North Metro Fire Rescue District Station No. 63

When the site has no room to grow outward, the answer is to go up.

Station No. 63 needed more space — expanded apparatus capacity and updated crew quarters — but the existing lot left no meaningful footprint to work with. Demolishing the station entirely wasn’t the answer either. The foundation and structural walls of the existing bunkrooms were sound, and preserving them was both practical and responsible.

The solution reused what was worth keeping and rebuilt everything else. The station was raised from its foundation, the apparatus bays were constructed below, and the bunkrooms were repositioned directly above — stacking the program vertically where the site couldn’t accommodate it horizontally. The result is a two-bay, back-in station that fits within the original lot while delivering the operational capacity the district needed.

The exterior is clad in brick with coursed detailing that gives the building a permanence appropriate to its role in the community. Brick was the right material here — durable, low-maintenance, and capable of aging well in a neighborhood context where the station will be a fixture for decades.

What reads as a straightforward building is the product of a constrained site and a design process that took that constraint seriously from the start.