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Luxury senior tower unveiled

$109 million project with 240 rental units slated to open in '08

John Rebchook, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 22, 2006 at midnight

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Plans were presented Thursday for a $109 million, luxury senior citizen retirement tower in the Riverfront Park development in downtown Denver.

Balfour Senior Care plans to start construction in February on the Cosmopolitan Club at 15th and Little Raven streets near Commons Park.

Susan Juroe, the general counsel for the Louisville-based company, detailed the project at Downtown Denver Partnership breakfast on Thursday.

"It is the perfect thing for downtown," said Chris Frampton of East West Partners, developer of Riverfront Park and another speaker at the partnership's breakfast.

As part of the deal, Balfour will renovate the historic but long vacant Moffatt train station into a community center. The entire construction project will take about 20 months, she said.

The Cosmopolitan Club is expected to have about seven stories, 240 units and a 160-car parking garage. It is scheduled to be built on a site that Arapahoe County-based Archstone Smith had planned for part of its upscale Riverfront Park apartments. Instead, Archstone Smith sold the land.

Juroe said that Balfour research found that at most retirement homes, 73 percent of the residents come from a 10-mile radius. The two major cities bucking that trend are Denver and Atlanta, where 50 percent of the people come from out of state, typically to be close to their grown children and grandchildren, Juroe said.

The Cosmopolitan Club will be designed by klipp architects of Denver and Robert AM Stern Architects.

There will be a one-time fee of $10,000, and monthly rents will range from $3,500 to $6,500 for people with independent living units. Assisted living rents will start at $5,300, and Alzheimer care will start at $6,500, she said.

Those rents are competitive with much older facilities in the Denver area, she said.

She said a lot of seniors who are living on $100,000 or more a year plan on hiring in-home care.

"Our biggest competitors are people's homes," she said.

Zach Neumeyer, chairman of Denver-based Sage Hospitality, is an outside director on the privately held Balfour board. Balfour was founded a decade ago by Michael Schonbrun, who from 1981 to 1991 was president and CEO of the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine in Denver.

"Michael's premise for the project is that there is a large enough group of affluent seniors who want to live in the Denver area," Neumeyer said. "I absolutely believe that. The way the project has been designed is superb. This is the kind of project where you think your parents would be happy there. My parents would be happy there."

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