Professor stamps urban living footprint in downtown Edmond, Oklahoma

Published by Richard Mize in The Oklahoman on June 1, 2016

EDMOND — David Chapman is crawling out on a limb three stories high with a new home at the north edge of downtown Edmond. It's a prototype urban town home designed to look like a downtown commercial building — red brick, hugging the lot lines, engraved masonry wall plaques out front with "2016," the year of construction, and the name Chapman, as if he were the proprietor. Well, he is. If the limb holds, if others like the design and his attempt at place making, he'll build more and let it grow, spread and form a crown for urban design and urban living in Edmond.

Chapman said it was time for him to practice what he teaches at the University of Central Oklahoma. In addition to doing business with his company, Realty1 LLC, he is an assistant professor of finance and teaches courses in real estate.

What he's into is New Urbanism.

He's pouring that approach into the project: a penchant for live-work-play design, neighborhood walkability, and having shopping as well as public spaces close by. It's a three-story, 2,500-square-foot home that looks like a business for him and his wife, Julie, at 325 N Broadway Ave.

"We were looking to move from suburbia. We wanted an urban environment, but we wanted to stay in our hometown of Edmond, Oklahoma," Chapman said. "So about four years ago, I made a concerted effort to get involved down here, downtown, to start doing some place making efforts.

"We brought some ideas from Midtown and Bricktown to downtown Edmond to try to build that urban fabric that we wanted to live in. That was the first thing. Then we had to build our home."

For that, he turned to Tony Leddy of TL Construction of Oklahoma LLC — and SIPS, structural insulated panels. The solid foam-filled wall panels, by Enercept Structural Insulated Panels in Watertown, S.D., conserve energy and lower utility costs, making the town home green.

"The solid foam core is — like a coffee cup is maybe an eighth of an inch thick, and you can put that hot water in there and not burn your hands? This has a great insulating value in the solid-core, closed-cell form that's in these walls," Leddy said.

It's cozy.

The 1,100-square-foot ground floor includes the master bedroom and bath, kitchen, living and dining areas, a small office for Julie, a powder room and Murphy bed. The living area rises through a two-story atrium to add volume.

The second floor has two bedrooms, a full bath, a large landing with ample views of the living space below, including a two-story wall finished in wood, a reinforced closet/gun safe, and a small office area for David.

The third floor is for entertaining — and for marketing urban living.

The indoors open via an automatic garage door onto a deck in front, "with glass all around just to give it that ambience," and a side balcony leading to a back deck with a hot tub. The vantage offers treetop views of downtown and the surrounding area, and, Chapman pointed out, a bird's-eye view of Edmond's LibertyFest Parade every Fourth of July.

Finally, in back is a detached two-car garage, in the same urban design scheme. It has 800 square feet of upstairs living space with one bedroom, for rent, "kind of a high-end apartment," Chapman said, "but it could be a live-work-play where somebody could have their office back there."

From the outside, it all looks like a stylish, redbrick, mid-rise commercial building on a traditional narrow but deep urban footprint.