Chateau Normandie Apartments (a.k.a. Moyle Apartments)

The Chateau Normandie stands as one of Salt Lake City's earliest apartment buildings, among the last completed during the wave of multi-family construction that swept the city in the early 20th century before the Great Depression. Between the 1890s and the 1930s, roughly 180 apartment buildings were constructed in downtown Salt Lake City, representing the city's first real experiment with density and urban residential life. The Chateau Normandie, then the Moyle Apartments, completed in 1931, was among the final buildings of that era.

Unlike earlier downtown housing that catered primarily to the wealthy, the Moyle Apartments were designed to offer affordable, dignified housing for working-class individuals and single women, a demographic that had rarely had access to quality central-city housing. It's 32 units, ranging from 430 to 1,408 square feet, offered both modest and more generous configurations within the same building, allowing it to serve a range of incomes under one roof. That range was intentional: the building embodied the Progressive Era belief that decent housing was a social good, not a luxury. It was one of the few apartment buildings of its era explicitly accessible to single women, offering modern amenities, a central location, and a sense of place at a time when such access was rare.

Architecturally, the building is a relatively uncommon application of the English Tudor Period Revival style to a multi-family urban apartment building. While the Tudor Revival was among the most popular domestic styles in Utah following World War I, it was typically applied to single-family residences. Architect Hugh Cecil Lewis, working with associate William E. Nelson, translated the style into a four-story brick apartment building constructed of striated brick and textured masonry with varied surface coursing that gives the exterior its distinctive horizontal character and visual warmth. The English Tudor vocabulary appears in the bay windows, steeply pitched rooflines, and modest Tudor detailing of the facade. Inside, the building was noted for its Art Deco tilework, a layering of period styles that was characteristic of the early 1930s, when Tudor exteriors and Art Deco interiors coexisted comfortably as expressions of modernity and stability. The building follows the walk-up apartment plan, with a central stair serving units on each landing, a configuration that supports the communal life of its residents.

The Utah State Historic Preservation Office surveyed the building in August 1988 and determined it to be Eligible/Contributing. No National Register nomination has been pursued in the 37 years since that evaluation.