Denver – A Denver development firm plans to build a contemporary and swanky condominium high-rise unlike anything the city has yet seen constructed so close to its light-rail train lines.
The 31-story, 190-unit building to break ground this year at 20th Avenue and Lincoln Street is designed to trumpet the ease of downtown living, said Angela Osborn, whose husband, Erik, is the project’s developer.
Called One Lincoln Park, it will feature homes priced from about $300,000 to $5 million, 11,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and underground parking. The building will be a short walk from Denver’s 16th Street Mall and constructed on what is now a parking lot along one of the city’s major light-rail routes. When completed in late 2007, the high-rise is expected to be valued at $130 million, Osborn said.
The building is the first of several massive changes the couple, backed by private financial investors, hopes to make to a pocket of downtown Denver largely paved with surface parking. Osborn Development Corp. has secured options to buy adjacent and nearby parking lots on which it hopes to build an urban village with roughly 150,000 square feet of office and retail space and 1,000 homes, Angela Osborn said Friday.
“We think people are tired of TREX and tired of having to drive everywhere,” she said. “The market is right for this. People want easy access to everything they need.”
Trips to Chicago, Florida and New York – as well as jaunts to see how Denver development company East West Partners has transformed the city’s Central Platte Valley with homes and shops – inspired the Osborns’ vision and shaped One Lincoln Park’s design by Denver architectural firm Buchanan Yonushewski Group.
“We’re trying to build back a piece of the city,” senior project architect Mark Young said. “This is a very contemporary building that will set a new baseline for modern, urban living in Denver, which is maturing but a little behind” other large cities, where people clamor to live near offices, restaurants, shops and mass transit.
Condominiums in the five-sided building, he added, will range from 795 square feet to 2,800 square feet. Osborn said 30 units already are sold to family and friends and that sales to the public will launch Aug. 20.
Denver officials reviewed the building’s design in mid April and are scheduled to reexamine it next month.
“There is a lot of acceptance of dense development right now,” city planner specialist Ellen Ittelson said. “One of our goals is to have a wide variety of housing types at a wide variety of prices close to light rail stations. We want the very rich, the very poor and everybody in between living downtown.”
Erik Osborn is working on other prominent projects, including the $14 million, 27-unit Diamond Lofts at 22nd and Blake streets; Montage, a custom-home community near University Avenue and East Cedar Street in Cherry Creek; and a 2.5-acre office park near Belleview Boulevard and Interstate 25.
Staff writer Christine Tatum can be reached at 303-820-1015 or ctatum@denverpost.com.
