Novum Wall Supports High-Profile Parking Expansion in Breckenridge, CO

Project Details

Owner: Breckenridge Grand Vacations Manufacturer: Signature Stone Location: Breckenridge, CO Wall Type: MSE Texture: Summit Year Built: 2025

We're here at North Gold Rush in Breckenridge, Colorado. This is one of many projects we've done with Breckenridge Grand Vacations. That's the developer on the project. This is a workforce housing complex in Breckenridge, Colorado and we utilize our Novum retaining wall block on this. It's a new product that we've had for about a little over a year. The Novum block is a very economical solution in part due to the smaller size of the blocks. We can ship two hundred and twenty square feet on a truckload as opposed to about a hundred and sixty to a hundred and forty square feet of a larger big block system. So there's significant savings on it if you have a larger haul. And in this case, we had a three hour haul from our facility in Greeley, Colorado. This project that we're standing out on here is a fill condition where the owner was looking for the aesthetics of a wet cast product including the long term durability. Right along a roadway here, so there's a lot of a lot of traffic, foot traffic, bikes, the works. A lot of people looking at this project on a daily basis. The process for designing this wall was looking at it on a preliminary basis. It's a deferred submittal, so the contractor went to the manufacturer to discuss what options they had, and we settled on the option of Novum for the smaller size and the ability to design it as a typical SRW or MSE wall. The process for design looked fairly typical again to like your your typical small block product using sheet reinforcement. On this one, we use the Synteen SF35 product for the GeoGrid. Original conditions for soils were intended to use site fills because again, we're here in the mountains. Fairly good granular fill. They wound up importing crusher fines, ready to do a class one spec in lieu of using on-site for availability and ease of testing. What we're doing here is a big overflow parking lot for Breckenridge ski resorts. We need this wall to extend the parking lot and make room for the workforce housing for over four hundred parking spots. And this'll allow us to do it in a quick simple way. It's actually really simple. The first tier is definitely the most difficult getting those level and getting started correctly. And then from there up, it's really, really quick. This project is right on one of the main drags of Breckenridge, Colorado. So it has a ton of visibility from the street. The owner of this project wanted something that's gonna look good because of the visibility here, and so they chose Novum as the option. This was a design build project, so, they knew they needed a retaining wall, and they came to Signature Stone. Signature Stone partnered with, with Ben Daiss of SSC to do the design on it, and it turned out really well. It's gonna be a really cool project when it's all said and done.

Why Novum Wall?

One of North America’s most famous ski resorts needed a straightforward, durable, and attractive retaining wall solution to support the vital expansion of a parking area adjacent to a new mountainside workforce housing development. To support the 400-space expanded overflow parking lot, the North Gold Rush project developers chose a mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) Novum Wall design. Novum was the clear choice for several reasons, including:

Freight Savings. Greeley, Colorado-based producer Signature Stone was able to deliver 220 sq ft (20.4 sq m) of wall face per truckload, compared to about 140–160 sq ft (13–14.8 sq m) with larger big block systems. With a three-hour haul from Signature Stone’s Greeley, CO, production facility, that difference translated directly into lower freight cost per square foot of wall.
Structural Performance. Novum Wall blocks are produced with wet cast concrete and its lower porosity (compared to dry cast concrete) limits water absorption, delivering significantly better long-term durability and lifespans. This advantage is particularly impactful in regions with frequent freeze-thaw cycles, like Colorado’s mountain ranges.
Design Flexibility. The wall was designed and installed as a segmental retaining wall (SRW) with geogrid reinforcement, providing designers a familiar engineering methodology that allowed for simple, straightforward installation.
Installation Efficiency. Novum Wall is installed with compact machinery like skid-steers and mini-excavators, while small-block dry cast SRWs are hand-set, demanding more labor and time and driving up installation costs.
Deeply-Textured Details. Novum Wall block faces look like they’ve come straight from the quarry, an essential consideration since this wall faces one of the town’s main thoroughfares. The Summit texture was the perfect choice for this Summit County project.

With its combination of shipping efficiency, structural resilience, design simplicity, installation speed, and visual appeal, Novum Wall delivered exactly what this high-visibility mountain town project required. The result is a retaining solution that performs reliably in extreme conditions while complementing the character of Breckenridge’s resort corridor.