What every homeowner wants, as the Italians say, is tutto bellissimo—everything beautiful. But in the case of this newly built home in Denver’s Belcaro neighborhood, beauty was only one aspect. Its design-minded owners had a very particular vision. But, first, they had to convince a consequential member of their design team to get on board.
The couple had a specific reference in mind for their new home: a famed 2001 Denver dwelling originally designed for Chipotle founder Steve Ells. The pair had walked the house when it came up for sale, and while it didn’t fit the needs of their family of four, they decided to contact its architect about designing a similar glass-walled abode. Unfortunately, the mastermind behind this residence’s midcentury modern-style architecture, Thomas A. Briner, had since retired. But, undeterred, they still reached out. At first, Briner said no, but their enthusiasm eventually won him over, and he agreed to sketch plans. “We now have boxes of his beautiful hand drawings,” the wife shares. All the owners needed now was a design team to bring these sketches to life.
Enter interior designer Jessica Doran, whose work on a Cherry Hills Village house the pair had admired. Landscape architect Peter Chivers and colleague Trevor Toms also joined the team, while the husband, an experienced developer, acted as the project’s day-to-day superintendent. “The house was a continuous design exercise we took on together,” Doran says of the husband’s involvement. “We basically never stopped designing until the day their family moved in.”
Doran’s scope of work was particularly expansive, as Briner’s drawings didn’t specify materials. Her approach was to minimize the palette for simplicity and consistency—“creating a clean, timeless backdrop to showcase the clients’ growing art collection and sculptural furniture,” she notes—and to repeat key elements for cohesion. “We have all those operable sliders, and dialogue between the interior and exterior is so important,” the designer stresses. To wit, the same color of brick is used inside and out, with a textural shift for the bricks on the stair wall and around the fireplace. And she worked to figure out how to make some of Briner’s ideas a reality, including an innovative motorized pivoting louvered wooden screen fitted across a wall of the primary bedroom.
Doran’s goals for the interiors neatly complement the architect’s clean-lined, midcentury-inspired design. “My clients were attracted to a more contemporary version of a midcentury house, with overtones of this style in the details and materiality, but mixed with timeless furnishings befitting modern life,” she explains. “We brought in a lot of rich, earthy tones as well as darker walnuts and teak wood.” The owners also wished to furnish the home primarily with Italian designers, including Arclinea, Sicis and B&B Italia, with Doran guiding the process.
“I grew up in Italy, and we chose a lot of pieces designed in the 1970s and ’80s that have become iconic now,” the husband notes. The wife, in turn, zeroed in on practicality, especially regarding how well the finishes and furnishings would work for their two young children. “I was the functionality police,” she jokes. “I was constantly asking things like, ‘How are we going to keep this clean?’” Doran answered with materials that would wear well, including durable concrete floors, leather upholstery and steel toe kicks in the kitchen. Briner had also planned for clear sight lines from the kitchen and living areas to a backyard tree house (which he also sketched, designing it as a counterpart to the main home), allowing the couple to easily track their kids’ outdoor activities.
And the aesthetic of the interiors continues outdoors. “The idea was for this residence to feel like it was melded with the site, while keeping the landscaping clean and modern to reflect the lines of the house,” Toms recalls. One of the first things he and Chivers settled upon was the creation of an interior courtyard, an alluring space that includes a reflecting pool, boulders and graceful redbud trees laid out “like a sculpture garden,” Toms notes. Doran also brought greenery inside, most notably via the entrance gallery where panels of preserved moss act as an artful accent.
As the project concluded, the designer credits the husband in particular for the passion he brought to the project, which took it to the next level. “He came to the table again and again with many, many ideas that we’d then refine together,” Doran says. The wife concurs, adding, “Our hope is that, in the end, we’ve created a house that will live on.” Or, in other words, beauty per sempre.
