Denver Historic Remodel & Detached Garage
From Basement Digout to greenhouse
A 127-year-old house on a tight lot
Beth and Rob's home was full of history — an 1890s Denver house with all the character of its era and all the headaches, too. Steep, dangerous stairs. An awkward powder room eating into the living room. A mudroom so cramped it felt like a collapsing tunnel. A basement that existed but couldn't really be used. And a single-car garage too small to fit a modern vehicle.
They loved the house. They wanted it to finally work for the way they lived — without losing what made it worth saving.
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Designing for every constraint
We started where these projects should: documenting the existing conditions of the house and the small lot, then building a plan around the real problems rather than papering over them.
The basement was the foundation of the strategy — working with a structural engineer to drop the existing floor and dig out the crawl space, with the goal of roughly doubling its usable square footage. Upstairs, a small, narrow addition let us relocate the staircase and powder room together, freeing the living room to return to its original proportions. We mirrored that move on the opposite side to finally solve the mudroom, opened the kitchen to the dining room, and replaced the sagging porch and entry with something sound and welcoming.
Ellen has been a godsend on a gnarly, long running project. Thorough, focused, and communicative, Ellen has made the process of finding the right solutions for our 127 year old house so much simpler. Her sense of style and ideation for ways to meet our goals was always on point. She listened to our concerns or ideas, and would work with us to find the right solution.
The Detached Garage & Green House
The most ambitious piece of the design replaced the undersized single-car garage with an expansive two-car garage paired with a greenhouse. The greenhouse was sited in the one spot in the backyard with reliable sunlight — positioned to stretch the growing season and make the most of a small yard — while the garage carried detailing meant to pay homage to the historic neighborhood around it.
How it came together
As with many long-running historic projects, life intervened. Partway through construction, the owners made the decision to sell, and the scope was reduced accordingly — the garage and greenhouse addition was set aside, and the main-house work was scaled back to essential repairs and a partial basement build-out.
What remains is the design itself: a thorough, constraint-driven plan for a difficult historic lot, and the foundational repairs that left the home in far better shape than we found it. The full vision shown here is what the house could be — a record of how careful design turns a century-old home's quirks into solvable problems.
