I can pretty much talk all day with any number of my mid mod friends. And Adrian Kinney is definitely in that number! He’s a realtor, mid-century modern (MCM) guru and owns Mid Mod Colorado. Here’s one thing we agree on today: loving your home is a huge part of your real remodel ROI.
Adrian is back on the podcast this week to cover all my latest obsessions. We dive into Denver housing history, why passive solar is great in the high desert and why planning your perfect remodel should be about YOU (and not about remodel ROI).
How Denver became such a Mid Mod town
Denver experienced a massive boom in construction during the 1950s and 1960s, a period that coincided perfectly with the explosion of the modernist movement. A significant number of mid-century modern homes were built in the Denver Metro area – thousands, in fact – despite it being considered a “flyover city” for much of its history.
Mid-century homes built for the high Desert
These are the homes Adrian specializes in and they were uniquely planned for Denver’s dry, arid climate. The best mid mod houses there have thoughtful layouts designed for passive cooling and stack effect ventilation that took advantage of prevailing winds.
Until recently it was possible to get along in Denver without conventional Air conditioning. When it’s hot but dry you could use a so called “swamp cooler” to use the power of evaporation over water to create cooler air. This has become less common as changing climate heat waves have set in for longer and heat and cool cycles have shifted. But I love that this was a common feature of Denver MCM!
One thing that hasn’t changed?
The tweakabilty of post and beam homes
A hallmark of mid-century modern design in Denver and the surrounding region was post and beam construction.
This created a stock of infinitely “tweakable” homes with flexible layouts – for better or worse. Post and beam allows for large expanses of glass, making houses feel at one with the land and facilitating easy flow between interior and exterior spaces.
Small-ish mid-century homes “live bigger” due to their open plans and direct access to the outdoors. Adrian loves how these homes can be adapted to suit modern lifestyles, but has definitely seen some unfortunate flips. With some of the worst including changes that go maximalist in spaces that are built to be the definition of minimalism.
If you listen to the episode you’ll hear Adiran and I talk about how homeowners go back and forth through the eras on how open or closed we want our houses to be. People put in dividing walls and then take them down … then put them back again over the decades.
Making the right choice for you is the real remodel ROI
Your happiness can be, and perhaps is the real return on investment in a remodel.
Don’t just think about resale value. Focus on making design choices that truly suit your house and your mid-century tastes. This thoughtful approach means your home will work better for you in your lifetime, creating extraordinary benefits for you and your family.
Leaning into the mid-mod style of your choices not only makes the house more enjoyable for you but also attracts the right next person to care for it.
Resources to up your remodel ROI
- Want more from Adrian? Go back and catch:
- Want us to create your mid-century master plan? Apply here (https://midmod-midwest.com/services) to get on my calendar for a Discovery Call!
- Get Ready to Remodel (https://midmod-midwest.com/ready), my course that teaches you to DIY a great plan for your mid mod remodel!
- Schedule a 30-minute Zoom consult (https://midmod-midwest.com/call) with me. We’ll dig into an issue or do a comprehensive mid century house audit.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Della Hansmann
Your Happiness can be a return on investment in a remodel (remodel ROI). Perhaps it is the real remodel ROI in any home improvement project. Today, I’m chatting with Adrian Kinney of mid mod Colorado about our shared love of mid-century. Now we’re going to cover a lot of ground in this conversation, from the history of Denver’s kind of Gold Rush mid-century development era to swamp cooling and the passive design built into mid-century homes, to the amazing tweakability of the layout of a mid-century post and beam.
Della Hansmann
But what I hope you’ll most take away from this is that your home is for you, and you have the power to make design choices that suit the house and suit your mid-century tastes. Take it from me and from Adrian, with years of specializing in the market for mid-century homes.
Della Hansmann
Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is a show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2110.
Della Hansmann
This episode really grows perfectly out of a handful of topics I’ve touched on in recent episodes. Actually, that is by design. It did get recorded first and is only being released now. But I have been on a kick as you know about mid-century history and housing development and why it’s happened, and thinking about passive solar and passive cooling. So none of this is actually out of left field.
Della Hansmann
Anyway, we’re really going to dig into the developmental history of Denver, why and when people came there over time, and the changing power that bringing AC to the West had over these homes, and the way that the last couple of decades of climate change have affected Denver’s ability to maintain what had been, in some cases, real passive cooling in the majority of houses to the place where now air conditioning is necessary to meet tough conditions throughout the summer and winter.
Della Hansmann
It’s a shame, because it has been a place where the dry heat, it’s a dry heat, has meant that it’s been possible for people to do really well with older, low tech cooling solutions like swamp coolers and homes laid out for stack effect ventilation that takes advantage of the prevailing winds. I love how specifically that Denver mid-century homes were planned for their conditions and not just plop down willy nilly in any direction without any thought of their local environment. And I’ve talked with Adrian before a number of times.
Della Hansmann
So if you get to the end of this chat and think I want more of that, then if you want to think about Denver’s history clever mid-century home buying policies, or just more about Adrian’s background as someone who has lived in and remodeled quite a few different mid-century homes now, until he found the one that he and his partner don’t want to leave, you can go back and grab those in the podcast archives. So let’s see.
Della Hansmann
A few years ago, we chatted about why mid-century homes live so well their great flow and flexibility. And that was episode 1004 back in November 2022 if you are scrolling your podcast feed. Then last summer, we talked about unicorn houses, you know, those mid-century dream homes, and how to find a mid-century house that works for you. Even in a really tight market, there’s some good how to content there for anyone who’s mid-century house hunting right now, that is episode 1802, from July last summer. And then in August, we talked about assembling your mid-century Dream Team, not just a great realtor and a great architect, although those help, but how to find the contractors and specialists who get it about your mid-century home. So if you’re looking for more of Adrian’s and my advice on how to find the pros who will be your best allies in this process, check out episode 1807.
Della Hansmann
Here’s the bottom line, Adrian and I both know that there is always a market for well updated mid-century homes, leaning into the era of your house and applying some design creativity to a remodel might cost you literally not one extra dollar in a kitchen or a bathroom remodel or in your whole house.
Della Hansmann
That kind of design thinking can just be a matter of spending your contractor’s time and costs in different materials or in an alternate layout, but the benefit to you and your family can be extraordinary, leaning into the choices for your home that are both personal, the right amount of openness, the right allocation of space between a den or office or bedrooms, the right choice of a shower versus a tub, not only means the house works better for you in your lifetime, but also might call in just the right person to care for it next, especially when you also lean into the mid mod style of each of those choices. Find show notes for this episode at mid mod midwest.com/ 2110. Let’s get right into it.
Della Hansmann
Okay, so here I am with Adrian Kinney, owner of mid mod Colorado, real estate. And we’ve, we’ve been mid-century friends for a while now, and I had so much fun coming out to be there for Denver modernism week a couple of years ago. It’s always fun to really just go down deep into something with a fellow mid-century obsessive. So one of the things that’s been on my mind recently is the policy and the social why? Behind our mid-century homes. And I know you spent a lot of time deep, diving into the history of Denver, specifically, when you I guess, what does that bring up for you when you think about the history of how we got these houses, how we got them in this spatial layout, what’s that story? First
Adrian Kinney
of all, hello again. Thank you for having me here. So nice to see you. Always great to chat with, agreed the crazy mid center folks like ourselves and just really deep dive into all of this. Yeah, it was, you know, I’m sure most of the listeners know this whole modernist movement was coming about at the time about how the house interacts with the ability and how to live in the property, where before it was basically like, you know, humans just figured out we could do structures to live in. And then it was like, How can we actually live in them? Versus just, here’s a bedroom and a bathroom and, you know, a basic layout.
Adrian Kinney
And then it was, you know, really, how can you live, you know, what does the living space look like? What is, you know, bedroom layouts. How does it connect with everything? And that was really, obviously what modernism was about. Was really making it accessible to outside. Super easy living structure for, you know, the occupants of the property. But as well, as, you know, for entertaining purposes. Obviously, you know, the classic 50s and 60s parties of the era were a big thing. So it was, you know, how does it interact? How does it interact with two people in the house, with two people in kiddos, and then, you know, with a medium or large size party.
Adrian Kinney
And, you know, how does it, you know, need a big house to make the smaller sections work for entertaining, obviously, the light coming in and out, for the big windows, the connections to courtyards. And that was that whole in that modernist and connection to outdoors. And really, I know we always talk about the indoor outdoor connection today, and so this is really where it came from. Is that whole modernist style of, hey, these houses should be really kind of one with the land and connected, so that you really can live in and out that, you know, maybe the square footage is smaller than some of these stacked we call them the square homes that we have here, the Denver squares, where they were the Sears craft homes that were shipped over on crates, and they were basically 800 square foot basement, 800 square foot first floors and 800 square Foot upper floors.
Adrian Kinney
Bathroom got put on the upper floor because they needed gravity when they eventually did indoor plumbing. And that was kind of like, you know, three times 800 and that’s what had a lot of these mid mods were 1000 to 1200 square feet, when comparison, that was quite a bit smaller than three stacked 800 square footers. And so it was kind of that like, well, they live bigger because it’s on one floor, but at the end of the day, it’s only, you know, a half or two thirds of the square footage. So it was really this like, well, you can go outside and you’ve got connections to the land and the windows that, you know, is just a very ahead of its time kind of, kind of styling and theory about how you live in a property,
Della Hansmann
yeah, and that feels like a big part of the story of the west of Denver. How much? Well, actually, this is a question I don’t know, even a beginning of the answer to, how much of Denver was there before the mid-century era. Was it? It was a city? Was it sizable? How much did it expand during the sort of post war boom?
Adrian Kinney
Absolutely. So Denver really saw most of our construction time during the 1950s and 60s, for the most part, Denver really, obviously came on the map during the gold rush. That was, you know, the big thing that we had here, and really put, you know, Denver, where it is on the map. For that reason for the gold rush, we didn’t really have much until the 1950s-ish, and this is kind of generally for Denver proper, I know a lot of the statistical means are including the west side of town, which is Arvada, Wheat Ridge and Lakewood, some of Aurora, which is east of Denver.
Adrian Kinney
But Denver itself, really, if you kind of just take the schematics of when it was built, most all of it was 1950s and 1960s Denver is a pretty sprawling city. We’re actually sitting county metro that’s been merged together. But if you look at it, we go pretty far to Littleton, basically down in the southwest corner, and then we go all the way up to DIA, which is our major airport, which was a huge land grab, going north and east through Aurora, essentially. So we go a big, long diagonal for the town, but most of it, you know, the downtown core was, you know, 1880 to 1910 we really don’t have many date stamps of single family homes that were built in the 1920s and 30s.
Adrian Kinney
There’s a really small pocket, kind of, where I live in the southeast part of Denver that has a 1930s date stamp. Why we don’t have many cool art deco so we just didn’t have many built in that 1930s timeframe. Almost nothing the 1940s and then really early 1950s truthfully, about 1954 through 1965 is when Denver was just exploding, which obviously coincided, well, with this whole modernist movement that was happening at the time where, you know, this theoretical idea of living like we just talked about, paired over really well with this whole explosion that Denver was seeing for housing.
Adrian Kinney
So, you know, we were essentially a flyover city for such a long time between coast and coast that, you know, no one really stopped here, but for the 19. 50s and 60s, we just had a huge, huge boom of all structures that were built in 1950s and 1960s thus we were able to actually get a larger sum of mid-century modern houses. And my team and I, over the years have found six to 7000 in the Denver Metro area of true mid-century modern houses.
Adrian Kinney
And you know, while that number seems large, yeah, on the average is pretty small, like the percentage, but again, for being a flyover city, like, that’s a pretty large number of these, like cutting edge style of homes that were being built. So it was really cool that we ended up with that we had a downturn, I think was a national downtrend, if I remember correctly, late 60s onward, that kind of just slowed building in general, but Colorado and Denver especially just had a massive boom in the 50s and 60s. The burbs around Denver really saw a 1980s and 90s building kind of conglomerate going on. But Denver itself really has 1890s and 1910 and then 1950s and 60s is probably 80 plus percent of our build dates here.
Della Hansmann
So 1890s that this is my, my lack of Western history. Was that in the Gold Rush era, or what was the economic driver? Yeah,
Adrian Kinney
it was just after it essentially, that was a lot of the kind of the gold rush and the excitement around it, and then obviously, you know, as the gold goes with most of the other cities, it’s a very boom and bust kind of thing. People just stayed. Yep, they stayed, and they also left. And you’ll find a lot of our Colorado has never been a growth City until about 2014 we’ve always been this boom and bust kind of cycle where, again, you know that 1890s 1920s it was just the spot to be. Everything was happening, all the stuff was being built, you know, it was just, it was the spot.
Adrian Kinney
But really, after, Gosh, 1910 1920 you’ll be hard pressed to find a lot of build dates on structures within Denver, because it just totally collapsed. You know, then it came back the 1950s and 60s, it was a little better. It kind of puts along and, you know, this little slow growth here and there. We followed the.com really big, but really from about 2014 onward is the longest just growth cycle. We’re still on it now that Denver itself has ever seen where we’re really used to this kind of cyclical, okay, boom and bust. A major boom, major bust, where now it’s kind of been kind of a constant upward trend, which is just fascinating to see, given we’ve never had this in our history before?
Della Hansmann
Well, in these days, it feels like Denver’s a really a lifestyle city. You want to go there because you are a hiker, because you’re a skier. You want to be near mountains, and then you find a job, or you remotely work in a way that lets you be there. What was the economic driver in the post war period? Was there a lot of industry around there? Or, yeah, a
Adrian Kinney
lot of industry was being built. Just things were happening here as a place to be. So there was, you know, new construction. We had a lot of industrial coming in that was as well here, a lot of factories and plants, you know, various business. We were kind of that big city in the Midwest. I know, you know, there were still others in the time, but we were really coming to be. So it was a really exciting thing for it. It was at that time, some of the outdoors that we had on proximity to the mountains, as we get in the 50s and 60s, you know, it’s not as exciting where, you know, if there’s a giant snowstorm, you can’t get up there as easy as you can today, kind of thing.
Adrian Kinney
But yes, that was a lot of the big drivers for it was, you know, just the industries that were coming in. We had actually a lot of for the health side of stuff. That’s actually why my paternal grandparents came here, because of our super dry and high air that we have and the colder temperatures. A lot of places that had renowned doctors were saying that if you had asthma or suffered from some type of lung or breathing issues to actually send you to Colorado because of the high dry air that we had. So yeah, that was actually my grandpa was kind of sent here for that, that they were like, hey, you’ve got, you know, pretty bad asthma.
Adrian Kinney
Go to Denver. It’s going to be great spot for you. So that was kind of interesting. Again, not the entire world didn’t come here for that, but that was something that was happening that they’re like, hey, it’s the high desert. Go to go to Denver. Go to Colorado. It’s a spot for you. And it was kind of the growing city, so it was exciting, and a lot of lot was just happening. It was a very again, the spike in 10 years, and then it kind of just faded back off, and then picked back up, you know, a couple decades later, that mid-century
Della Hansmann
moment. I mean, it was a boom time all over. But it’s interesting to sort of see the different drivers of why people went to specific places. Yeah, I know a little further southwest, the advent of affordable home air conditioning was really a big movement to like the boom around Phoenix and all of Arizona and a lot of California was about being able to sort of create conditioned indoor air in hot places and endure them. Is that I remember being quite shocked when I was in Denver by how little it seemed people paid attention to heating. But do they air condition in Denver, or do you just kind of live with the
Adrian Kinney
climate we do now, obviously, with kind of climate changing to consistently warmer, consistently longer? Yes, they’re paying more attention to it. When these homes were built originally, they were actually perfect for the climate, aside from the two tail ends, you know, we. Do get very cold here, and we do get very hot here. But in, you know, in the bell curve of things, the hot and the cold aren’t, you know, as much as people think for being, you know, a mountain town per se. You know, we still get to negative 20.
Adrian Kinney
We do get 100 plus on the tail ends. But, you know, most of the year is kind of, yes, it’s, you know, we get one or two of each of those a year. But the, you know, most of these homes didn’t have air conditioning when they started again. You know, our summers would peak at maybe a 90, mid 90s here and there. They really stayed kind of that high 80s. Low 90s is like the highs of it, where now, you know, even when I was growing up, I think we broke like 2030, days straight of 90 plus that we had here, that, you know, again, had that in the 50s and 60s, like that’s it’s hot, and a lot of the reason the cooling kind of came here is we have what we call evaporative or swamp coolers here. And I know anyone listening in a wet climate is going to think we’re crazy for this.
Adrian Kinney
We are considered the high desert here. So again, we are a mountainous town that is technically a dry, very arid climate. So what we have are evaporative coolers, or swamp coolers, that put basically cool, moist air into the properties. It’s kind of a glorified, think of basically wet cardboard, but a much nicer version that stays kind of wet or damp, and then there’s a fan that pulls air in and over the kind of damp surface and into your property. So it’s a very natural, very energy efficient, awesome way to cool your property. But the key part of that is you have to have cool outside temperatures for that to really work.
Adrian Kinney
And Denver, because we are the desert, we get the obviously really big swings of the high highs and the low lows, even during summer, so that at nighttime, you can use either an attic fan or an evaporative cooler, and you can really cool your house down to that, you know, mid 60s, lock it up for the day. And even if it’s high 80s or 90s, it only, you know, gets up to 70 by the, you know, time the sun sets. And then you kind of repeat the cycle when we have 90s in the hundreds, and you can’t get that 60 degree overnight, and it’s at that 70 or 80 overnight, the evaporative coolers just can’t keep up, unfortunately. And if you have a whole month of that, you know you just can’t get your house cool without air conditioning.
Adrian Kinney
So as these were built, almost none of them actually had AC again, because it just wasn’t needed. You could use attic fans. You could do cross winds. A lot of the mid-centuries had kind of the north facing windows would open and operate. The south facing would as well, and you’d get that North breeze that would kind of pull that air through naturally. A lot of the like semi customer custom designed homes or APO acres or APO Hills down in Littleton and Englewood, they all have those in them. So you’ll see that quite often.
Adrian Kinney
But again, as things are just hotter longer the evaporative coolers became and then the evaporative coolers struggle a lot, especially when you really do have those 90s and hundreds and again, part of Ken touching on outside of political the climate change, we have a lot of fires, unfortunately, that are happening more often in Colorado when we have a summer fire and you’re pulling in some of that kind of, unfortunately, dust burned air, it pulls that campfire smell into your property as well, too. If you have asthma or allergies, you start suffering from, you know, bringing in that from outside.
Adrian Kinney
So just, that’s what a lot of houses had. It worked for a very long time, especially the 50s and 60s, as it was warmer, just not like today. And now, you know, 5060, years later, you pretty much have to have AC in the property just because it is, you know, they these aren’t made for super hot or cold. All mid-centuries are. They’re really made for that California, you know, 60 to 80, low 80 range, and anything above that, they don’t do super well in and since we do get above, you know, 85 and below 50 here they, you know, they struggle on those tail ends.
Della Hansmann
right? No, they work better to sort of moderate a swing in temperature rather than to push against it, really, so. And that’s one of the reasons that I love the Denver architecture specifics, because they feel so they feel so Californian. They feel so pure. And in the Midwest, we always have to be, we always have to be doing a little bit more.
Della Hansmann
In Wisconsin, in Minnesota and Michigan, we’re doing a bit more to sort of keep the house a box, because our temperatures have always been a little bit more intense, particularly on the cold end. And there’s just you can’t live with a beautiful sheet of glass. There are houses like that, and what they tend to be is just deeply uncomfortable all winter long. So yeah,
Adrian Kinney
they get tough and it, you know, here it’s we do have the, you know, yeah, the super hot and cold are a little tougher to keep but we do have a lot more moderated here in Denver Metro area. And because, also, we don’t have the humidity, our cold and our hot are just less intense here because of that, you know, a freezing and, you know, Minnesota around the lakes versus, you know, freezing here, it’s a lot warmer, and a 32 when there’s not a wind chill of, you know, minus 100 billion, because it’s just that it’s biting. And we don’t really get the humidity here at all, because it makes
Della Hansmann
such a difference that whole it’s a dry heat thing. It really, it really is better. It is, I know
Adrian Kinney
everyone’s like, Oh, it’s a dry heat. That’s one of those. Like, you know, you’re from Colorado, and you call it a dry heat, but it does, you know, it’s, you know, not great for your skin and various other things that you know for the long run. But it, you know, for house, house stuff. It’s, you know, if it’s 100 and dry. Heat. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s not, you know, permeating through every part of the house because of the humidity. It just, it’s just dang hot. Yeah,
Della Hansmann
yeah. This is sidebar for people, not in Denver, but if you’re listening to this, because you’re curious about what it’s like in other places, it’s one of the most important things, I think, for air conditioning units in muggy areas. Is not to oversize the unit, because if the house can cool itself before it can dehumidify itself, you end up with a muggy, clammy cold, which is deeply unpleasant.
Della Hansmann
So HVAC guys are like a lot of sort of good old boy fellows who are just like, bigger is better. But actually, I’m always like, you know what you want a very small unit that works really hard all the time, that’s cooling and dehumidifying constantly, not something that’s gonna like now the temperature’s cold, and no amount of layering is gonna keep you from feeling sort of sticky and moist, yep,
Adrian Kinney
because it’s that monkey, yep. And that’s the nice thing about ours is here, like you can slightly oversize in Denver, because we don’t have to dehumidify the air as much to get a fast result. Yeah, yes, obviously we do. And, you know, it’s nice on ours. Ours is slightly oversized for the house. But again, like, if we honestly see a relative humidity over 20% it has to be raining, like, it just, it just like, that’s, it’s dry here. So it’s one of those. Everyone’s like, oh, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s Denver, and it’s a relative humidity is honestly very low.
Adrian Kinney
And I say this, as I look at we had, we’re gonna have about 48 hours of rain here in Denver, which usually means, like, floods and like just we have our we have clay soil, where the desert, again, is just what we have. So when you get that kind of rain and that amount of time, we just flood. So it’s just that very opposite. Yeah, we just don’t get this much rain ever, and so when we get it this much at a single spot like these last two days, are going to be amazing. It’s going to be a drought Buster for some parts of the state.
Adrian Kinney
So we’re very grateful for it, but it’s one that like, if we honestly get three or four days straight of just constant rain, there will be floods, because it just, we don’t, we don’t have the soil for we don’t have anything for it, and except looking out right now, it’s, you know, to me, two days of no sun, and this overcast is like, I’m going crazy, but it’s just, you know, we’re used to so much sun here that, you know, very happy for this, because it has been a very unfortunately hot and warm and dry winter that we had. So our snowpack was down quite a bit most of the state.
Della Hansmann
So this will help that a lot to sort of mitigate them. That’s great.
Adrian Kinney
Yes, yeah. So as we’re talking about, like, the humidity, even though it’s, like, super humid for us outside, that it just rained, like it doesn’t feel it because we’re just so dry here that it’s when it feels like, I’m, you know, a month in California, and I go outside, I’m like, this is weird. This is Colorado. We don’t have this here.
Della Hansmann
It’s so fun to see how the specificity of microclimates does affect and I think as we’ve gone on, and maybe the mid-century era kind of kicked this off with a lot of universalized housing materials and techniques. But particularly today, I think we just we kind of build a McMansion anywhere in any orientation, in any climate, and don’t really pay a whole lot of attention to how the specifics of that space should affect the building scale and cooling techniques and shading and all those things. So it’s really fun to see it still lingering in the early, mid-century era in particular, that the housing stock of Denver really does respond to it.
Adrian Kinney
Yeah, yeah. It’s been fascinating to see. And like we do have a whole bunch of the, you know, the Hutchison was a big builder that we had here. But it’s the classic brick ranch that, you know, I had cousins in Cali, and every time they came out, they called them, you know, very Colorado houses where they’re, you know, 1000 square feet brick ranch, one car garage on one side or the other, and then the basement that was 1000 square feet, very Midwest, you know, as you will. But they were just the, you know, the lack of better, or the socialist thing to build, because they were easy to build. You know, they had these thick frame built, you know, rectangles.
Adrian Kinney
They could easily do a brick facade, the one car garage for, you know, the one person that would go to work downtown. I could just, they were easy formulaic to build. And so all over the Midwest, as things were just booming in the 50s and 60s, they were just built, you know, left and right, left and right. And they were essentially all the same. The garage may switch side that it’s on. You may have a gable one way or the other, but otherwise, they were just kind of popped up everywhere. And, you know, very, very Midwest kind of feeling, which Denver got a lot of, even though we’re kind of the Rocky Mountain High Desert, we got a lot of the classic, you know, brick ranches all over the area here.
Della Hansmann
The mid-century, modest, the more basic end, yeah,
Adrian Kinney
exactly that, yep, yeah. And they still had, you know, some wood paneling, some fun little features here and there that you can know, you know, doll up here and there. But, yeah, they didn’t have, you know, the floor to ceiling windows or the low slung roofs, but they still had a lot of the fun period pieces inside, the fun colored bathrooms and all the stuff that we love was in those two.
Della Hansmann
Right. Well, that actually is a perfect transition, because the other thing I really wanted to chat with you about today is the post and beam structure and how that’s so prevalent. As you said, maybe about 6000 of those mid-century modern houses, which I think, I think for you that’s a Venn diagram, is a circle of post and beam structure. Is that right for the most part?
Adrian Kinney
Yeah, there’s a couple that were, you know, not or half of the house is post and beam or not, but most. Of the known enclaves are post and beam, and then kind of even the one offs on the west side of town, or typical post beam, I’d probably say the 85 to 90% or of mid-century moderns are actual post and beam.
Della Hansmann
Yeah, and that’s there, again, a slightly more rare here. We just it the advantage of a post and beam that you can dissolve big parts of the wall and do a lot of glass. It just doesn’t get you as much here. You need to have walls to keep the temperature controlled, anyway, and so we do have them, and they’re wonderful, and they’re exciting, and I love working on them, but they also feel more precise and individual. But you’ve got a whole community of people that are living into these kinds of houses. What do you see as the primary living advantages of being in a post and beam structure?
Adrian Kinney
You touched on it pretty, pretty good. Of, like, the call it the Tinker ability of the houses, which I love. And this is always sort of the caveat, of, like, get a structural engineer verify everything. Do all that first, if we’re doing this stuff. But the post to be in structures are basically glorified barns, and so your headers run, you know, typically the two sides of the house and your spine.
Adrian Kinney
Actually, you can see it right here. This is the spine above me, and these are the two sides of it, and the rest of it is basically fluff like, you know, you don’t, you know, the post needs to remain and the beam needs to remain. Our Denver code has about 15 feet between the two posts to support for structure, for the style of redwood beams that we had. But outside of that, the rest of its kind of just funny walls.
Adrian Kinney
And like you mentioned, like we could take down walls, which we did in this property. There was a transom window above, and we wanted a whole wall of windows, and what we had to do was take out the section below and build in Windows below it. So that’s what I love about, you know, livability is that the Tinker ability of it is, you know, if you want to move a wall here, move the wall here. You can check, double check, with the structural person. But most of these structures really were built as barns that as long as the post and the beam remain and the span is within your code for your local jurisdiction, you can really manipulate them super easy and change a wall to a window or window to a wall and move stuff around.
Adrian Kinney
Ours are all built over a crawl space for the most part, so that adds a second easy layer to kind of manipulate that you know, if you wanted to move a bathroom from part A of the house to part B of the house, all you have to do is, kind of drop the plumbing below, take it over, and pop it up on this side of the house, and it just goes through the crawl space, and then the wall you had to move, likely wasn’t load bearing, because it’s post and beam.
Adrian Kinney
So you just move that as well. So for that part of it, you know, livability, if you need to make it the house that you want it to be, all you have to do is, you know, it’s a lot easier process than, you know, having a basement that’s finished, or a structure where, you know, half the walls are load bearing, where you have to get new headers put in and new beams put in, and really kind of manipulate it where, in this sake, it’s like, yeah, all you have to do is kind of move stuff around and leave out what you want on it. So that’s what I love. For livability, they’re a lot easier to manipulate. To really make what you want is like your dream house than you know, having to really get a whole bunch of architectural plans, you can move things a lot easier here.
Della Hansmann
Do you feel like you see your clients who are buying and selling houses have really made a lot of changes to the floor plan? Or are they still living into the general layout of the original mid-century? First pass.
Adrian Kinney
Yeah, a lot of, I would say general layout, the, you know, the two rooms, they get changed a lot. I know we’re kind of in the transition zone in the general world for, you know, open concept versus partition concept. And I know that’s kind of changing. And, you know, that’s the 70s and 80s. Structures and design come back into focus at side tangent.
Adrian Kinney
You know, there’s certain styles that fit certain houses, and that’s how these all got screwed up in the first place. Is a lot of people are shoving are shoving in the wrong style into the wrong type of house, and as we move forward a mid-century becomes less popular the masses. Just a reminder to folks that you don’t have to shove in the 80s into your mid-century.
Adrian Kinney
You can still live true to your bones, and it’s going to be okay as things are changing. But you know, the open living area for the main living space, I do see a lot of folks still from its centuries take down kind of that kitchen partition wall and really make the main living area one space with the kitchen and the living and some of that is, if the wall stays up, you get two good sized rooms.
Adrian Kinney
And some of that means an oversized kitchen and an undersized living space, where, when they’re combined, you get a, you know, one living space that seems to function better, again, depending on what’s, what builder it was, or what things so that seems to be a big one is kind of combining the living space with the kitchen space. And then I see a lot of kind of primary bedroom bathroom reconfigurations where both of these didn’t have a true primary ensuite, and if they did, it was likely a very small shower, sink and toilet, or there was not one at all that function.
Adrian Kinney
So I see a lot of folks that have you know, if there’s a three bedroom up, they try to make a two plus one, where they do a two bedroom plus like a small office, and then try to shove in a good size suite. Three piece, maybe four piece bathroom that, you know, actually is an ensuite for the primary bedroom. So those seem to be the biggest change I see. As far as like changing the floor plan is, you know, taking the wall down to make a, you know, a large living space in the center, and then reconfiguring their primary setup to have a true ensuite, seems to be the kind of configuration that’s most commonly seen.
Della Hansmann
So I want to circle back on that for a minute, because fascinating to see people happy, or at least willing to sacrifice a bedroom for getting that ensuite bathroom access. And I know when I work, you know when I work with a client, it’s always it always comes up, and it’s something that makes people so anxious, because they’re afraid that even though they want it, that it’s against the rules, that it’s this sort of, oh no, I need to think about the resale value of the house, but it does seem like the way that a lot of people are living has shifted. So it might not be that everybody wants to be down a bedroom, but you’ll find someone who does.
Adrian Kinney
Yeah, and it’s, you know, I right on for that too. I always tell clients like a 323 bedroom two bath configuration is the most ideal for, you know, in that bell curve that everyone’s like, that’s kind of where everyone starts, is that, you know, if you’re looking for a single family, detached three bedroom two bath seems to be the minimum that most people will accept. That does play a factor of, you know, when I have a two bedroom to sell, or a one bath to sell. Both of those are very hard to sell.
Adrian Kinney
So you’re kind of this, you know, lesser of two evils of like, do I then sacrifice my three one to get a two, two? Or do I go from, you know, the two one to a two, like that, you know, what do you do to kind of make this thing happen? Basements are always the saving grace, where I’m like, Hey, if you can make a full egress, that’s legal bedroom in the basement, then you can easily lop off one of the upstairs and have a two up and a one down and keep your three two configuration.
Adrian Kinney
But I have a lot of folks that try to make that like two plus one, and I say plus one, that you can probably legally call it a bedroom, even if it’s, you know, five by five, and you’ve got a closet and a window, but it’s really going to be like an office that’s up there. So you’ve got, like, a two bedroom plus office, which really seems to be the minimum today, versus three true bedrooms is, you know, an office, a true primary bedroom and then a guest room seems to be kind of the thing. So if you’ve got two bedrooms and a way to put in a half sized room with a closet, that that seems to be a way that folks are getting away with, you know, shoving in a primary bath, because that I said, both those are real tough to sell to. Just straight two bedrooms and one bathrooms are just, they’re tough, especially if there’s no room to add a third bedroom or a second bath. Those get really tough.
Adrian Kinney
Yeah. So it’s, yeah, it’s always a tough one to swallow. And there’s always the, you know, if you plan have to resale on it. Talk to your local agent and just kind of see, hey, what, what do you think is the best return here? You know, is adding a powder room, even maybe an option to the primary that it gives you at least some type of bathroom space, or is, you know, making a two plus one really the right solution for it?
Adrian Kinney
But yeah, I’m seeing a lot of folks that would opt to almost have a two, two or two plus one two, then, you know, just a two, one and just kind of live with it. It seems to be that second bath seems to be a pretty big deal breaker again, depending on the house size and location and all that. But that’s, I’m not surprised. You get those kind of questions of like, Oh, which way do I go?
Della Hansmann
I know, and I can never, I mean, I can’t. I don’t try to answer it for people, but I do encourage people to think beyond a hypothetical someone else wanting this house someday more importantly than how you want to live in your home right now. And sometimes people have a sense of like there’s a timeline on how long we’ll be here. We’re probably going to move when our kids hit an age or when a job change is coming in. In that case, I would advise more being more conservative. But I don’t know if someone’s telling me this is their forever home. I always just feel like you should have a layout that you want, and someone else will probably like it too, or they can change it.
Adrian Kinney
Yeah. And it’s one of those that like, you know, even if you decide, hey, 1015, years to sell it from now again, maybe this whole partition room thing will be the very much norm. And this, you know, open living area that we have in mid mods, they’ll go back to how they were originally built. And this will be a, you know, shameful that I’ve done this and taken the wall down. So it’s back to that, like, hey, maybe they really won’t care about one bath in 20 years. Or maybe they will care very much that you only have one bath, right?
Adrian Kinney
And that’s that, like, do what you want to be happy in it, especially if you’ve got 15 plus years in the property at that point. Like the equity gain over just time is really not going to make the difference between a, you know, a two, two or two one, because it’s 15 years from now, and how you lived in it for all of those years, and you were happy for Exactly, and that’s the biggest thing. And quick toe off of that, I very much get that conversation where this is our third primary, that apartment of I have lived in, you know, we had a condo we lived in, and redid, we had a cliff made that we owned, and got it, and redid, and then this one, we’ve been in now for almost nine years.
Adrian Kinney
This is the first one where it’s like, we will never sell this house. Sure, we may live somewhere else for a bit, but it’ll always be, you know, within our portfolio, we’re always going to keep it. And so we finally reached that tipping point. To, like, I don’t care what I spend, you know, it’s a reasonable spend on things, you know, sure it’s, you know, maybe it’s over improving. Maybe it’s too specific. I don’t care anymore.
Adrian Kinney
And that’s that, you know, it is a nice relief. Obviously, it’s taken us a long time to build to this, and there’s a lot of things that have gotten here. But if you really can look past that, like, you know what, I don’t care what happens in 10 years, build the dang house for yourself, like, do what you want for it. It won’t really matter if you’ve got a short timeline, be a little more cognizant for sure. You know, just be aware so you can get your return back. But 15 plus years out, you’re fine.
Della Hansmann
Right? I mean, I agree people, people don’t feel I mean, everyone has their own things that feel particularly spendy, regardless of the dollar value. But right? If, if what you value is being at home, you could go on expensive vacations, or you could over design your house, or you could eat out constantly, or you could just be in your house that you love and spend more than the market will give you back on it.
Adrian Kinney
Right? Pick which one makes you happy.
Della Hansmann
This, yeah, I find the question on return on investment (remodel ROI) to be really a curious one, particularly when people are telling me that the house is, is there is their long term home. They want to stay there with their little kids until they’re retired. And I’m just like, okay, so you can, you can do this however you want to. There is not a rule. There’s not.
Adrian Kinney
Yeah, oh, absolutely, yeah. And you hit on to, you know, turn on investment. And, you know, return isn’t always monetary. It’s the I love coming home to my house, and I love my new primary suite that I built. And like, you know, if that’s what makes it great that you know, you love your vacation, but you’re so happy to come home to, you know, this, that’s the, you know, that’s the exact kind of trade off of like, Sure, it can be monetary always, especially if it’s a short term, but there’s definitely that long term side of, like, you know, you spend a lot of time in your house, whether you, you know, think you do or not.
Adrian Kinney
You know you’re there at least seven to eight hours a night sleeping at the very minimum that, you know, it’s, you know, make it a space you’re happy. And whatever budget that looks like, you know, all the money is, or just even a small little touch of paint here and there, you know, do what? What makes the space happy? Because you’re going to be in it, and that’s, you know, that’s an investment that returns back to just mental happiness in these places.
Della Hansmann
Exactly. Oh, I. Okay, we should wrap this up. But I have one more thing I wanted to come back to, which is you mentioned the sort of swing of styles, and they do really go in and out. But I’m curious what you mentioned about the sort of 70s, 80s room division philosophy is maybe coming back. Where are you seeing that?
Adrian Kinney
Yeah, I’m starting to see a lot of the like, some of it’s the overdone. In my opinion. I hate the word open concept, but it’s not a concept because you actually did it. So it’s not, it’s actually done at that point. It’s not theoretical. It’s, I think, when you really got into just some of these houses that took down every single wall in a space that just to open it. And then you’ve got these weird corners of the house that you’re like, What the heck do I do here?
Adrian Kinney
Because this is living, this is dining, this is kitchen, and this is lounge room. I just, I think, obviously, you know, the pendulum always swings. It swings too far one way and back to the other. Applies to everything that. I think some of these, you know, a lot of fix and flips that grayish it out that opened up everything whatsoever to be an open living area. It went so far that it was like, okay, yikes. Like, this is too much. And they didn’t utilize things. And this is a great example, obviously, self serving. I’ve got this lovely screen divider here behind me that this kind of window, while you see behind me our houses see through, essentially.
Adrian Kinney
So as you’ve been here, the front part has giant Windows. You can see all the way through where that section back there, where that door and open window is, that is what used to be an old bedroom, and now it’s kind of a living space just in front of it, where the back of this wall was, was a washer and dryer room and a hallway, and then the space to the left here, that would have been the kind of living area into the rights our kitchen, that whole thing in our house is fully open. But I think the screen wall does a great division of space that says, like, this is kind of the living area. This is, you know, a different living area that’s kind of dining, kind of kitchen.
Adrian Kinney
So I think that, you know, defining your space can be in different ways, how you do it. But I’m really saying, I think kind of the people are like, Oh, I love my kitchen to be a little more intact. So when I burn things, it doesn’t, you know, smell up the entire house. And it’s just, again, it’s this pendulum swing that, you know, I don’t think we’re going to see the 1920s structures of where, like, every room is, you know, five by five and perfectly stacked. It just seems that, you know, the coziness of the spaces, obviously, maximalism is making its way. It’s come back into, I think that, you know, maximalism, combined with tighter spaces, is just going to be a general thing. And sure, you can close back up your kitchens and that kind of thing.
Adrian Kinney
But the good part about mid-century is they just don’t accept maximalism very well, because they’re very small houses, yeah. So, you know, if you maximize them now, that’s great. If that’s your style, it’s just it does get very small very quickly. And that’s a lot of the advent of this, you know, modernist furniture was, it was made for these spaces where low profiles, low to the ground, you know, very sleek lines, so that you could have a full size couch in a very small living space, because it felt. Like, it was not actually as big as it was. If you put one of the big, you know, I call them the very rounded floofy cloud couches in the middle of a mid-century living room, it’s going to be very small living room.
Della Hansmann
he 80s lacy Boy, oh yeah, no, it just,
Adrian Kinney
And that’s just a matter of fact, yeah, it’s just a like, they’re really cool. But, like, unless you’ve got that 70s tri level with 8000 square feet, like, it just not going to work. It’s not going to fit. And that, you know, as much as you can love it, it’s, sorry, you can have one of the sections in a corner, but that’s about it. So, yeah, I’m starting to see a little bit of that come in. And it’s, you know, we always see these trends. I’m really glad mid-century has had this long of a moment. Obviously, it’s going to continue.
Adrian Kinney
You know, it’s really the takeaway of modernism, the theoretical thought behind it. How does the house live? How does it connect to outside wrapping. Back to the very first part of this. You know, the big mansions that are just built as spec homes that are saying, Hey, I’ve got 8000 square feet lot. I can build 6000 of it that’s built to every square inch of it. Versus which way should we face the house? Where should the windows be? Where should the passive Windows be? Where should the forward when, you know, really thinking about that again.
Adrian Kinney
Back to this, when I do fix and flips, it doesn’t cost anymore. It just costs us the brain power to say, hey, hold up. Let’s wait one week. Let’s, you know, sit on the site, you know, Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, and just say, hey, the sun’s coming from this direction. Let’s make this eve longer. This one for the, you know, summer, winter that, you know, makes a whole lot, even if it’s a nice big square that’s just a stack built, even if, you know, turn it 10 degrees just for this reason and extend this one Eve, it makes the world of a difference in some of these houses. So always, my thing of, like, just spend a little more time researching.
Della Hansmann
Yeah, a little design goes such a long way. It really does.
Adrian Kinney
So, I’m I think some of the stuff will come back, and I think we’ll see, you know, summit centuries. Try to accept some of the 70s and 80s, where, again, I think some of it can fit in. These are technically style agnostic when they were built, Cliff May was a big proponent of that. But there’s just a sensible reality at the end of the day that like maximalism and giant couches just will not fit in 1200 square feet. Like it just, you can try all you want, but it’s just probably not gonna happen.
Della Hansmann
It is, yeah, and there are houses that are better suited to that out there, if that’s what you’re looking for. So, oh, absolutely.
Adrian Kinney
Yeah, exactly. And I’m gonna find one of those if that’s kind of your true style, that you have to have that kind of furniture. But, you know, if we tried to shove some of that in here, as great as it would look, it just livability wise, it just, it doesn’t work, unfortunately. Well,
Della Hansmann
I mean, we love these houses for their specificity, and that’s, that’s part of the fun of it is, you know, match. And what you get to do, I mean, what I get to do is take a house and fit it to the people that have chosen it. And what you get to do is match people to the house that they’re looking for. And both of those are such essential steps in getting the right answer for houses and not trying to jam a square peg into a round hole in terms of style and substance, with the with the mid-century bones.
Adrian Kinney
And I think people are figuring that out. I know we’re short on time for this, but it’s nice to see in most parts of all of America. The housing market has slowed substantially, and so folks are getting a lot more time to ponder their purchases. Where, you know, before it was really, again, lack of a better word, a panic buying type of thing, where, you know, if they didn’t buy it, it was going to go up 100,000 they were losing their 3% interest. It was just, you know, there was less thought behind it than just, I need to get a freaking house. Let’s do this. I gotta, I gotta do it.
Adrian Kinney
So, you know, now I’m saying, again, I’m just gonna swung a lot the other way. There’s a little too much pickiness we’ll have to work through. But it is really nice to see folks that you know can see 10 houses, can think for a couple of weeks, for the most part, about, you know, how can I live in this house? Does it work for me? Is a long term? Is it a short term?
Adrian Kinney
So that’s really nice to, you know, have that time where folks can ponder versus like, well, this is a street I want. I don’t care what house it is, and I have to bid 100 over 100,000 over. And here we go. Yeah. So it is nice to kind of see that change, where folks are taking a little more time to ponder it, and, you know, really make the right decision, that this is the place they want to live at.
Della Hansmann
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think you know that also is always going to swing back and forth, but it’s, it’s a good moment right now to see it having a little bit more breathing room.
Adrian Kinney
Yes, which, again, it’s great for everyone. Little frustrating sometimes that there’s, you know, the want more than can actually be produced, which I would love to produce, and that just doesn’t exist. But the general sense of, you know, having a little bit of time to ponder it has been absolutely wonderful to let you know clients have even a night or two to sleep on. It is more than they had before, where it was literally a matter of minutes, where it’s like, you want to bed or not, because it’s going it’s going tomorrow.
Della Hansmann
So it, it’s been such a chaotic moment, and I’ve had so many clients who, mostly the people who come, who find their way to me got lucky, but they’ll often be like, oh yeah. I didn’t even know what mid-century was. I just bid on this house because location blah, blah, blah. Now I know what it is. Can you help me find it? You know, Work it. Work it up to its potential. Yes. But that story happened a lot over the last couple of years where people just like, did you know from the internet, maybe never even having set foot in it. And like, Okay, here’s what I have noticed, that I, like, I do like the concept of mid-century, but I wouldn’t have chosen these things. Can we fix them? And so that’s just interesting.
Adrian Kinney
Yeah, oh, absolutely. I’ve seen that too, and it’s nice to see the exact opposite. I just had a new buyer call yesterday of someone that was like, you know, we’re very specific, we’re very flexible with. In these parameters. But you know, it’s very specific. And it’s, you know, my buyers are all very specific. And, you know, wanting him at Century, wanting XYZ, wanting location. So it’s been nice to, you know, they’re specific, but they’re also patient that they’re like, yeah, we can wait between tomorrow and six months from now.
Adrian Kinney
We just, we know what we want, and we’ll jump on it. So it’s, it again, nice to have folks to have this moment to breathe and ponder it. And lucky for the folks that stumbled into them and got the cool houses. But yeah, there were definitely a lot that were like, Huh? I didn’t know what this was. This is pretty sweet. And I just happened to bid on it because, like, it fit the parameters at the time, and it was a panic purchase. So.
Della Hansmann
Yeah, purchase of a house never really the ideal.
Adrian Kinney
No. And it’s luckily a lot of people did work out okay, up until about 2022 that they could make some equity if they realized that, like, if they realized that, like, you know, a year or two later, this isn’t the house for me, that could turn it be okay. That’s the nice part about the slowing; is things aren’t going up as quick.
Adrian Kinney
So, you know, really make your money back is going to take, you know, three to seven years, the typical time that it used to take. So that’s a lot of this methodical purchase now, as folks are like, okay, you know, I can’t sell this tomorrow for 100,000 more. So I really want to make sure, if you know, we’re here for three to five years, you know, at least get our money back.
Della Hansmann
Like it as it is.
Adrian Kinney
Yes, versus just like whatever, because in two years, it’ll be worth, you know, twice the price, which was true and they didn’t have to worry about it. Or now it’s really like it might not appreciate tomorrow, it might go down 2% tomorrow, and it could go up 5% and percent in 10 years. But it’s more normal, and, you know, more expectation setting of, instead of, yeah, it’s a cash cow just, you know, pull the ATM lever and voila, and slot machine. So it’s, it’s a nice thing to see that stuff is just slow to a pace for folks. And think about it, which, you know, makes me happy and just better for everybody.
Della Hansmann
Absolutely, it seems, seems that way to me. Well, this has been amazing. I think just gonna have to make a plan to talk again about Denver, about housing purchases and seeking and how to really do right by a mid-century house. I always love to get your take on these things.
Adrian Kinney
I would absolutely love to. It’s always a pleasure chatting with you. And thank you so much for having me and catching up again.
Della Hansmann
Absolutely.