“WELL” Built The Lakehouse at Sloans Lake

Health and wellness is at the forefront of most everyone’s minds in these current times, and the built environmentwill have to address the heightened demand for healthy spaces like never before. Owners and developers of office buildings, retail centers and residential buildings will now face important and legitimate questions about their buildings’ ability to provide a safe and healthy environment to the people who live and work in these spaces, and their design and construction teams must be able to answer for them.

The shiny new Lakehouse condos and townhomes at Sloan’s Lake were originally designed and built with wellnessin mind. Not because of any knowledge of a looming pandemic, obviously. Rather, the 540,000 square foot building, with 196 residences and ground floor retail space was originally envisioned six-years ago to become the first residential building in Colorado to achieve the newly established WELL Building Standard™.

Douglass Colony, a commercial construction company headquartered in Denver, worked hand-in-hand with the Lakehouse developers to provide high-end custom finishes, innovative craftsmanship, and successful project execution for this 12-story project in Sloan’s Lake.

This standard, which was introduced in 2014 by the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), moved the dial beyond the long-established LEED building standard in the direction of the building occupant’s health and wellness.

The founders of the standard Delos believed that buildings should be developed with a person’s wellbeing at the center of design and construction. NAVA Real Estate Development, the visionary force behind Lakehouse with prior LEED experience, immediately felt an alignment with the WELL Building Standard upon its release and vision for creating healthier communities and brought-on Stantec and GH Phipps Construction Companies to begin turning the concept into a reality.

“The team was very involved a year ahead of our groundbreaking, making sure that the elements of the WELL Building Standard™ were ‘constructable’,” said Brian Levitt of NAVA Real Estate Development.

“There are seven distinct measures of the standard, and we all had to be highly aware of how we would be able to meet these requirements early in the process. This meant thinking years ahead and reaching out to suppliers and subs to make sure they had the capacity and willingness to help us to reach our goals. That was a critical component of the design process and gave us a path for the project to become a success.”