In Sunnyside area north of Highlands, landmark home is solid concrete
By Mark Samuelson
Whether or not you’re chasing after something in Denver’s Highlands neighborhood, you’re unlikely to tour any house more fun than one in Sunnyside, north of W. 38th, two blocks east of Federal. Beaux Arts-trained architect Eugene Groves began work in 1935 on a 1-bedroom there, two years before he did Johnson’s Corner gas station on old U.S. 85 near Longmont, saved from a wrecking ball in 2002.
Highlands developer Chuck Murphy of Epic Realty restored this all-concrete landmark by Denver architect Eugene Groves.
This house, which spent the 1980s-1990s sheltering jazz percussionist Marc Bertoni, could have easily met a similar fate. Of 40 buildings Groves created (numbers of landmarks on the CSU campus), only a dozen ever gained historic preservation; and when Mr. Bertoni began ailing, this one wasn’t on the list. “It would have been a historical sin if it had been torn down,” says Highlands developer Chuck Murphy, who spent two years restoring 2733 41st Street for the market, preserving all its quirks.
…The most prominent being the architecture: Solid concrete…brick walls coated inside and out in concrete, a concrete dome, concrete floors over the basement…even an upstairs office, with desk and bookshelves in concrete. “Concrete was his gig,” Murphy told me, noting that Groves (devotees have a web site at EugeneGroves.org) was pals with mining/cement magnate Charles Boettcher and shared a vision with him: Concrete could create an inexpensive house that would be immune from the hazard of fire, still on the city’s collective mind from the famous blaze of 1863.
That quality, Murphy says, gives this place a diminutive premium of $330 for hazard insurance…and some energy performance that sounds incredible for a place built when leaky steel-frame windows were the thing. Mid-winter gas-electric bill, he notes, is about $115.
You’ll be wowed by an effect in the living room under that concrete dome. Murphy will show you a place to sit where you can hear everything said by somebody 20 feet away at the fireplace, magically amplified. There’s a berth-style concrete double bed upstairs…and a kitchen that looks to be from a Union Pacific streamliner, with stainless cabinets and virtually everything else of concrete, even the vent hood and dish shelves.
Also…a blackboard set in concrete, sort of a ‘computer workstation’ from the days before computers…a copper-door safe (the combination comes with the deed)…and this inscription in tile above the oven-range space: ‘No matter where I serve my guests, it seems they like the kitchen best.’
The Groves house is priced at $349,900…on view 11-4 today.
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WHERE: Landmark 1935 house, 1,430 sq. ft. plus basement, by Harvard-trained architect Eugene Groves, in Sunnyside neighborhood. 2733 W. 41st Ave., Denver; take Park/W.38th Ave. west from I-25, 2 mi. to Clay, right to 41st, ten left; or take Federal north to 41st, right 2 blks
PRICE: $349,900
WHEN: Sunday, Sep. 27, 11 a.m. until 4 p.m.
PHONE: 303-760-2701
Tags: Chuck Murphy, Eugene Groves, Highlands, Sunnyside
