This is Day 90 of the Slow Home Project and we need you to join us in our quest to evaluate the design quality of houses in nine North American cities in nine months. This week we are analyzing apartment/lofts in Denver, Colorado and today everyone needs to analyze as many apartment/lofts as possible.
Good morning Denver! This is our first day in Colorado and we need you to help us analyze the design quality of new houses in this city! This week, we are focused on seeking out apartment/ loft projects to review. To join the cause, all you need to do is search the web for floor plans of new apartment/ loft projects in the Denver region and then use the Slow Home test to complete your evaluation. Use the “Add a House To The Project” link to bring up the electronic version of the Slow Home Test. After you have evaluated the plan and made your comments, your results will be automatically added onto our Slow Home Google map of Denver.
To get things kicked off, we are analyzing a loft project at 2101 Market St in Denver called Twenty One 01. It is a renovation and addition to an existing 1920′s era food warehouse and the unit we are looking at is called the Vanderbilt. It is 1,525 square feet and has two bedrooms and three and a half baths.
The biggest problem with this unit is its site location within the complex itself. It is on an inside corner and this means a lot of the unit is internal and has no possibility of daylight for much of the floor space. There is also a potentially big overlooking issue from the other units that could see right into the bedrooms of the Vanderbilt.
The location within the overall building also negatively impacts the circulation and organization of the plan. It is really hard to place the living room furniture because you need to to walk through the center of the living room to get to the bedrooms. The location of the doors into the bedroom is also really poor.
The kitchen get a marginal passing grade but would have been so much better if the island had just been rotated 90 degrees. That would have made the access to the laundry room make more sense in the overall space and the dining room could have started to get some definition, whereas in the current plan, the dining room is really just left over space.
This unit score 13 out of 20 on the Slow Home test which means it barely becomes a “Moderately Slow Home”. Just a little more time spent on the design could really improve the livability of this unit. We would be really interested to hear what the Slow Home viewers think of the “Vanderbilt.”
That’s it for today! Join us again tomorrow for our “Which House Should I Buy” episode where we will be analyzing two apartments from the same complex to try to decide which is the better real estate purchase. And please, don’t forget to analyze as many apartment/ loft floor plans in Denver as you can using the Slow Home test and post them to the site! Your efforts will make a big difference to our project!
