The path to creative and monetary fulfillment is a tricky balance. For Black Monarch Hotel owner and continuing Victor visionary Adam Zimmerli, it is a pendulum of time, learning, and instinct that brought him to this point in life.

The Black Monarch Hotel in Victor is a confluence of historical structure and architectural theory incorporated with outside-the-box thinking and cultural references including Gothic, Victorian, and Bela Legosi with dark grays and blues permeating the design.

Zimmerli is prepping other hotel concepts in Victor including the just-about-to-open Best Boarding House in Victor (an ode to country-western stars like Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette) and the in-development Battle Mountain Hotel … all on Main Street.

But Zimmerli’s story has a specific beginning and build.

Zimmerli started working in music in Denver as a music promoter and club DJ in the early aughts before life swung him in a different direction. “I really hit the wall financially in 2009 and I was just really tired of being broke.” The final straw was doing an artist showcase event in July 2009 at a former Denver club called Beta, which had just opened at the time. Zimmerli had been doing hip-hop weekly DJ gigs around town.

“I was a resident DJ at Logos where I got $200, $300 a night.” Zimmerli liked promoting local artists. They worked hard on the showcase, but the club was turning people away at the door telling them it was sold out. The capacity of the club was 1,400 and Zimmerli’s cut plus those of his artists (which numbered almost 30) depended on the door. Afterward, the whole argument over debated profits soured him on the music industry. He returned to a life he knew – construction.

Adam Zimmerli Finds a New Perceptive in Life

Zimmerli had to rethink his approach to life. He had a construction background, His dad worked in construction. His great grandfather built a bar. Zimmerli grew up, in his words, around structural concrete.      

Between 1997 and 2009, he was living around the Capitol Hill and Five Points area in Denver, picking up side gigs on Craigslist. He was helping with demolition and framework almost exclusively in that area, which had beautiful architecture and historic homes from the Victorian era.

“You grow up your whole life in the suburbs, and it’s just tract homes. Everything looks the same. Homogenization is really just hard on your soul if you’re a creative person. So, to live in that neighborhood with all this variance of texture? Those old homes, some of them were in good condition, some were in bad [condition], some were going to fall down. And you get to watch the process of some of them get saved, while some don’t get saved.”

At the time, Zimmerli was destitute, but the family of a friend gifted him enough equipment to start a basic landscaping company. “I was like 29 years old. So, I ended up throwing this ad up on Craigslist that said – it was kind of a joke, out of desperation:– “Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap.’”

Though the play was on the AC/DC song, Zimmerli would do those jobs that most wouldn’t do: sewer disasters, hoarder clearances – and he got the job done. People tend to recognize that kind of dedication.

At one point, Zimmerli got a call from a woman: Rachel Brown, whom he later came to learn was a professor of architecture at CU Denver. “That was a big change point for me.” Brown called to ask him basically to strip out a house in Park Hill. Her husband Tom was a successful general contractor and they were having a house flipping contest between husband and wife. Zimmerli says Brown wanted to prove that she herself could flip a house without her husband, without his crew, without his advice. She was convinced she could do it.

A New Path to Structural Enlightenment

“So, I didn’t really know what was going on.” Brown wanted Zimmerli initially to strip a house to the studs. He said that he could do it in three days, but he said he liked this lady’s focus and wanted to impress her knowing there might be more work. They stripped the house in a day, and he got a $500 tip (still a record for him).

Brown begins calling back with gigs for painting and landscaping. “She basically won the contest with the husband and proved that she could flip a house without his help, but with my help, I guess. I mean, she found other people to hire, who came in and did higher-level work: window people and good tile people.”

Her husband began hiring Zimmerli’s crew. “It turns out he is a really high-end historic restoration contractor.” Zimmerli began to learn the intrinsic work including major structural overhauls on these specific kinds of buildings.

“Then before long [Tom’s] just handing me these engineering drawings saying, ‘OK, why this beam? Why these posts? This is how you can build it to spec, Adam, it’s no big deal; you’ve proven yourself.’ And through that, I ended up learning how to do the major structural overhaul, how to move a load-bearing wall, how to build a second story on a historic building or an underpin where you turn the crawl space into a basement.”

These times were an eye-opening, learning experience for Zimmerli.

Around 2013, Zimmerli ended up gaining ownership of a property in downtown Denver through a lease-to-own contract. He had been doing all this structural work learning the craft and someone mentioned to him about Airbnb coming on the scene. Zimmerli listed this property (which was in a unique location) as a 1bed/1bath and it ended up bringing in $3000 a month (even with a shared bathroom).

Lucky Break and Specific Mindset Led to Money-Making Possibilities

“Slowly, but surely, I was able to figure out that the house had unique zoning.” Zimmerli found the old documentation that the house had been used as a boarding house at one point, then made an argument to the city that the property was grandfathered in as a multi-unit to the city. As a property owner, he is finally exiting the property in June [2022]. It’s going to get torn down to make room for a 22-story skyscraper. His instincts were dead-on … with a bit of luck.

This property, once he got some of the other tenants out, allowed him to have all four units on Airbnb. It was doing $200,000 a year, turnkey. “I’m barely putting in any work. And that was the first time in my life where I was like, ‘Holy shit, I have money!’” This was around 2015.

Zimmerli began making a bigger plan. “I started saying to myself, ‘Man, this money is coming in too easy,’ Easy come, easy go, right? There’s no way you’re going to have a revenue stream coming in this easy forever and ever. You need to invest this money.’”

The Denver real estate market was booming in 2015 and he says he can’t believe it still hasn’t burst, Zimmerli needed to look outward and take advantage of what he had learned.

That path led him next to Teller County and eventually to his new canvas in Victor where the Black Monarch and his soon-to-be other hotels now stand.

To be continued in Part II.

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