World Article on downtown apartments.

[MichaelC]

Excerpt form Tulsa World

" It's a simple question, really. How big is the apartment? How many square feet? But Ken Brune takes a long pause, thinking it over.

"Well," he says, "that depends."

It's hard to say exactly where the apartment ends and the law office begins. Take, for example, that room with a long table and six or eight chairs.

Call it a dining room and Brune's apartment measures about 1,500 square feet. But call it a conference room and the apartment shrinks to 1,300 square feet.

"We use it for both," he says. "That's what you get when you live and work in the same place."

The place where Brune both lives and works is called the Reunion Center, a 10-story office tower at Fourth and Main streets. He's the one and only resident.

His bedroom is maybe 10 steps from the receptionist's desk; his gourmet kitchen just around the corner from the waiting room.

"It's an unusual place to live right now," Brune says. "But I think five, 10 years from now it will seem very normal."

By then, if all goes according to the Vision 2025 plan, much of downtown's old vacant office space will be converted to mixed use, with people living, working and shopping within the same few blocks, if not in some cases within
the same building.

For now, Brune is one of a small but growing number of Tulsans who are living ahead of the times, finding obscure corners of downtown to convert into private homes.

Of course, you have the major residential projects, too. The Tribune Lofts, the Philtower Lofts, Central Park condominiums. But people like Brune are making their own little niches in unexpected places.

On the ninth floor of the Reunion Center, a long hallway leads from the elevators to his law firm. What isn't immediately obvious is that it also leads to his private apartment -- a door in the reception area slides open to reveal a dining room and beyond that the kitchen and cozy living room.

"Living downtown is itself a unique experience," Brune said. "Personally, now I can't imagine living anywhere else."

In vacant office buildings, above empty storefronts and often with do-it-yourself renovations, people aren't waiting for high-profile, well-financed Vision 2025 projects.

These downtown outposts are mostly scattered, with a few in the Brady District and even fewer in the central business core along Main Street and Boston Avenue.

But a cluster seems to be forming near Third Street and Kenosha Avenue, a mix of dilapidated and freshly renovated old buildings.

Micha Alexander calls it "in the shadow of downtown," and that's where he wants it to stay.

"We can be over here out of the way and do our own thing," said Alexander, who launched the area's revitalization with the 2003 renovation of the Virginia Lofts. "I want to be a real arts district, not for tourists but for artists." "