Owner of Copper Mountain’s Double Diamond cafe seeks to near small business, swap the area with household units
The owner of the Double Diamond restaurant in Copper’s East Village is searching for to transform his professional space into residential use, citing the restaurant’s dwindling financial viability.
All through a May well 23 Summit Board of County Commissioners, restaurant operator David Luthi stated the landscape of Copper has changed significantly in the about a few decades considering the fact that he opened Double Diamond. That contains a lot less parking accessibility and a decline in company exercise in the space.
“With that change, I guess, I experience like it is time for me to improve much too,” Luthi stated. “I feel like I gave it my all with a practical enterprise that I no extended imagine is a practical organization.”
Commissioners voted to approve a request from Luthi to amend the site’s land-use guidelines to allow for a slight enhance in residential density.
The restaurant is at the moment housed inside of the Fox Pine Inn setting up, which encapsulates 31 condos. The transform enables for the restaurant’s proprietor to go after a conversion of approximately 3,000-sq.-feet of cafe area into three additional residencies, bringing the number of housing models up to 34. The website will also have 44 parking areas.
The transform permitted by commissioners does not completely give Luthi a inexperienced light-weight for the venture, in accordance to county Senior Planner Sid Rivers, who explained that any new device building will nonetheless have to go as a result of a multistep method for county acceptance. What the adjust does do, Rivers said, is allow the industrial space to be applied for residential.
Commissioners obtained numerous prepared general public remarks from people equally for and against the proposal. Some who stay in the constructing mentioned they were anxious that new development would guide to problems such as a disruption in building providers and attainable harm to the building.
They also reported getting a restaurant in the setting up is a reward for residents.
“We experience that having a restaurant in our creating is an asset, and when the Double Diamond restaurant was in business enterprise, it was an asset for all of East Village,” wrote Fox Pine inhabitants Jeff and Karen Molyneux. “This task would consider absent this asset.”
But the vast bulk of citizens were in help of the proposal, with 87% of home owner association users voting in favor of it, according to Luthi and other general public comment writers.
“The cafe has been shut for some time now. Lots of tiny businesses did not recoup from the hardships of COVID,” wrote residents Maria Insalata & Eric Zehnpfennig. “We would significantly relatively see the room converted into desirable household models, beautiful and new, to switch the unused business house which is of no use to the proprietors or our attendees.”