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Vail-area homeowners understand all too well the steep costs associated with expanding their existing properties. With town regulations on floor area ratios (the amount of floor area versus the entire lot) making additions expensive and complex, on Vail homeowner came up with a unique solution – go underground and build a whole new space under his existing home, with no impact to the footprint of the original home. Thanks to changes in local regulations, getting permission for the project was no sweat; actually completing the work was a whole different matter.

Hoping to expand their Cascade home, the Harlan family took a subterranean route and enlisted the help of Atlas Construction to excavate some 1,300 feet in the new room.

“The simplest way we figured out to do things was to jack it up, build a new foundation and start from there,” Tom Counter says.

What originally was only a crawlspace was eventually dug out enough to allow a small backhoe to finish the work. Builders Leif and Chris Counter reinforced the walls and installed soil nails to stabilize the ground.

Hugh Harlan, owner of a 10-year-old, 3,200 square foot home in the Glen Lyon subdivision, located near the Vail Cascade Resort, wanted to add a new master bedroom and bath, media room, laundry room and a hallway bathroom to his current home. Harlan proposed to excavate the crawl space under his home and build a whole new 1,300 square foot basement addition, allowing a large, new subterranean addition that would still have plenty of natural light. To do so, he contracted the help of Tom Counter of Slifer Designs Interior Architecture and his sons, Leif and Chris, owners of Atlas Construction.


“The owner had already spoken to two different contractors who both said they didn’t want to touch it,” says Leif Counter. “It took some guts on his part to let us try to do the work.”

Tom Counter created a design that would allow the builders to shore up the existing home before digging out the crawl space, allowing the residents to normally use the home during the entire construction process.

“The simplest way we figured out to do things was to jack it up, build a new foundation and start from there,” Tom Counter says. “But the excavation issue was a big one… we could just barely fit a backhoe underneath the house, so it required a lot of hand labor. you’ve got to be creative in these situations. A lot of people finish out their basements, but here there was no basement to begin with.”

The Counters were able to take advantage of recent changes to Vail town code that provide exemptions for new construction at private homes, provided the construction takes place below grade.

Russell Forrest, Vail’s community development director, says that the town’s gross residential floor area codes tend to make new construction a costly prospect at many of Vail’s small-lot, large-home properties. He says this might be a better solution for many folks seeking some additional square footage.

The Harlan Residence in Cascade’s Glen Lyon subdivision looks normal from the outside and was lived in during the excavating process.

Far right: an architectural drawing shows the amount of room added to the home.

“It’s actually quite common here since the policy change,’ he says. Traditionally, working things out through the floor area ratio policy is quite complicated – there are varying credits and deductions as people try to do aboveground construction. But if you have a home addition taking place below grade, it does not count.

Complicating things at the Harlan home was the fact that the house, located at 1320 Westhaven Circle, is actually a duplex; Tom Counter was only able to get the neighbor’s permission to begin the project after several consultations with the engineers originally involved in building the home.

After passin Vail’s design review board (“There were no changes to the outside, but they still needed to know what we were doing,” Tom Counter says), excavation work began in October 2004. Leif and Chris Counter then drilled horizontally into the walls to install piers and soils nails to stabilize the surrounding ground and to hold the house in place while a new, reinforced concrete cave was built underneath the home.

Holes were cut in the existing walls for a series of below-grade light well windows, doubling as fire escapes; the interior has subsequently been framed up and the Counters hope to have the entire project completed by the end of this summer. Final values of the completed project are suggested to be as high as $1,100 per square foot, according to Slifer Designs.

“You can’t give the Harlans enough credit for being pioneers… there was an awful lot of speculation on what was going to happen, but they were fully supportive of our plans,” Ton Counter says.
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