The Crestmoor Residence, Denver, Co

Architect: Nest Architectural Design, Denver, CO, 303-321-1268, www.nestarch.com

The owners of the Crestmoor Residence presented the architect with a substantial challenge: a reinterpretation of their historic home that would function in a very different way than the original program envisioned, while honoring an overriding obligation to work within a historic vocabulary that would satisfy neighborhood requirements.

The Crestmoor Residence in its original form was a visible, prominent and much-loved landmark in its neighborhood. Like many homes of its age, it featured gracious formal rooms, but lacked informal spaces for family gatherings and offered minimal connections to its expansive yard, which had the potential to serve as multiple year-round outdoor “rooms.”

The home’s strengths and weaknesses provided the structure for a new program that maintains and enhances the formal spaces located at the front of the house—and preserves the street elevation beloved by neighbors—while gutting and extending the back of the house to provide generous family spaces that interact with a variety of new outdoor living spaces and the backyard. Previous incongruous additions were removed during the renovation process, resulting in a house that reads as an improved version of its former self.

Throughout the addition, materials were matched to older parts of the house, but often used in subtly different ways. For example, the entryway’s new copper canopy uses the same material as the hood of an adjacent window, but in a strikingly different form. In the new breakfast room, the traditional notion of a beamed ceiling is literally bent into a pair of intersecting arcs that draw attention to the room’s unique circular form and reference the pointed-arch motif found throughout the home.

The judges were impressed by this project’s aesthetic and market appeal, its sensitivity to the original structure and the surrounding homes, and by the architect’s ability to achieve the client’s dual desires—to maintain their home’s historic appeal while updating the space’s function and aesthetic—throughout the project.