Why a New Trinidad Apartment Building Will Only Have Five-Bedroom Units

• June 14th 2016

by Nena Perry-Brown

Welcome to Property Week, a week-long UrbanTurf series devoted to intriguing residential properties ranging from a DC version of Wrigleyville to a warehouse-turned-loft in Brooklyn. Enjoy.

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The Oslo opened in Shaw two years ago with a mix of units that included solely three- and four-bedroom apartments, a stark departure from the normal unit mix for new apartment buildings in the area. The layout for each unit at The Oslo was also a little different — a large communal living and kitchen area surrounded by en-suite bedrooms, a harbinger for the larger co-living developments that have sprung up in the area since.

Now, Oslo developer Ditto Residential is doubling down with a Northeast DC project that will be comprised entirely of five-bedroom apartments.

Located at 1219 Florida Avenue NE (map), the four-story building will have eight apartments, each with five bedrooms.

“It’s a shared housing experience where people basically get to create community and have a culture outside of [the] stale community room that is in most apartment complexes,” explains Ditto Residential president Martin Ditto.

The layout for each apartment arranges the doors to the various bedrooms around a large common kitchen/living room/dining area, without unnecessary hallways or wasted space. While it might be tempting to liken the set-up to a dormitory, the bedrooms themselves are more comparable in size to those inside traditional apartments, with a closet occupying one wall of the bedroom. Each bedroom also comes with its own bathroom. Rents will range from $1,100-1,200 per person a month.

During the conceptual planning of the building, the Ditto team decided that they were comfortable with only five-bedroom apartments in order to preserve the smaller community feel, and it just so happened that the footprint of the building was compatible with that unit style.

Sizeable demand for these sorts of projects means that 1219 Florida Avenue NE is one of four co-living concepts that Ditto has in the pipeline. The building, designed by Square 134, is scheduled for delivery in late summer or early fall of this year.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/only_five_bedrooms_a_new_trinidad_apartment_building_bets_on_sharing/11314.