Getting your player ready...
Right through the years it took Niwot to grow from a roadside hamlet into a plush Boulder suburb, the 18-acre Lange estate (1970s residence of the famous Lange ski-boot family) remained an isolated reserve wrapped on all sides by luxury homes and pretty cottonwoods. After changing hands a few times, Goldbranch Property Developers Jennifer and Ron Budacz and Ron Ibsen engaged Boulder architect Steven DeWitt to design a Tuscan-styled Village enclave – and built an 8,400 square foot custom spec home that gives a vision of what life could be like in a low-maintenance Boulder setting with Italianate surroundings.
At Goldbranch (ten minutes from Boulder; only around 40 minutes from downtown Denver) you’ll see two other already-sold homes built by Goldbranch Homes, designed by DeWitt, in provincial-Mediterranean style (the architect-builder has a place in Tuscany); along with eight remaining near-half-acre home sites that will get community HOA maintenance, and another six 1-acre sites available for custom homes. You can have Goldbranch Homes build an already Dewitt designed home on Village lots, or create your own plan with your qualified architect/builder. But homes on Village sites, says Goldbranch’s Patrick Temaat, have to stay within Tuscan guidelines – including a facing in white-plains quarried rock with red-tile roofs that are required to have 18% of their caps randomly raised, to create that bucolic look of Siena or San Gimignano. (Nearby one-acre sites require a complementary old world architectural theme. One of Goldbranch’s buyers brought in a Disney consultant to add even more bucolic detailing – and is using a small piece of the lot for a solar array that delivers around 106 percent of the sizable homes’ energy needs.) Meanwhile, this is a 10-minute walk from Old Town Niwot, started in the 1870s, now sporting restaurants frequented by Temaat and his family including Treppeda’s Italian Ristorante, Colterra and Niwot Tavern; and a free Thursday night Rock-n-Rails concerts at Whistle Stop Park. The walk would take you past a riparian/wildlife corridor created on the north side of Goldbranch – directly across from a site where you could do a luxurious low-maintenance ranch from $1.5 million. To put that in perspective, higher density enclaves with nowhere near this level of size well east of Boulder have seen sales near $1 million for smaller production ranches. As with the other Village lots at Goldbranch, Lot 16 has a home design ready to employ: Casa Bella, a 5,400-foot ranch with full basement, courtyard outdoor living area, and 3-car garage, custom drawn by DeWitt. If you choose to build your own ranch or two-story plan, this and other Goldbranch lots get a break from Boulder County’s super-restrictive green building/size regulations, making building requirements very easy in Goldbranch. 8,400 square-foot interior And they still get the Boulder County setting with its inimitable view of the Indian Peaks – highly visible from the bedroom-suite level of Goldbranch’s Casa Siena spec-model- on the market at $2.799 million. You’ll see a home gathered around a courtyard that divides separate garages sized for a car collector, with an enclosed outdoor-living space with Viking kitchen; down-lit exterior lighting; an 8,400 square-foot interior with cherry floors and distressed beams treated to create a 400-year aged look; a lavish kitchen with hand-blown Italian glass lighting; and spectacular master. Perhaps the best of the six acre-sized custom lots still has the old Lange residence on it, ready for scrape, but with sentimental features that might give you a reason to keep it and remodel: an indoor pool, 1970s disco, and an office in a tower 43 feet high – well above Boulder County’s 35-foot height limit and grandfathered in. To visit Goldbranch from Denver take I-25 north Hwy 52, head west nine miles to Somerset Drive, right to Longview, and right. Or from Boulder, take the Diagonal to Niwot Road, and right a mile to Longview. Patrick Temaat, with some incentives for both owners and builders is at 303-652-0510.Wed-Sun 11-6 PHONE: 303-652-0510
You can see all of Mark Samuelson’s columns at DenverPost.com/RealEstate.
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