Vail's $14M Housing Project Uses Cascading Designs to Beat Height Restrictions

A $14 million project. Twelve units.

That’s the scale of the housing push in Vail, where the definition of “affordable” is currently being tested by the same architectural trends that make your morning commute look like a maze. The Town of Vail is leaning hard into “cascading designs” — a bureaucratic term for buildings that step down the hillside to avoid looking like a brutalist concrete block dropped from a helicopter.

Principal Architect Adam Harrison of Shepherd Resources isn’t just talking about aesthetics. He’s talking about zoning compliance. The town’s height restrictions are rigid. If you build a flat, three-story box on Gore Creek Drive, it violates the visual massing rules. So, you step it. You break it up. You make it look like it grew out of the rock rather than being shoved there.

“Quite often in the mountains we’ll need to step designs with the topography to work with height restrictions, very frequently in Vail,” Harrison says. “Another word we might use is ‘articulation.’”

Let’s translate that. “Articulation” means the building doesn’t look like a single, monolithic slab. It looks like it has joints, layers, and depth. Harrison argues that a rigid elevation is “kind of brutal when it comes to the facade on the street.” Stepping the design gives it “a little bit of artication.” It’s a polite way of saying it doesn’t stare at you.

The result is a structure that hugs the topography. Shepherd Resources built two row houses on Gore Creek Drive that follow this exact principle. The front facades step back from level to level. It’s not just for show; it’s a workaround for the zoning code. Without that step, those units wouldn’t exist in that specific footprint.

Harrison claims this approach enhances design by creating “more opportunity for shade and shadow, negative space.” He compares it to a flat building, which he finds “usually not as pleasing as one with some movement to the elevation.” The goal is to break up verticality. Large planes of glass. Large overhangs. It’s a toolkit for making a tall building feel less tall.

“We’ve always had a goal that we’re working with the topography of the site, not against it,” Harrison says. “So if we’re designing a home, it’s very natural to step the home.”

This isn’t just about Vail. Shepherd Resources applied similar logic to a Texas home, using exterior steps leading to the pool to create a cascading effect. But in Vail, the terrain does the heavy lifting. The land is already sloped; the architecture just follows the path of least resistance.

For context, consider the alternative. If the town relaxed the height restrictions or allowed for more “brutal” flat elevations, we might see fewer, larger footprints. Or we might see the same number of units but with a different visual impact on the street. The current model prioritizes visual integration over pure volume. It’s a trade-off. You get a building that looks better from the sidewalk, but you pay for the complexity of the stepped design.

The “Cascading” trend is part of a broader push by Vail Valley HOME to redefine housing density. It’s not just about squeezing more units into a lot; it’s about making those units feel like part of the landscape. The stepped design is the visual language of that integration.

Harrison notes that every structure his firm builds integrates this goal. It’s not an afterthought. It’s the baseline. Whether it’s a split-level ranch or a multi-story row house, the idea is to avoid the “poking out of the ground” effect.

In practice, this means more complex foundations. More complex engineering. And likely, a higher price tag per square foot. The “articulation” costs money. The “negative space” costs money. The “flow” costs money.

The bottom line? We’re getting housing that fits the hill. We’re getting units that don’t look like they’re fighting the view. But we’re also paying for the architectural gymnastics required to keep the zoning inspectors happy. The design is elegant. The cost is steep. And the result is a Vail that looks like it belongs there, even if the price tag says otherwise.