When attorney Dominick Sekich was hired to draft guidelines for preserving Denver’s treasured Joshel House in 1994, he had no idea that one day he’d be compelled to follow those rules himself. But 19 years later, he and his husband, Scott Van Vleet, purchased the 1951 International Style landmark for their own home and began a top-to-bottom renovation. Every move they made was constricted by the provisions detailed in Dominick’s diligent—and legally binding—preservation easement: no altering the facade or roofline, no putting up fences or flora that would obstruct the public’s view of the house, and definitely no messing with a stand of Pfitzer juniper bushes lining the driveway.

Dominick had fallen for the place the first time he saw it. The surrounding, one-square-mile Hilltop neighborhood was largely built during the 1940s and ’50s, but the home created for Lloyd and Suzanne Joshel by the renowned architecture/design team of Joseph and Louise Marlow is one of the few International Style residences in Colorado. The structure is basically a cube, with its north, east, and west walls constructed of blond brick topped by a delicate band of clerestory windows beneath a flat roof. The house gets its personality, and an abundance of sunlight, from its south wall, which, thanks to a slope in the property, rises one and a half stories from the ground. It features two bands of glass, one serving as floor-to-ceiling windows for the living room and the other delivering daylight to lower-level rooms. Fixed wood louvers separate the levels and allow for natural ventilation.

After Suzanne Joshel died in 2009, the house passed to new buyers who never actually moved in. Dominick, meanwhile, made multiple offers over several years to purchase it. “You know how it is,” he says. “People stalk a house. They keep an eye on it and think, if anything ever happens, maybe I’ll be in a position to swoop it up.”

In 2013, he finally got it, acquiring the deed without even asking for a property inspection. It was great news—until he and Scott saw how much work was required to make the house habitable again. Though listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1995, it had suffered from serious neglect. Radiators had leaked, damaging the floors and interior walls. An errant lawn sprinkler, aimed directly at the foundation, had accelerated rot of the exterior wood. The structure’s exposed old-growth Douglas fir columns, which double as window mullions, had all deteriorated. “Literally, the roof was being held up by the glass in the windows,” says Scott.

“We spent a year planning the renovation and several years finding materials and contractors and completing the work.”
–Dominick Sekich, resident

Dominick and Scott—who has a degree in architecture and experience in the construction industry—oversaw the renovation themselves and remained as true as possible to the original materials. Mahogany walls were replaced with mahogany, Douglas fir ceiling panels with Douglas fir. When they did veer off, they did so with great care. Enlarging the kitchen so it could fit an island for intimate dinners meant moving an interior wall, but only 10 inches. They replaced the original glazing with high-performance glass, but compromised on its efficiency to maintain the house’s signature transparency.

They also were able to preserve an original entertainment and storage wall in the living room by turning the former master bedroom, located behind it, into a media room and putting their large-screen TV there. The framing for the 1950s television and radio in the living room remains—the couple had the old missing knobs re-created using a 3D printer—but the Radio Craftsmen TV screen has been replaced by a computer monitor.

And because the preservation easement forbids going up or out to enlarge the house, they went down, digging out the crawl space beneath the kitchen to make room for a master bathroom, a closet, and utility rooms next to the newly relocated master bedroom. That added 320 square feet to the existing 1,880-square-foot structure.

Honoring the house’s sleek sensibilities, the couple kept the number of finishes to a minimum. All three bathrooms have the same white tiles, countertops, and cabinet materials. The painted surfaces throughout are in the same shade, which Dominick and Scott have dubbed “Joshel white.”

The couple agonized over each detail of their “obsessively responsible” renovation. Sometimes the pair ended up doing work themselves, such as finishing walls or installing doors.

“When people try to replicate a midcentury home, one of their biggest mistakes is overlighting. Things were pretty dimly lit back then.”
–Scott Van Vleet, resident

That interest in the home’s origins extends to the first couple who lived in it, whom Dominick and Scott researched extensively. Lloyd Joshel, a chemist, was Dow Chemical’s general manager of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant when testing after a 1969 fire at the plant showed high levels of plutonium in the soil and waterways of Denver suburbs; though the contamination was later found to be primarily due to an earlier, more major fire, officials were forced to admit they had known about it for years. Lloyd died in 1999. Suzanne was a survivor of Nazi Germany who lost her parents in the Holocaust and went on to become a political activist with a major role in promoting voting and civil rights.

As a couple, the Joshels were doyens of Denver, major patrons of opera and chamber music and well-known art buyers. Their vast collection, and their fortune, was spread among the city’s cultural institutions after their deaths.

Dominick and Scott think of them often. They consider what the couple might have watched on the old TV (they know which episode of I Love Lucy aired the night the Joshels moved in) and the people they might have entertained around the fountain in their garden. And they learned in an interesting way that the Joshels were fans of Colorado’s nearby mountains. Studying the house from satellite images taken around the time it was built (when Denver was smaller and there was little to obstruct the home’s view), they noticed that the structure is turned nine degrees south off the city’s rigid street grid—straight in the direction of Pikes Peak.

That attention to detail in the Joshel House inspires them to continue its legacy, but in a way that honors both past and present. “One of the things we were trying to prove is that you could take a historic house and make it efficient,” says Scott. “And we did that.”

Project Credits:

Construction: Journeyman Construction Inc.