325 Projects Later: What We’ve Learned About Architecture in Colorado
We recently did something that architecture firms are not always very good at doing.
We stopped long enough to count.
Over the years, F9 Productions accumulated hundreds of drawing sets across project folders dating all the way back to 2010. Custom homes. Remodels. Additions. Restaurants. Offices. ADUs. Apartments. Group homes. Warehouses. Mountain cabins. Tenant improvements. Garages. Industrial facilities. A shipping container home. Even an aircraft hangar.
We knew we had done a lot of work. We had never really stopped to ask exactly what that work added up to.
So we went through the archives and built a master project database.
The final number surprised even us:
325 unique architectural projects.
Of those, 318 are in Colorado, spread across 19 Colorado counties and nearly 60 communities.
But once we started looking at the data, the number 325 became the least interesting part of the exercise.
The database told the story of how F9 evolved from a young architecture firm trying to survive the aftermath of the Great Recession into a mature Colorado practice working across residential, commercial, multifamily, adaptive reuse, industrial, and other project types.
More importantly, it reminded us of what those projects have taught us.
Here are some of the biggest lessons we found hiding inside 16 years of architecture in Colorado.
Lesson 1: Most Architecture Does Not Begin With a Blank Sheet of Paper
There is a popular image of the architect sitting down with a pristine site and creating a building from nothing.
Our project history tells a different story.
Of F9’s 325 projects, 179 involved modifications to existing buildings. Another eight combined new and existing construction. Only 136 were classified strictly as new construction.
In other words, more than half of our work has involved something already being there.
A house.
A warehouse.
A restaurant.
A basement.
A garage.
A commercial building.
A structure somebody loved but needed to change.
That matters because existing buildings force architects to deal with reality.
Walls are not always where the old drawings say they are. Existing structural systems impose limits. Ceiling heights matter. Mechanical systems compete for space. Previous additions create strange conditions. Current building codes have to be reconciled with buildings constructed under completely different standards.
Sometimes the most important design move is not adding more. It is figuring out how to make what already exists work better.
That lesson has followed us from small residential additions all the way through commercial renovations and mixed-use projects.
Architecture is often less about inventing something from nothing and more about seeing possibilities inside constraints.
Lesson 2: There Is No Such Thing as a Typical Colorado Project
Colorado is one state, but designing across it can feel like working in several different worlds.
Our database includes projects from Denver and Longmont to Boulder, Golden, Breckenridge, Nederland, Fairplay, Colorado Springs, Parker, Brighton, Loveland, Central City, and dozens of communities in between.
Denver alone accounts for 61 F9 projects. Longmont accounts for another 48. We have also completed work across Boulder, Jefferson, Weld, Larimer, Douglas, Adams, Arapahoe, El Paso, Summit, Gilpin, Park, and other counties.
Every jurisdiction brings its own version of the puzzle.
Then there is the land itself.
A narrow Denver infill lot presents a completely different architectural problem from an acreage property outside Berthoud. A Boulder project can introduce solar access, floor-area limitations, neighborhood compatibility, indoor pools and trampolines. A mountain project can bring steep terrain, snow loading, wildfire exposure, wells, septic systems, and limited construction access into the conversation before the floor plan is even settled.
One project in our database, a shipping container residence in Breckenridge, required design around a 100 PSF snow load. Another recent cabin in Central City had to respond to historic residential design guidelines.
Those conditions are not footnotes. They become part of the architecture.
The longer we practice in Colorado, the more convinced we become that local experience compounds.
Every permit review, zoning interpretation, difficult lot, unusual structural condition, and field problem becomes knowledge that follows us into the next project.
Lesson 3: Residential Architecture Became Our Backbone, but Never Our Boundary
The largest single category in our database is residential.
F9 has completed 193 projects classified as single-family residential.
That includes custom homes, additions, remodels, mountain residences, production housing, basement projects, rural properties, and homes that evolved through multiple phases over many years.
It would be easy to look at that number and conclude that F9 became a residential architecture firm.
That would only tell part of the story.
The database also includes 61 projects classified as commercial, along with additional commercial-industrial work, 30 projects classified primarily as ADUs, 100+ multifamily housing, mixed-use buildings, group homes, institutional projects, manufacturing spaces, restaurants, laboratories, fitness facilities, offices, and industrial buildings.
At one point we might be working on a custom residence. At another, we might be coordinating life-safety requirements for an adult residential care facility. Then a restaurant. Then a 30-unit apartment project. Then a laboratory test fit. Then a tiny backyard dwelling.
That range matters.
Different building types make architects better at solving different problems.
Commercial work teaches efficiency, code, circulation, and coordination.
Residential work teaches proportion, intimacy, daylight, materiality, and how people actually live.
Multifamily work teaches repetition and density.
Existing-building work teaches humility.
Industrial projects teach you that architecture sometimes needs to get out of the way and make complicated operations work.
All of those lessons eventually cross-pollinate.
Lesson 4: Small Projects Are Not Small Architectural Problems
One of the easiest mistakes to make in architecture is assuming difficulty correlates directly with square footage.
It does not.
Our database contains 30 projects classified specifically as accessory dwelling units, plus other residential projects that incorporated ADUs as part of a larger scope.
Those projects appear in Denver, Longmont, Arvada, Wheat Ridge, Broomfield, Centennial, Westminster, Loveland, and elsewhere.
They are small buildings, but they can require surprisingly sophisticated architectural thinking.
Setbacks matter.
Bulk planes matter.
Height limits matter.
Parking can matter.
Historic districts can matter.
Access matters.
Privacy matters.
Existing utilities matter.
Relationships to the primary residence matter.
And when you have only a few hundred square feet to work with, wasting fifty of them is a much bigger mistake than wasting fifty square feet in a 5,000-square-foot house.
The same lesson applies to additions.
Some of the most demanding work in our history has involved connecting a relatively small amount of new architecture to an existing house while making the finished project feel like it was always meant to be there.
Good architecture is not measured by size.
Lesson 5: The Best Projects Often Evolve Instead of Ending
The database also revealed something we had not fully appreciated before putting everything in one place.
Projects have families.
Clients come back.
Buildings change.
Ideas evolve.
Our original East Watch Residence in Golden was completed as an F9 drawing project in 2018. Seven years later, the database contains East Watch 2.0, another phase adding new living area, a breezeway, and garage space to that same property.
Other addresses show the same pattern.
A residential project leads to an ADU.
A commercial tenant improvement leads to another phase.
An industrial client expands.
A building we worked on years earlier comes back into the office with a new problem to solve.
That is architecture in the real world.
Buildings are not static objects photographed once and frozen forever. They are used. Businesses grow. Families change. Owners discover what works and what does not. New needs emerge.
Some of the best evidence that a project worked is being invited back to work on it again.
Lesson 6: Growth Forces You to Build a Practice, Not Just Design Buildings
The first year represented in the database is 2010.
F9 completed five drawing projects that year.
From 2010 through 2018, the firm averaged about eight projects per year.
Then something changed.
From 2019 through 2025, F9 averaged nearly 36 projects per year.
In 2024 alone, the database records 51 projects, the highest annual total in our history so far.
That is almost a fivefold increase in annual project volume compared with our first nine years.
There is an architectural lesson in that growth, but there is also a business lesson.
You cannot handle 30, 40, or 50 projects the same way you handled five.
Processes have to improve. Standards have to improve. Communication has to improve. Quality control has to become systematic. Knowledge has to move beyond the founders and into the team.
Architecture firms sometimes romanticize the creative side of the profession while treating operations as something less important. Our experience has been the opposite.
A better-run practice creates the conditions for better architecture.
When people know what is expected, when drawings are coordinated, when information moves quickly, and when lessons from one project make it into the next, designers get more time to actually design.
Lesson 7: Architecture Has to Survive Contact With Construction
There is a point in every architectural project where the drawing stops being an idea and somebody has to build it.
That moment changes everything.
Over 325 projects, we have seen elegant ideas become better because a contractor challenged them. We have seen simple-looking details become complicated in the field. We have watched existing conditions completely change the solution. We have learned where extra information on a drawing saves hours during construction and where architectural complexity produces little value for the client.
Our experience building projects through F14 Productions has only reinforced this.
A detail is not successful because it looks good enlarged on a sheet.
It is successful when the people in the field understand it, can build it, can afford it, and the finished result still accomplishes the architectural intent.
That feedback loop between design and construction might be one of the most valuable things 325 projects have given us.
Every project becomes research for the next one.
Lesson 8: Repetition Should Produce Evolution, Not Repetition
After 193 single-family residential projects, it would be easy to develop a formula.
We have tried not to.
Colorado architecture should not be a catalog of stylistic answers applied to different lots.
A contemporary house in Golden should not automatically become the same house placed in Nederland.
An ADU in Denver should not automatically become the same ADU built in Loveland.
A rural home outside Berthoud should respond differently from an infill residence three miles from downtown Denver.
Experience should make architects faster at recognizing problems, not faster at repeating solutions.
The value of doing hundreds of projects is not that you eventually know the answer before the client walks in.
It is that you get better at asking the right questions.
What does this site want?
How does this client actually live?
What is worth spending money on?
What can be simpler?
What does the climate demand?
What will the contractor encounter?
What is the one thing this project could become that another project could not?
That is where experience becomes useful.
325 Projects Later, We Are Still Learning
When we started assembling this database, the goal was mostly practical.
We wanted to know what we had done.
We wanted a reliable record of the firm’s architectural history instead of hundreds of old project folders scattered across years of archives.
What we ended up with was something closer to a record of our education.
325 projects.
318 in Colorado.
193 single-family residential projects.
179 projects involving existing buildings.
19 Colorado counties.
Nearly 60 Colorado communities.
Behind every number is a client, a site, a building department, a contractor, a problem, a decision, and usually at least one thing that did not go exactly according to plan.
That is the part the spreadsheet cannot fully capture.
Architecture is cumulative.
The first project teaches you something that makes the tenth better. The tenth teaches you something that appears again on project 75. A strange condition you encountered a decade ago suddenly becomes useful on project 280.
Eventually, experience becomes less about the projects you can point to and more about the thousands of small decisions you no longer have to learn for the first time.
We are proud of reaching 325 projects.
But we do not see the number as proof that we have figured everything out.
Quite the opposite.
325 projects do not mean we have seen everything. They mean we have spent more than 15 years learning how much there is to see.
And project 326 starts the education all over again.
Looking for an Architect in Colorado?
F9 Productions provides residential, commercial, multifamily, renovation, ADU, and integrated design-build services throughout Colorado.
Our experience is not built around one project type, one architectural style, or one city. It comes from hundreds of real projects and more than 16 years of learning how architecture actually gets designed, permitted, coordinated, and built here.