The zoning gets read at the start, against the program you had that week. Then the client adds a bedroom, the garage turns, the budget moves the whole thing five feet; the tenant wants the mezzanine back, the entry moves, the occupant load crosses a line — and nobody re-reads the code, because re-reading the code takes an afternoon. So the scheme carries an assumption from January into design development, where it becomes expensive.
An address is all we need. Pick a project you know intimately — the point is for you to find out whether we are right, on a parcel where you already know the answer.
The research is real work and it is largely invisible in a fee. Doing it once is defensible. Doing it four times, as the scheme evolves, is not something anyone has ever been paid for — so it does not happen, and the design quietly inherits the first reading.
Which is fine until the rule that moved was structural. A build-to line is not a setback: the facade has to reach the street, and a scheme drawn to sit politely behind a front yard is not a small revision. A height limit measured from the lowest point within 25 feet is a different building from one measured from the average — and both codes print 35 ft.
Two different things, and they are not two depths of the same thing. One is the set of facts you should re-read every time the scheme moves. The other is a colleague reading your design against them before it gets expensive.
“What does this property allow?”
One parcel, cited line by line — the zoning district and the standards that actually govern it, the buildable envelope, allowable use, adopted editions and local amendments, and the overlays and planned-development plans most people never find. Free, and saved to your account, so re-reading it when the design moves costs nothing.
“Does what I’m drawing still work?”
Send the scheme, your questions and any drawings. An architect who lives and works in the Front Range reads it against the code for that parcel and writes back: what works, the few things most likely to change your cost or schedule, what the project triggers, and the permit path — then walks you through it on a 15-minute call.
Ask for it at the moment it matters: before design development, or before you submit.
A second architect's read on your scheme at this address, with the sources cited. How it works →
It is normally done once, at the start, against the program you had then. Every change after that is measured against a memory. Here the answer is a page you re-open, so the check costs a minute rather than an afternoon.
The expensive ones are structural to the scheme — a build-to line rather than a setback, a height datum measured from somewhere you did not assume, an overlay that changes the side yard by lot width. Late, they cost a redesign.
“We cannot go three stories here” lands differently with the subsection printed under it. It stops being your opinion against their contractor's brother-in-law.
It is a reimbursable at a fixed number, per project rather than per question — so the fee conversation is a line item instead of an estimate of your own hours.
This is the part that is genuinely hard to get from a search engine, and the reason a blended answer is worse than no answer: the figure survives the summary and the definition does not.
measured from the lowest point within 25 feet of the building. On a sloping lot this is the strict reading, and it is the one that surprises people.
measured from average grade. Same printed number, a materially different building on the same slope.
We record the datum with the figure, because a number without its definition is not a fact. The same applies to a side yard printed as “none” — which is not zero, and does not mean you may build to the line.
You are the professional here, and this does not stand in for that. We do not interpret the code, we quote it — every asserted line carries the subsection it came from and a link back to the source wherever we can give you one, with the adopted edition named and dated. What we remove is the re-reading. The judgment stays yours.
And where we don’t hold a rule, we say so plainly rather than inferring one. A blank is safe; a confident wrong answer is not, and it is the one thing that would end this the first time it happened.
We show what the jurisdiction publishes about a property. That is the scope, and it is not the whole picture: easements, utility and drainage locations, private covenants, HOA restrictions and anything else recorded against the title sit outside it, and any of them can further limit what is buildable. A full title report is what tells you all encumbrances on a property — this tells you what the code and the zoning allow on it.
What we never do: tell you a permit will be issued. We read what the adopted code and the zoning say about a parcel. Whether an application is approved is the jurisdiction’s call, every time, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something we would not buy either.
You know the answer on that parcel — the overlay, the thing the planner made you change, the rule you found late. Send the address and we will show you what we would have handed you at the start. If we miss something you caught, that is worth knowing, and it costs you an email.
Coverage is published live rather than quoted here, so it cannot go stale behind us — see exactly which jurisdictions are answered today, and what’s next. Questions about how this would sit in your process? Ask directly — joshua@addwell.design.