Alamo Placita Residence
This project started by salavaging a damaged home in the historic Alamo Placita neighborhood in Denver.
We teamed up to help transform a tragic beginning with a damaged house to a lovely new home that compliments the historic neighborhood. We worked closely with the landmark historic department with Denver to create a design that is rooted in historic and contextual research and creates a new example for building in historic neighborhoods. We worked with DL Engineering to get creative on the foundation design and helped implement our vision for the home. We envisioned that we could utilize the original damaged foundation to provide shoring for the new house and new basement and DL Engineering figured out how to make that happen, saving the client additional cost & scope.
We also salvaged the brick from the original damaged house and reused it on the new structure to build the front facade and front porch, keeping the history of the original house present in the new home. The home design pulls on the context of the neighborhood filled with Victorian Queen Anne Brick homes and creates a contemporary version of the nestled gable traditional home form. We used shingle siding for the remaining home design to create a texture composition that is contemporary and yet pulls on the history of the neighborhood.The home design creates an open living space that blends with the outdoor spaces. We have a large inset opening on the south side to flood light into the middle of the house and kitchen. We organized the more introverted utility and storage spaces on the north side to consolidate those and then create an open living experience for the primary living, dining and kitchen spaces capturing more sunlight and open connection to the outdoors. It is exciting to create a light filled home that still preserves privacy on a tight urban site in Denver.
Check out the story of this project from DL Engineering.
Photography by Ella Dascalos.