For the first time in decades, a little purple church in Denver’s Cole neighborhood will be open on Sundays. Not for mass or services, but for coffee and wine.
“There’s a need for interesting neighborhood retail around here. It’s an interesting neighborhood, and it’s an interesting property,” said Nathan Beal, a local developer.
Beal runs a one-person shop, St. Bernard Properties, which he started about 20 years ago. The 47-year-old hails from the South, but you wouldn’t know that unless you get some whiskey in him, he said.
He likes to bike around town and left Atlanta for Denver’s more “consistent urban fabric,” which his developments reflect: small-scale infill projects, townhomes and duplexes, which pair well with neighborhood retail. He’s currently renovating a motel on East Colfax and has repurposed a number of other older buildings around town.
His next project, at the corner of Franklin Street and 38th Avenue, will be in that same vein. Beal wants to turn the nearly 140-year-old church into a cafe — a $500,000 to $750,000 cost — and spend $2 million building six townhomes on the vacant lot next door. It will add to the roughly 50 residential units he’s built across the east side of town.
“It’s one I’ve been keeping an eye on, because it’s a funky little building. It’s like this little purple church with an empty lot next door to it,” he said.
Beal purchased the property, which sits on a 6,100-square-foot lot, for $675,000 in October 2021. He petitioned to have it named as a city landmark, a designation it received in 2023.
“I’m a sucker for saving old stuff,” he said.
The 1,650-square-foot onetime Lutheran church was erected by a Swedish community that came to Cole to build Denver’s railroads. It’s currently occupied by an artist. There hasn’t been a church service in 45 years.
Nathan Beal stands outside his 140-year-old church in Cole. (Hayden Kim/BusinessDen)
Beal wants to redo the stucco, “a defining feature” of the property, and build a mezzanine inside that will “bring you up by the roof rafters.” Some of the church’s layers will also be peeled back to expose its wood frame. Local firm Sopher Sparn Architects drew up the plans.
Two blocks from the church, on a sunny Thursday morning, Brandon Painter was busy dishing out coffee from his 1973 Airstream trailer. The storefront for his mobile business, Nowhere Coffee, sat parked outside the old Rock Drill building that day.
Soon, Painter will have somewhere to call home. It will be in Beal’s old church.
“Currently, [if it’s] super cold, probably not here. If it’s super hot, probably not here. So I would say overall, that’s an opportunity. But I think my customers will expect me to be open all the time now,” he quipped.
The 37-year-old hails from Amarillo, Texas, where he said the only thing that happens is “a lot of wind.” He moved to Colorado with five of his friends in a 26-foot U-Haul trailer a week after graduating from high school. Besides a brief stint in Philadelphia working a corporate job, the Mile High City has been home since.
“Cole for me is this little corner of Denver that not a lot of people have explored, and it’s finally developing a little bit and changing. But I have people that lived in Denver their entire lives and had never been to this part of town,” Painter said.
Beal hopes that Painter, whom he met through a mutual friend, will be moved in and serving up brews to the neighborhood by the fall of 2026. The six houses next door, which will range from 800 to 1,400 square feet, should be done by then too. They’ll be designed with a sawtooth-like roof, reflecting the Rock Drill building two blocks away.
“The fact that it’s in the neighborhood that I’ve already built community in, and Nathan is a good dude — which with developers, isn’t always the case — and his other projects that have supported small businesses is pretty important to me too. And it’s a stand-alone building, it’s a historic building,” Painter said.
“All of those were pretty attractive to me.”
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