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Meet Christoph Kaiser of Christoph Kaiser Rentals

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Christoph Kaiser.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Christoph. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I am a Phoenix native, for the most part. My mother is German so we spent our summers in southern Germany as I was growing up, a place I also studied architecture later in life. Having this constant exposure of two very different environments and cultures provoked me to consider the way things are with more curiosity at a young age than I think I would have without two worlds to compare with each other.

Pressing fast forward through childhood, K-12, undergraduate and graduate school, where I studied architecture, I purchased my first property in downtown Phoenix in 2004, in Garfield Historic District, and immediately fell in love with the neighborhood. The neighborhood was not my first choice, not even my second or third. Garfield Historic District was a very gritty neighborhood, riddled with neglected homes and vacant lots, and with its share of gang activity still remnant from far tougher years. But Garfield was alas, the only place I could find a house that I could afford.

After more than a year of searching for my first home, starting that search in more established historic districts, and having had so many attempted purchases fall through or be plucked from my grasp by cash buyers, I purchased my first home, near 9th street and Pierce. I immediately began working to transform it, into both a home I could enjoy and a home that would communicate “renewal” to the community around me. As an early pioneer in the neighborhood, the fresh coat of paint and new plants in the yard were invested with an ulterior motive of attracting other people with plans to do the same in this neighborhood. I couldn’t do this alone and wanted to inspire reinforcements.

With an education in architecture, creating and transforming homes in the downtown core of Phoenix quickly became a natural extension of my architecture practice – my ‘playground’ if you will. I initially gravitated towards the historic districts because of the history here, and because of the architectural solidity and material honesty inherent to these vintage structures. Here I discovered buildings with soul, buildings built by hand before developers perfected the art of building houses as cheap as possible and then cosmetically jacketing them with stucco and faux materials to make them look like something they are not. My first remodels were strictly traditional. I sought to restore, to bring back what was.

Later, as I began adding square footage to some of my projects, I determined that it was warranted, in certain restrained moments, to treat new as new – and that expressing distinction between historic architecture and new square footage yielded a certain richness, simultaneously sweetening both the new and the historic.

Along the way, I learned that it is those moments, where the new, while remaining materially honest and true to building conventions of our day, respectfully engage the historic, that capture the imagination and attention of passers-by. We are not creating benign faux historic, nor are we creating futuristic space stations that punch you in the face with their modernity, but appropriately distinct architecture. As time passed, my confidence in being able to work within the context of our historic districts with savvy and sensitivity grew, and I began to test ideas that possessed greater boldness.

And while boldness is not always the right answer, my strategy for putting Garfield on the radar of a larger audience was to introduce some subtle but architecturally powerful moves to the historic fabric of the neighborhood. Most of what I was doing was very safe, tasteful and appropriate – very Martha Stewart, and doing so, in my view, allowed me to introduce certain unexpected special moments within that larger background. The thing people talk about, the thing that will be remembered. The thing that sets this historic house apart from the others. All of these endeavors, by the way, underwent an immediate and real litmus test.

These were rental properties, in a somewhat sketchy neighborhood – did people want to live in them? If I wasn’t able to attract tenants that would stay on my property, the rental would not perform well and I would not be able to sustain it. As my rental business grew, so did my architecture practice. Creating innovative, fresh moments within the historic context of early 1900’s houses slowly became a more frequent opportunity alongside an architecture practice that was primarily commercial in nature.

Today, 70% of the work we do at KaiserWorks LLC (Instagram: @ksrwrks) is commercial: office space, restaurants, churches and multifamily housing projects. The remaining 20% is residential new build, and 10% are personal projects – the projects that become part of Christoph Kaiser Rentals (see Facebook: Christoph Kaiser Rentals), like the Silo House, Attica, the Grand Pyramid Cottage, and Craftsman Portal. This year, a new rental will join that family, so stay tuned… In the meantime, you can follow my personal stories on my personal Instagram feed @christoph.g.kaiser where I regularly provide behind the scenes looks at the projects we’re working on.

Has it been a smooth road?
Real progress is never a smooth road. When I bought my first house, I was working full time at an architecture practice, DeBartolo Architects, and working nights and weekends to remodel my home, frequently falling asleep with sawdust caked on my face. I would run to Home Depot before sunrise, buy tools and/or materials, then meet my helpers shortly after sunrise to provide instructions for the day, if I was able to afford them, and then race off to work.

And the next day it started all over again. I remember receiving my first rent check in May of 2005. So much work had gone into the setup of making that moment happen. I remember thinking, “I am not going to do this again any time soon.” And less than 10 months later, I purchased my next house on the same street, which would later be home to the Silo House and Attica.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Christoph Kaiser Rentals story. Tell us more about the business.
Christoph Kaiser Rentals is a rental business based in Phoenix Arizona that specializes in unique rental properties, often historic in nature, that strive to provide spaces that ‘feed the soul’ and enrich the human experience. Christoph Kaiser Rentals is a spinoff of KaiserWorks LLC and owes the spirit of innovation and freshness inherent to it’s rental properties to the creative minds that comprise the KaiserWorks company culture.

What makes me most proud as a company is that we are not driven by the bottom dollar – we make spaces that excite us and positively impact our City, and then make them available to the public as rentals.

Where do you see your industry going over the next 5-10 years?  Any big shifts, changes, trends, etc?
In the next 5-10 years, Christoph Kaiser Rentals will expand out of the Garfield Historic District. We will introduce completely new and novel rental models and increase the density of our rental-model with a focus on sustainable architecture and low carbon footprint living. KaiserWorks LLC is currently designing a project called kbox that it will make public in 2018 that will become a reproducible part of Christoph Kaiser Rentals. Christoph Kaiser Rentals will also start showcasing furnishings and interior accessories designed by KaiserWorks LLC.

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