He will be razing the long-abandoned Hested's department store building and replacing it with condo, retail and offices. The offices also will be sold as condos. Hested's opened in the 1960s and closed about a decade later. For most of the past 30 years, it has been empty.

Venn lives in Genesee, a mountain community west of Golden and frequently goes to the historic downtown. "Downtown pretty much stops at the half block where Hested's is," Venn tells GlobeSt.com.

For more than a year, he has been working with the city, the Golden Urban Renewal Authority and the Golden Landmark Association. He will tear down the Hested's building and replace it with a new five-story building. He will also be tearing down the historic Linder Block building on the site. But for the Linder building, he will rebuild it to look exactly as it does today, even re-using the original bricks.

Gateway Station will include 34 luxury condo units, priced from the $300,000s to as much as the $800,000s. Venn tells GlobeSt.com they will be the most expensive condos in Downtown Golden. Still, they will sell for about $300 less per sf than comparable units in Boulder, which is about 25 miles from Downtown Golden. "And they're at least $150 per sf less than comparable condos in LoDo," he tells GlobeSt.com. The first phase will cost about $20 million. The second phase likely will be in the $8 million to $10 million range, he says.

The development also will have about 16,000 sf of retail space on the ground floor and 4,800 sf of office condos. Venn tells GlobeSt.com that there is more demand for office condos than for leased space.

Esther Kettering, a broker with Fuller and Co., is handling the non-commercial space in the project. She tells GlobeSt.com that this development will raise the bar in Downtown Golden. While many people are drawn to the area because of its historic buildings, she notes that much of the retail space available there is functionally obsolete.

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