Micro-unit apartments proposed for Short North

View Larger The Bottom Line Other Business Features Local Stories from ThisWeek More Articles By Jim Weiker The Columbus Dispatch Wednesday September 3, 2014 2:17 AM

Columbus has plenty of microbreweries, but is it ready for micro-apartments?

The Dublin development company Stonehenge hopes so.

Stonehenge has proposed a micro-unit apartment complex at the southwest corner of N. High Street and 3rd Avenue in the Short North.

The six-story building would include 32 studio apartments, all of them 540 square feet about half to two-thirds the size of a typical central Ohio one-bedroom unit.

Theres a tremendous movement toward efficiency, that less may be better, said Stonehenge President Mo Dioun.

We would like to be a pioneer in that area, to test this. We believe the community is ready for a smaller residential option.

The ground floor of the complex would include a lobby, retail space and spots for 32 Smart cars, which take up about half the room of conventional cars.

Dioun and Jonathan Barnes, the principal in JBAD architecture firm, who designed the building, said the project is a response to high demand for Short North apartments coupled with the high cost of building apartments in the neighborhood.

This is a trend in cities where theres a lot more pressure to develop, in New York and San Francisco, Barnes said. We have our own version of that in the Short North. So this was a matter of taking an idea thats been successful elsewhere and applying it to the Short North.

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Micro-unit apartments proposed for Short North