New apartment building planned for Denver's Golden Triangle neighborhood

A Denver-based equity firm this week unveiled plans for another large-scale apartment building in the Golden Triangle neighborhood south of downtown.

It joins a sea of planned apartments there in the wake of the pandemic, as over a thousand new apartment units are already slated to change the cityscape over the next few years.

Trailbreak Partners announced plans to build an 18-story, 320-unit mixed-use apartment building at 8th Avenue and Lincoln Street. The 37,000-square-foot site is currently home to Low Down Brewery and Kitchen.

“We identified it as a really attractive location for a higher-end product,” Vice President Ethan Argov said from the firm’s offices in Uptown.

Although Trailbreak is calling the building’s units “luxury market-rate” apartments, Argov said the particulars will deliver economies of scale to keep end prices of some apartments lower. Those prices have not been announced, he said.

A 5,000-foot ground-floor retail component could definitely incorporate a restaurant, Argov said, pointing to the brewery currently on the corner. But Trailbreak also envisions some kind of co-working space where tenants might find work-from-home capabilities.

“Working from home is easy in a single-family house, but in an apartment, you might want more space,” he said.

The project, currently in mid-design, is working its way through the entitlement process and will head for Denver's Design Advisory Board review in the middle of October.

“The intent is to feel very much open and welcoming to the public,” Argov said about the design.

The project architect Hord Copland Macht has incorporated elements to resonate both with Golden Triangle and its museum district to the north, as well as with the historic Capitol Hill area to the east, he said.

Offerings will include luxury one and two-bedroom units ranging to 1,200 square feet on upper floors, but also more affordable one-bedrooms, including some 500-foot units that Argov calls “junior-one-bedrooms,” designed as a more attractive alternative to a studio apartment.

Upper floors, Argov said, will offer some Pikes-to-Longs-Peak views, while all residents will view the Front Range from a variety of terraces, including a 2-story rooftop lounge, a pool deck on the seventh floor, and an additional terrace wrapping the fifth floor along E. 8th Avenue. Plans include a 324-stall garage.

Numbers of other large-scale new apartment projects have been announced for Golden Triangle over the past year, including five sites at W. 11th Avenue and Bannock Street, W. 11th and Cherokee, W. 12th and Delaware, W. 12th and Elati, and W. 14th and Fox.

Argov says the building will come in at around 200 feet high and will comply with a view corridor requirement. The corner building site went under contract in May and hasn’t closed yet. Argov said both the city and the Golden Triangle community have given positive reactions to the proposed building.

“It’s not a shlocky, half-thought-out project,” he said. “It really fits the context of neighborhood.”

The firm hopes to begin construction in Q2 of 2023, with completion two years beyond.

Trailbreak Partners also has multifamily projects under way at W. 32nd Avenue and Eliot Street in Denver’s Highland neighborhood, and at Sheridan Station along the W Line light rail.