Operator of Copper Mountain’s Double Diamond cafe seeks to near organization, substitute the area with residential models

The owner of the Double Diamond restaurant in Copper’s East Village is looking for to change his industrial place into residential use, citing the restaurant’s dwindling economical viability. 

Through a May well 23 Summit Board of County Commissioners, cafe operator David Luthi said the landscape of Copper has modified drastically in the approximately a few decades given that he opened Double Diamond. That involves fewer parking accessibility and a decrease in business enterprise activity in the space. 

“With that alter, I guess, I truly feel like it is time for me to change way too,” Luthi mentioned. “I feel like I gave it my all with a feasible small business that I no for a longer time assume is a viable business.” 

Commissioners voted to approve a ask for from Luthi to amend the site’s land-use rules to permit for a slight improve in residential density. 

The restaurant is at this time housed inside of the Fox Pine Inn building, which encapsulates 31 condos. The transform allows for the restaurant’s owner to go after a conversion of roughly 3,000-square-ft of restaurant area into a few added residencies, bringing the range of housing units up to 34. The internet site will also have 44 parking spaces. 

The change accredited by commissioners does not completely give Luthi a inexperienced light-weight for the task, according to county Senior Planner Sid Rivers, who reported that any new device design will nonetheless have to go by way of a multistep course of action for county approval. What the transform does do, Rivers said, is permit the industrial house to be utilized for household. 

Commissioners received several composed community comments from residents both of those for and in opposition to the proposal. Some who are living in the creating stated they had been concerned that new building would direct to challenges this kind of as a disruption in building companies and probable harm to the making.

They also stated possessing a cafe in the constructing is a advantage for residents. 

“We experience that possessing a restaurant in our setting up is an asset, and when the Double Diamond cafe was in business enterprise, it was an asset for all of East Village,” wrote Fox Pine citizens Jeff and Karen Molyneux. “This task would acquire absent this asset.”

But the wide the greater part of residents ended up in assist of the proposal, with 87% of home owner association members voting in favor of it, according to Luthi and other public remark writers. 

“The restaurant has been closed for some time now. Many tiny businesses did not recoup from the hardships of COVID,” wrote residents Maria Insalata & Eric Zehnpfennig. “We would substantially fairly see the area transformed into desirable household units, beautiful and new, to substitute the unused industrial area which is of no use to the homeowners or our company.”