New space, vintage place
Oklahoma City’s first condo complex is finally about finished
Jamestown, Oklahoma City’s first condominium community, is finally about to be finished, 53 years after breaking ground on a former dairy near NW 63 and May Avenue.
Architect Allen Brown is completing a project first envisioned by architect Jack Graves in 1965 in response to demand after the national condominium law of 1961: a collection of mid-rise condo homes surrounding a lush park called Tinsley Green.
Individual ownership of community housing units with mutually owned common areas was still a new concept a halfcentury ago, perhaps especially here, where land ownership and wide-open spaces still defined “upscale.” It took a while to take off.
Brown will build the final four condos on the last two lots in a single development called the North End at Jamestown. He calls the 1,852-square-foot plan Tudor Place, with two bedrooms, two baths, a half bath, an enclosed garage space, and a covered space.
New residents will share the homeowners association and common amenities, including a community pergola and outdoor living area with fireplaces and television.
Hidden treasures
Gated Jamestown is virtually hidden behind its red brick wall, west of May Avenue and north of NW 63, on land that Floyd Tinsley operated as a dairy through the 1930s. Tinsley sold the land to Graves and developers R.W. Finley and George W. James.
Jamestown, Brown said, echoes James’ name, not the colonial settlement in Virginia.
But the first developers did look to historical architecture in Georgetown, the Washington, D.C., suburb, and to Boston brownstones in designing condos that, as Graves put it in 1966, “allowed variety, but we could maintain integrity of design.”
Vintage appointments included century-old slate shingles from New Orleans, gas lamps from Southwark, one of the oldest parts of London, and garden gates made of heavy cypress doors from a historic Southern mansion.
Brown bought the last lots, which face south along Jamestown’s eastwest Hickory Sign Post Road, in November from developer Don Karchmer, who bought in and continued to expand Jamestown in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The new condos will be similar in design to the other 40 or so Jamestown units, “including the materials, architectural style, entrance courtyards, and so forth,” Brown said. “But due to the depth of the lots, the courtyards separate the townhouses instead of being placed in front.”
He explained: “A typical Georgetown Federal style town house is a classic symmetrical two story with gables on the end, an entrance door in the center leading to a stair hall with the dining room and kitchen on one side, the living room on the other side and a stair to the bedrooms.
“So I turned the house 90 degrees to enter the center from the courtyard resulting in the gables on the front and back, a literal twist on the classic Federal style. Another inspiration that we named the plan after, similar to the practice of the other three plans in Jamestown, is Tudor Place in Georgetown, a little larger but some of the same architecture.”
‘The big draw’
Brown said building new space in such a vintage place has advantages.
“The neighborhood, the community, was already here, the grounds and the park area, and the mature landscaping,” he said. “Most developments, when you’re building something, you’ve got to start it from scratch.”
The park and mature trees and landscaping will be “the big draw,” said Heather Davis, a real estate agent with RE/ MAX Preferred Properties who is marketing the North End at Jamestown with her agent husband, Alan Davis.
Priced at $495,000, with HOA dues of $378 per month, the new condos will be competitive with others in Oklahoma City, she said.
“We looked at downtown pricing because that’s mostly what is the closest that’s newer construction, and we’re tucked in underneath that. We’re also tucked just under Nichols Hills pricing, but we’re very close to Nichols Hills, with all the same amenities,” she said.