Two homes in Denver’s Platt Park neighborhood have the same address.
But homeowners Dan Rees and Elizabeth Lopez use different doorbells so they know which front porch to greet their guests at.
One of the couple’s favorite tricks is to open one door and wave hello while newbie visitors stand dumbfounded at the other door. It’s a perk of living in one home that used to be two.
“We started out joking around that we should buy one of the neighbors’ houses,” says Rees, a 44-year-old economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. “I would build an underground tunnel so I could stay in one house with the dog, and my wife could be in the other house with the children.”
Then one night their next-door neighbor knocked on the couple’s door to say he was selling his home. “And just like that, the tunnel idea was no longer just a funny thing to say,” adds Lopez, a 33-year-old Medicaid analyst who speaks with a musical Venezuelan accent.
A way to stay
Rather than scrape or pop the top of their historic brick bungalow purchased in 1995, Rees and Lopez opted for an unusual solution that doubled their living space without negatively affecting the character of their neighborhood.
The couple purchased the house next to theirs and connected the two buildings.
What was once a two-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot property is now a 2,000-square-foot home with two separate wings joined by a breakfast nook and sunroom. And the renovation managed to retain the charm of both of the nearly-100- year-old houses.
The couple now manages two mortgages, cleans two houses and picks up mail and fliers left at both front doors. The new house has air conditioning while the old house doesn’t, and only one of the properties has an energy-efficient furnace.
And while the city of Denver classifies the property as one address, assessors still see it as two homes. The last time these linked houses were assessed, the value for one increased by $200,000 while the value of the other decreased by $200,000 — splitting the difference, Rees says.
But the benefit is added quiet, privacy and space for the children these homeowners hope to have one day.
“A lot of young couples move out of the city proper because it’s too expensive to get a house that has the space” they need, Rees says. “We love this neighborhood, and we want to stay to raise our children right here.”
His wife initially harbored doubts. She worried about destroying the integrity of the two older homes and that the attachment would be ugly and unwieldy. Now that construction is done, Lopez loves how easy it is to move around her much larger kitchen.
She also enjoys such energy-conscious touches as well-placed skylights that help illuminate the space without using electricity. And her husband likes being able to watch TV or listen to music as loud as he wants in one house without disturbing his partner while she works in her studio in the other house.
Not everyone shares their enthusiasm. The couple’s former neighbor, Dan Kruzek, dislikes the renovation.
“I must be a preservationist at heart because I don’t approve of it — along with so many other development projects that have taken away from the character of Platt Park,” Kruzek said last week, chosing to comment only through an e-mail interview.
Neighbor Vikki South, who has been only in the kitchen, was intrigued by the two-year renovation. “I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen two separate houses joined together like this,” South says.
Odd idea, simple work
The combined homes are laid out in a “U” shape with the newly constructed, 12-foot-long addition tucked in the back. At first glance, passers-by see only a small chain link fence and what appears to be a back porch. And soon, strategically planted bushes will screen even that clue that the adjacent houses are joined.
Jim Schneck of MasterBuild Architects calls the 100-square foot breakfast-nook addition a “gentle connection” because it’s built on piers instead of a foundation. That way, it can easily be removed if the couple ever wants to restore the bungalows as individual houses.
But even Schneck wasn’t immediately sold on the idea. He originally tried to talk Rees and Lopez into popping the top of their own home, saying it would be more cost efficient to put $100,000 into an addition than forking out more than $300,000 to buy the house next door and then spend another $100,000 to connect them.
But Schneck quickly accepted the challenge when Rees showed him the 100 square foot cigar box that was the original home’s kitchen.
“As an architect, I’m not used to clients saying they will spend more money,” Schneck says, “but they felt strongly about preserving the character of the house and the neighborhood.”
The breakfast nook addition now includes a modern kitchen with stainless-steel appliances, a stained concrete island, maple custom cabinets and a brick backsplash. Cascading open shelves help the space feel more generous.
Natural light pours into the space through 8-by-8-foot sliding glass doors that open directly onto a lush backyard, which has doubled in size and offers plenty of room for the couple’s 6-year-old dog, Niña, to romp. All that light makes for a festive setting for parties and gatherings and hosting overnight guests, so the couple now refers to that wing as “The Sunroom.”
Meanwhile, the darker palette of the original home with its wood trim, flooring and built-in cabinets creates a more lived-in feeling. The homeowners refer to that part of their property as “The Moon House.”
Although the concept of linking neighboring properties seems unorthodox, the construction was actually very standard, according to Kevin Molick of Timberleaf Construction.
“Rather than do a total gut,” Molick says, “we designed with minimal destruction to open up the rooms.”
He traveled to a mill in Texas to get the same old southern yellow pine flooring throughout the original house to use in the addition, then seamlessly laced the old floor with the new. And a bench that seats two at a cozy table inside the breakfast nook was reclaimed from an old church.
Molding in the space is new but was selected to match what already existed in the original home. To keep the nook from overheating, a solar trellis was built to block out the hot summer sun and reflect warmth from the winter sun.
The addition features many green building materials, including a Trex patio, radiant in-floor heat and solar tube lights.
“At the basic level, the most green thing you can do is to reuse what you’ve got,” Schneck says. “Keeping the old two houses intact and not demolishing them to make another one was the first start. The next was preserving all the original materials.”
Sheba R. Wheeler: 303-954-1283 or swheeler@denverpost.com
