ML
real estate
Focus On:
creede america
a silver boomtown’s historical architecture provides the inspiration for a new neighborhood of simple, smalL and stylish homes
Between 1889 and 1891, thousands of miners journeyed to the tiny southern Colorado town of Creede
in search of fortune. They hastily built their homes and headed into the hills, where they found some of the richest silver-bearing veins in the state. But their timing was poor. In 1893, the silver market crashed and the population of Creede soon dwindled. What remained, however, in addition to tales of outlaws and gunfights, was a style of building Creede resident and developer Avery Augur calls “Victorian minimalism”: traditional Victorian forms that lack the ornament adorning the homes of Colorado’s older mining towns like Aspen, Telluride and Central City. It’s this pared-down Victorian style that inspires the dwellings Augur, who has a master’s degree in architecture, and architects Jaimi Baer, Mark DuBois and Keith Loftin have created at Creede America, a neighborhood Augur first envisioned nine years ago when he purchased a 45-acre parcel of land on a mesa just above town. >>
Story by Christine Deorio
Photography by David O. Marlow
ML | www.mountainliving.com 53