, and Ballpark Lofts have significantly helped transform the blocks along Market (which becomes Walnut Street past Park Avenue) from a sea of asphalt to a vibrant mixed-use corridor. But there was one big gap remaining: the full city block parking lot bounded by Park Avenue, Walnut, 24th Street, and Larimer. Now, thanks to Mill Creek’s 2300 Walnut project, that big hole in the urban fabric will be repaired. Here’s a GoogleEarth aerial where I’ve marked the project location (for all images, click/zoom to embiggen):

2300 Walnut is a 5-story, 310-unit apartment building wrapped around a 446-space parking garage. Here’s an axonometric perspective of the 24th/Larimer corner looking west back towards Lower Downtown:

The project features a multi-hued brick facade with an interior courtyard, a swimming pool and fitness center, and leasing office. Thanks to Scott Johnson and Marie McClellan at Mill Creek, here are two high-resolution project renderings. These are views of the Park Avenue/Walnut corner and the Walnut Street side of the project:

Mill Creek Residential Trust just closed on the property, so now they are ready to get the project underway. Utility relocations and other site work should begin soon, with full project construction by this summer. If all goes as planned, 2300 Walnut will open late 2013/early 2014.

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Filed under Ballpark, Infill, Residential.
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New Union Station District Project: 16 Chestnut

Posted by on April 20, 2012

Coming soon to a Millennium Bridge near you… 16 Chestnut!

16 Chestnut is East-West Partners‘ proposed office tower at 16th Street and Chestnut Place that will anchor the fourth and final corner to Denver’s Millennium Bridge.

Way back in 2000, when Denver’s Central Platte Valley was just beginning its transition from industrial wasteland to hip urban neighborhood, the Millennium Bridge’s dramatic 200-foot tall mast stood alone as a symbol of the area’s potential as Downtown’s newest urban district. Shortly thereafter, the Park Place and Promenade Lofts buildings joined the bridge as neighbors on its western corners, and now the DaVita building is wrapping up construction at the third corner. Once 16 Chestnut is built, the Millennium Bridge’s destiny as an iconic public space embraced by contemporary development will be complete. From an urban morphological perspective, the bridge will go from being the figure surrounded by open ground to being, in a way, the ground surrounded by many figures (that’s for my planner/architect geek friends!). Whatever your perspective, this is an exciting milestone for the Union Station area.

Here’s the scoop on 16 Chestnut:

It’s a 320,000 square foot, 18-story, 240-foot-high office tower located on the rectangular parcel bounded by 16th Street/Millennium Bridge, Chestnut Place, and 17th Street. The site is surrounded by the new Mall Shuttle loop at the Union Station light rail station. Here are two views of the site:

 

The development is currently in the concept design stage. Therefore, please note that all of the following images, provided courtesy of East-West Partners and their design partner klipp architecture, are very preliminary in nature and subject to change. Nevertheless, these renderings do give you a general sense of the mass and scale of the proposed building.

The general building program includes a level of underground parking, ground floor retail and entry, a second-level lobby that includes a cool walkway that spans across the mall shuttle lane and connects to the Millennium Bridge (a pedestrian bridge to a pedestrian bridge!), a few more levels of parking, and about a dozen or so floors of office space. Here’s a conceptual ground-floor site plan and building section/stacking plan—again, very much subject to change:

 

Finally, how about a couple of building concept renderings:

First, the view from 17th and Chestnut, showing the building’s unique helical parking garage ramps:

Next, the view from 16th and Chestnut, showing how the building spans across the Mall Shuttle lane plus the pedestrian connection to the Millennium Bridge:

East-West Partners is now actively marketing the building to prospective tenants, and the design will be refined as marketing efforts continue. More information on this exciting addition to Denver’s Union Station district will be forthcoming.

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Filed under Infill, Office, Union Station.
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