Live-work condos offer dual-purpose space
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| "While most live-work units
require some retrofitting to make them business-ready," Andersen says. "Ours
are designed as office suites built for immediate business occupancy."
Kubik, a two-tower condo project under construction
in Miami, will include adaptable-spaced, bilevel units called LOTS, or living
over the studio, units. "To access your studio or office,
you have to go out on the terrace, then go down a spiral staircase to the work
space," says Camilo Alvarado Boshell, Kubik's architect and developer.
In addition, Boshell says, Kubik's townhomes offer
professionals, such as attorneys or writers, the opportunity to
have offices with separate entrances on the street and their living
quarters above.
These designs are
Boshell's solutions to city of Miami zoning codes, which, to date, make no provision
for apartments with both commercial and residential uses.
The interior space is adaptable, Boshell says, because "it adapts to your
needs. We have movable wall panels that allow people to create their own space
configurations, so that each unit is unique." Kolter
City Plaza in West Palm Beach, Fla., where zoning is more amenable to live-work
buildings, offers upstairs living and downstairs work units connected by an internal
staircase, says real estate attorney Cynthia Spall of Gunster, Yoakley & Stewart,
which represents the developer. A similar layout will be used
for live-work units at The Lofts at Hollywood Station in Hollywood, Fla. Developer
Richard Lamondin says the project's five-floor plans all feature separate work
areas and private quarters. "They are accessible from
the street level and the garage, making it easy for both residents and guests
to come and go," Lamondin says. "Artists and photographers requiring
studio space, salespeople and home-business owners who need a combination of work
and living space, are prime candidates for this kind of residence." Zoning,
building code challenges
Code problems arise because the live-work
concept usually falls between the cracks, says H. William Freeman, a principal
with Freeman, Cotton & Norris in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. As a real estate
attorney, Freeman says he has handled a half-dozen live-work condos in the metropolitan
Detroit area. "Communities don't know whether to treat
them as commercial or residential," Freeman says. "And that presents
problems because of the stricter commercial codes for things such as fire protection
and sewer capacity, the need for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities
Act, and so on." Boshell's solution of having work and
living space under one roof, but not interconnected, gets around zoning and code
issues, says David Dabby, a real estate consultant in Coral Gables, Fla., because
"people are more accustomed to that idea. The zoning and building codes can
embrace it as long as the area is zoned for both commercial and residential use.
It's when you get into a single live-work condo unit that you're going to run
into problems -- not because the municipality doesn't like the idea, but simply
because there's no precedent for it in the codes." A related
problem that comes up often, Freeman says, is that "people don't always live
in the living space and work in the work space, so things can get kind of mixed
up. Condo communities don't like that. They want working going on only in the
work space." Because of these difficulties, live-work
units are most frequently found in master-planned, New Urbanist-style developments,
McIlwain says, "where the idea is to try to combine uses, harking back to
the old days -- or at least what we imagine the old days were like." | 
