MASTERPLANNING & PARTNERSHIPS

Know Someone Who Does.

You don't have to know everything about everything. You just need to have a friend who does.

That is the most useful lesson we have learned on large, complicated projects, and no project taught it better than the master plan on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus where we were fortunate to help shape and deliver the district that surrounds one of the region's most important medical and life science campuses.

THE CHALLENGE

Too much for any one team.

The list was long. Renovate roughly 400 existing apartments. Build The Fremont, another 253 homes organized around an elevated courtyard and pool terrace. Build a hotel. Open a restaurant. Create an outdoor amphitheater. Make room for an elementary and high school. Bring in new retail, and keep going from there.

Each of those is its own business, with its own experts, its own economics and its own ways of failing. No developer knows how to run a hotel, a brewery, a daycare and a flower shop at the same time. Pretending to is how master plans end up as beautiful drawings and empty storefronts.

THE APPROACH

Call your friends.

So we started calling our friends, and their friends.

We hired the best hotel operators we knew. We tracked down brewery owners and restaurateurs who already had a following. We called daycare providers to understand what it would take for them to open on campus. We found local flower shops that were ready to expand.

Then we made it easy for them to say yes. In some cases, we gave small spaces away to make sure there was life on the street. A busy coffee counter or a flower stand does more for the big space next door than any leasing brochure. The early tenants were not a cost. They were the reason the larger tenants wanted to be there.

THE LESSON

Curiosity over expertise.

A master plan is not a drawing. It is a set of relationships. The plan only works when the people who will run each piece are part of shaping it, early enough that their needs show up in the design, the budget and the phasing.

Our job was not to be the expert in everything. Our job was to know what good looked like, find the people who were already doing it, and bring them together around one shared picture of the place.

That is still how we work. On every project, we ask who already does this best, and we go find them.

THE OUTCOME

Today there is a real sense of place on the campus. People live there, eat there, meet there and send their kids to school there. And it supports one of the most important medical and life science campuses in the Denver region.

That's knowing someone who does.

Bound by outcome.