Hick's old home bites the dust.
Gov. John Hickenlooper’s first home in Denver is history.
Mary B. Hashem, and her husband Stuart L. Miner, this week razed the home in northwest Denver that they bought from Hickenlooper last fall for $285,000. The 1,676-square-foot, brick home had been built in 1911. Hickenlooper paid $69,500 for it in 1983, but had been renting it for years.
Hashem said that they told the governor that his old home was coming down.
“He understood,” said Hashem. “It won’t be a surprise to him,” that is has been scraped.
They are going to build a 2.5-story, three-bedroom home with a garage and finished basement on the lot on West Moncrieff Place in West Highland. It will have about 2,300 square feet and Hashem said she thinks it will have four bathrooms.
“We are going to use one of the bedrooms as my office,” she said. “Stuart and I both work from home a lot.”
They are both executives with EGF Brownfield Partners, which among other things is redeveloping the former St. Anthony Central Hospital campus by Sloan’s Lake, which is less than three miles from their home.
The home that replaces Hick's old house will be bigger and more energy efficient than the house that came tumbling down this week.
The proximity to St. Anthony was not the driving force for the purchase.
“We wanted to be in West Highland and we wanted to be on Moncrieff. We just fell on love with that street.”
They hired architect Jon Hindlemann to design the house and G.J. Gardner Homes Denver, headed by David Pagano, to build it.
“Jon had been recommended to us and we liked that he does both historic renovations and new construction,” Hashem said.
When they bought the home, they didn’t know whether they would renovate it or raze it.
Hindlemann said it would have been far more expensive to renovate it than take it down and rebuild a new home on the lot.
“I think it would probably cost 30 percent or 40 percent more to restore it to the way you should,” Hindlemann said.
“To give you an example, some people in my neighborhood of Congress Park built new at $185 per square foot, while the cost of renovating it would have been $250 per square foot,” he said.
It would have cost far more to renovate this house than to scrape it.
He said the former Hickenlooper home suffered from water damage and from critters that had crawled into the home over the years, as well as poorly constructed attempts at interior renovations.
He said he even joked at one point that he hoped Hickenlooper did a better a job of running the city of Denver when he was mayor than with the stabs at renovations.
The new home will be constructed with some brick, stucco and ceramic squares that look like limestone.
“It will be sort of a modern-contemporary home,” Hindlemann said. He does not have any renderings. Hashem said the home will incorporate the same-style brick found in the SugarCube building in downtown Denver
“It is going to be very tasteful,” Hindlemann said. “It’s going to be a neat home. I’m trying to break things up by using a lot of shadow lines and lay-backs and bump-outs. I think these will be items of interest that will kind of animate the structure, without appearing cartoonish.”
It also will be very energy efficient.
“We are looking to make it very sustainable,” Hashem said. “We’re going to use geothermal (for heating and cooling) and we will make sure the garage is sturdy enough to hold pv,” photovoltaic solar panels, if they decide to install them at a later date. Hindlemann said they also are looking at adding more insulation to the home than is required by code.
Hashem said she was as equally impressed with G.J. Gardner, a franchise home construction company, as she was with Hindlemann.
“G.J. Gardner had been recommended to us and we toured a number of homes that were built and under construction,” she said. “People who lived in the homes were very willing to let us tour them and they were all very happy. His level of construction was very impressive.”
Have a story idea or real estate tip? Contact John Rebchook at JRCHOOK@gmail.com. InsideRealEstateNews.com is sponsored by Universal Lending, Land Title Guarantee and 8z Real Estate.com.
To see what else is for sale in West Highland, please visit COhomefinder.com.
To learn more about the architect of the home replacing Hick’s old house, please visit Hindleman Architecture + Design
To learn more about the contractor, please visit G. J. Gardner
Pagano built my house.
Excellent contractor, in my opinion.
The old house on Moncrieff was: ugly, run-down.
I am looking forward to the new structure.
I’m sure the new home will be an improvement and hopefully will inspire others to improve as well. But was there a law at one time in Denver at one time preventing such development – tearing down historical (aka old) houses?