What’s a nice single guy like Andy Weiss doing in a 4,500-square-foot house (not including basement) like this?
Easy. It’s about love.
The house affair began two years ago, when Weiss, a 38-year-old real estate developer and investor, watched the classic modern house in the Hilltop neighborhood take shape.
Behind the scenes, architects Bill Moore and Matt McHugh, partners at Sprocket Design-Build in Denver, were pursuing their own labor of love.
They were building a house, they admit, that reflected their passions more than their purses, breaking the first rule of spec home building.
“Rather than build a residence for a generic homeowner, which would make selling easier, we were building a home we wanted to build. For a speculative project, this was over the top,” said Moore, whose company has designed and built many custom and speculative home projects. “It would need an idiosyncratic buyer.”
Fortunately, Weiss was in the neighborhood.
He grew more enamored of the house at every building stage. “The last intention I had was to buy a big house,” said Weiss, a Denver native. “I had a 1,200-square-foot condo in Cherry Creek, which was fine.”
But then a friend who knew the architect got him in to see the property.
“I thought the house was gorgeous on the outside, but when I saw the inside, that did it,” Weiss said. He bought the house in November 2007, spent the next three months adding custom finishes and building out the 1,800-square-foot basement. He moved in last February.
The brick, wood and glass house has three bedrooms, two offices and 5 1/2 baths.
The basement is an all-guy hangout, with a gym, bar, wine cellar, theater room and a collection of signed jerseys representing the Nuggets, Broncos and Avalanche, hanging lighted on Plexiglas acrylic hangers around a poker table.
“It was crazy,” he said. “I kept asking myself: What does a single guy with no kids need with a place like this?”
His answer was coming.
Shortly after he moved in, he became reacquainted with a woman who’d caught his eye five years earlier. Weiss first met Aly Warren, 33, at a dinner party, “but,” he adds wistfully, “she doesn’t remember that.”
He ran into her again a year ago at a charity event, and they started dating. Next thing, her high heels were in his closet. She moved in last month.
In designing the home, Moore said, he and McHugh were trying to blur the boundaries between indoors and out by having each room orient to a corresponding exterior space, like a patio or balcony. There are large panes of glass. Clean red bricks line both interior and exterior walls, and dark walnut floors and built- ins mix fluidly with smooth plaster and glass.
“The use of walnut to fill spaces between the brick and glass is the home’s strongest nod to its classic modern influence,” said Moore.
The exterior of the home is striking, blending sleek elevations of glass, brick, metal and Spanish wood. Visitors approach the home through a dramatic 25-foot-high entry capped by a long, slim skylight that runs the length of the house. Bisecting the home from the other direction is another typically outdoor structure, a metal bridge.
Once the house was his, Weiss took the design from there. “He picked up on our design and added his own finishes, staying on the same track,” Moore said, adding that he and his partner were relieved to hand off their residential jewel to someone who shared their instincts. “Andy is a great steward of the design.”
Weiss has furnished the home with a light but sure hand, using a vivid yet spare style. Throughout, he has incorporated clean-lined, contemporary furnishings, sculptural accessories and contemporary abstract paintings.
He acquired most of his furnishings at local shops including Studio Como, One Home and Design Within Reach.
The first room you see off the entry is the dining room, with a modern spherical Swarovski crystal chandelier at its center. The colors at play here are whites and dark grays.
Though walls throughout the home are varying shades of gray, each room has a signature punch color. The music room, across from the dining room, has pungent orange chairs atop a Zebra-print rug. The music room’s two- sided fireplace separates it from the living room, where shades of regal purple dominate, and the art veers toward the psychedelic ’60s.
The family room features a floor-to-ceiling suede stone-block fireplace and French blue furnishings, all surrounding a contemporary white sectional.
Next to the family room is the kitchen, which looks not just immaculate, but entirely unused. Warren confesses: “We don’t cook, but we’re trying to change that.”
Upstairs are two guest bedrooms, a master suite, and Weiss’ office, where he spends 90 percent of his day on the phone and watching financial reports play out on a flat-screen television.
Though minimal by any standard, the home’s decor is less so now that Warren is in residence. “Before I moved in, there was not one framed photo anywhere, and no plants,” she said. “All of those are mine.”
Weiss doesn’t seem to mind the fact that she’s leaving her signature on his home.
In fact, he rather likes it. “She completes the house,” he said. “Besides, my mother told me to let her.”
Weiss also now knows what he’s going to do with all that space.
Again, love enters in. The longtime bachelor says he doesn’t want to stay that way.
If Warren agrees, he plans to marry her. It’s a question he plans to ask. Today.
