Courthouse Square Apartments I Wheaton, Illinois

Empty nesters are increasingly downsizing from four- and five bedroom homes to more manageable condominiums, townhomes and apartments. While they are happy to sacrifice living space, they are less willing to give up many of the amenities found in the homes they are leaving behind, including spacious kitchens with modern appliances, high ceilings and large windows that let in ample natural light.

In fact, the wish lists of empty nesters and Millennials who are shopping for new residences are quite similar. That suits developers like Focus Development in Northfield, Illinois, just fine. They are able to create new projects like Courthouse Square Apartments in Wheaton, Illinois, and market the apartments to a wide range of potential residents.

Completed in 2016, Courthouse Square Apartments features 149 units in a newly built six-story building in a historic downtown section of this affluent community 25 miles west of Chicago. The new apartment building has been carefully designed to blend in with the neighboring Courthouse Square luxury condominiums, which Focus Development completed in 2008. Both the previously completed condominiums and the new apartments were designed to imitate the DuPage County Courthouse which Focus painstakingly restored to its original glory as part of the project.

“We worked closely with the existing condominium associations to design and build a product that would be reflective of the quality and architecture of the already-existing buildings,” explains Kendall Lettinga, vice president of sales and marketing for Focus Development. “That included a brick façade, which is unusual for an apartment building, and generous-sized windows, which also are unique to an apartment building.”

Natural light pours into these apartments through large (6-foot-tall), arching living room windows and floor-to-ceiling (8-foot-tall) sliding and swing doors that provide access to spacious balconies. The windows and doors, developed by REHAU and built by Chicago-based Newtec Windows & Doors, Inc., are one reason why Courthouse Square Apartments won top honors in the one-bedroom apartment category of the 2016 Chicagoland Apartment Marketing and Management Excellence Awards

Wade Giorno, a senior project manager at Focus Development, which also served as the general contractor for this project, says the partnership with REHAU and Newtec Windows was vital to obtaining the desired end results. “They are very flexible in terms of the design and window sizes. With a typical manufacturer, you have to either buy a standard-size window off the block or there is a huge premium involved for custom. Here, they essentially do custom sizes and it doesn’t carry a premium price.”

Giorno also praises the on-site support provided by both REHAU and Newtec. He says Focus Development has enlisted their help in other projects because of the high quality of the products and the careful attention paid to customer service