Whether it’s a new-build or a resale, for years now people on the sales end of the housing business have been playing it safe when it comes to interior finishes. When in doubt, open it up and paint it white.

The bright-and-white look seen everywhere is a nod to how builders, agents and many designers are reading the tastes of homebuyers now, particularly of younger ones. But Kentwood broker Annzo Phelps has a historic house to show in Denver’s Country Club neighborhood that decidedly runs in a different direction, and she says she’s seeing numbers of buyers now who are ready for that change.

The house at 199 Lafayette Street has had only three owners in the 120 years since it came out of the ground, one of the earliest in the historic district that emerged along with the club’s golf course during Mayor Robert Speer’s first term. The period marked a boom in beaux-arts public building, and this Mediterranean revival design follows suit, with ornamental entertaining spaces that show unabashed splashes of color.

“The beauty of it is that this is a legacy home in a historic district that hasn’t lost its original charm,” Phelps said. She laments how traditional homes like this one, with period detailing and a careful traffic flow between entertaining and private areas, can lose that sense when the walls come down and everything gets a vanilla makeover. “You’re going to turn these beautiful rooms that flow so well into one big space.”

Tired of white

Phelps says she sees a growing number of clients that like a more compartmentalized plan and want to pick something other than white. “They’re still building them, but I hear clients saying, ‘We’re sick of the open floor plan, we want the formal dining room,’” she added. Her daughter, who is an interior architect in Los Angeles agrees. “I am so sick of white,” she told Phelps recently.

The home is $5.8 million for seven bedrooms, seven baths, 6,737 square feet of finished space on a near-quarter-acre lot that is one of the largest in Country Club, particularly in the six-block expanse between Downing and High Streets that were the original blocks facing across First to the clubhouse.

Those areas that have been kept as-they-were include a living room with a wood-burning fireplace and four French doors, two opening to the porch; a formal dining room with a large, seated bay window; a full butler’s pantry with glassed-in cabinetry and an original tin double-prep sink; and upstairs bedrooms with large windows, including in the primary, where two banks of those open inward. The basement has a pool parlor with original French street scenes, and there’s a carriage house above the garage, really its own apartment.  

Despite the maturity of the neighborhood, Phelps says this is a young-family house with a choice of three home office spaces, plenty of bedrooms and a big playroom on the third level. She says Country Club is a smaller neighborhood that is seeing higher prices that accompany how well Cherry Creek is performing as an office market following covid. She points to prices for both resale and new listings in Cherry Creek North as examples, on sites nowhere near this size. She’s showing the home by appointment.

ABOUT THIS HOME:

WHERE: 199 Lafayette St., Denver; from Cherry Creek take E. First Avenue west 8 blocks to Lafayette and turn north.

SIZE: 7 bedrooms/7 baths, 6,737 sq. ft.  PRICE: $5.8 million  WEB: 199LafayetteDenver.Kentwood.com  SHOWN: by appointment  AGENT: Annzo Phelps, 303-570-3429