South Suburban Mid Century Gem

 

Beautiful midcentury modern home for sale with much of its original finishes still intact. (Click on the thumbnails for larger pics)

5,000+ square feet, 4bd/ 5ba, 2 car garage, basement, almost 3/4 acre lot, desirable location. Under $900K.

 

Contact us when you are ready to put our unique knowledge and experience to work for you!

720.279.4884

shannon@5280mod.com

Listing Brokerage: Luxe Group

6 MCM Homes under $200K

While the most well known midcentury modern homes for sale in Denver are usually priced over $400K, we spend a lot of time looking for the more affordable gems.

Here’s a sample of affordable mid century modern (aka California contemporary) homes in the Denver Metro area :

 

Contact us when you are ready to put our unique knowledge and experience to work for you!

720.279.4884

shannon@5280mod.com

 

Architecture on Film

Last night we watched (and loved) Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman followed by a Q&A with director Eric Bricker. If you weren’t able to catch the film, keep an eye out for it at the Starz Filmcenter the first week in October.

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The Shulman documentary is the first in the Denver Film Society’s Film and Design series. There are three more films  and I’m looking forward to seeing Design Onscreen’s Journeyman Architect: The Life and Work of Donald Wexler on the big screen. More on all of the films in this series here.

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Design Onscreen will also be screening the Colorado premiere of  Infinite Space: The Architecture of John Lautner at the Denver Art Museum on October 9th @ 6:00

A Denver based initiative, Design Onscreen is dedicated to documenting primarily post WWII architects, industrial designers and graphic designers who are still living but have not received significant attention to date.

We are very fortunate to have so many modernist events happening around Denver!

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Architect Profiles: Richard Crowther (1910-2006)

The late Richard Crowther was a pioneer in green development, passive solar design, and energy efficiency. He gave lectures on solar energy at universities nationwide and wrote some of the most important books on the subject, including the famous Sun, Earth: Alternative Energy Design for Architecture in 1983.

Richard Crowther started as an Art Deco neon-light designer for a firm in San Diego, where he was commissioned to help design the spires of San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition.

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In 1948, Crowther moved to Denver. Working for Lakeside Amusement Park owner Ben Krasner, Crowther gave the park an Art Deco neon-light makeover which we all know and enjoy to this day. Here are some incredible examples of that design effort:

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In the 1950s, Richard Crowther built homes in the Country Club , Hilltop and Cherry Creek North neighborhoods. At Historic Denver’s recent Modernism Tour , participants were allowed inside Crowther’s 1956 Neufeld House. While the interior of the house is now contemporary modern, painstaking restoration effort was undertaken on the exterior to remove paint from Crowther’s original 1956 ribbed terra cotta tiles revealing their original “burnt orange” color. (Original & current interior pics below)

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In the 1960s, Crowther designed 3 masterful film theaters, the famous Cooper Cineramas. These were the first specially designed theaters to screen films with the incredible widescreen Cinerama process, which required three synchronized film projectors projecting crisscross onto a deeply curved screen. After the demise of this elaborate process, all three theaters were unfortunately demolished. These theaters were also clad in “burnt orange”.

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The Cooper Theatre here in Denver on S. Colorado Blvd was the first to be constructed, followed by a sister Cooper Theatre in St. Louis Park, MN. Finally, Crowther’s crowning achievement in theater design was the Indian Hills Theater in Omaha, Nebraska, which sported a 105 foot screen! When they demolished the Indian Hills Theater, celebrity protestors included Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Ray Bradbury and Leonard Maltin.

Cherry Creek residents may be familiar with some of Richard Crowther’s unique office buildings, around Third & Steele St.

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This was once Crowther’s office.

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Here you can see the solar functionality of the unusual geometric shapes jutting out of his structures.

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Happily, two fantastic Crowther houses in Cherry Creek have so far evaded the raze craze. They can be found at 500 Cook Street (hard to get a picture of due to bountiful streetside landscaping) and the Crowther House and Studio at 401 Madison St., which is a masterpiece. It has been compared to Charles Deaton’s Sculptured House of Genesee by esteemed art and architecture critic Michael Paglia.

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Richard Crowther died at 96, but he continued to swim 100 laps a day in the indoor solar-heated pool (which was designed to help warm his house) until he was 94 years old!

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