The Empty Blocks Behind the Golden Mill Are About to Fill In

For as long as most people have lived in Golden's historic district, the stretch of Ford Street past the Golden Mill has been the part of downtown you walk through, not to. It's industrial by heritage, quiet by habit. The building that now houses the Mill's self-pour tap wall was a flour mill and then a feed store for over a century before five Golden residents turned it into a food hall in 2021. Everything past it, toward Ninth Street, has mostly stayed exactly what it was: a former ceramics plant that Golden grew up around and then grew past.

That's changing this fall, and the reason is worth sitting with, because it isn't a developer from out of state discovering an undervalued block. It's the Coors family investing in the same ground their own manufacturing business occupied for more than a hundred years.

The corner behind the Mill

CoorsTek, the ceramics business the Coors family has run since the early 1900s, halted operations at its Ninth Street site in 2021 and moved manufacturing elsewhere in Golden. Rather than sell the 12-plus-acre property, the family launched its own real estate arm, AC Development, and set out to turn the site into a mixed-use district called Clayworks, with a new CoorsTek global headquarters anchoring the middle of it. Construction on the first phase, an office building known as 800 Ford Street, topped out in 2025. The address matters here: the Golden Mill sits at 1012 Ford Street. The two projects are on the same street, a few blocks apart, which means the historic district isn't getting a new destination across town. It's getting a second anchor on a street residents already walk.

What's actually landing there this fall

In May 2026, AC Development named the first tenant set to open inside Clayworks: Sweet Bloom Coffee Roasters, a Colorado roaster founded in Lakewood in 2013 by Andy Sprenger, later joined by Eric Yochim, and named one of the top 100 coffee shops in North America. Sweet Bloom already has locations in Westminster and Arvada. The Clayworks location will be its fourth, set inside a building called The Pottery, a nod to the ceramics work that happened on the same ground for decades. The shop is planned at more than 2,500 square feet with an outdoor patio, and the building itself is scheduled to be finished by the third quarter of 2026, with the cafe targeting a fall opening.

The rest of Clayworks is a bigger undertaking than one coffee shop. The full six-block district is planned to include more than 700,000 square feet of office space, a 160-room hotel, 500 apartments with a workforce housing component, and 60,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space. That's a lot of abstraction for a single number to carry, so here's what it means on the ground: it's the difference between Ninth Street staying a name on a historic plaque and Ninth Street becoming a block where you'd actually stop.

What six blocks means when you already live here

It's easy to read "six city blocks of mixed use" and picture something that competes with downtown Golden rather than extends it. That's not quite the geography. Clayworks sits at Ninth Street and Washington Avenue, which is the same axis the historic core has always run along. The project is described by its own developers as an extension of north downtown Golden, not a rival node. For someone who already lives in the district, the practical shift isn't a new place to drive to. It's a few more blocks added to the walk you already take.

That's a different kind of neighborhood change than a big-box retail center announcing a grand opening. It's incremental, tied to a family name that's been on this ground since Golden was founded, and it's happening on a timeline measured in phases rather than a single ribbon-cutting.

The calendar that was already full before Clayworks showed up

None of this is arriving into a blank fall. The historic district's existing anchors have their own season locked in, and it's worth knowing what's already on the books before a new coffee shop becomes the only thing anyone talks about:

• The Golden Mill runs a weekly live music calendar on its Clear Creek-facing patio, including a Latin Music Series with the Gio Barabadze Trio on August 30, alongside its 50-plus-tap self-pour wall.
• The Foothills Art Center's CarolAnn Wachter exhibit is on display at the Astor House through October 25, 2026, part of the historic building's ongoing run as exhibition space since the museum there closed in 2020.
• The Golden Farmers Market runs through early October at the Golden Public Library lot, the district's longest-running weekly draw for produce and local vendors.
• The Jefferson Symphony Orchestra kicks off its performance season each fall at the Colorado School of Mines Green Center, a short walk from the historic core.
• The district's fall festival lineup, including Oktoberfest, Autumn Fest, Harvest Haunt, the Wild West Pub Crawl, the Golden Hayride, and guided ghost tours, runs from September through Halloween, layered on top of self-paced history and public art walking tours that residents can do on their own schedule.

That's a full season before Clayworks adds anything. What changes with a fall opening for Sweet Bloom isn't the amount of things happening in the historic district. It's where some of them happen.

Two blocks doing double duty

The honest version of this story isn't that Golden's historic district is being reinvented. It's that one specific corridor, the stretch between the Golden Mill and the old CoorsTek plant, is finally catching up to the rest of downtown's density. The Mill proved in 2021 that an industrial building on Ford Street could become a weekly destination. Clayworks is the same family that built the original industry on that ground betting the same thing is true a few blocks further out.

For residents, the practical takeaway is small and specific: the walk past the Mill, the one that used to end at a fence line, is going to have a reason to keep going. A coffee shop by itself doesn't remake a neighborhood. But paired with a hotel, apartments, and tens of thousands of square feet of retail phased in over the next several years, it's the first visible piece of a corridor that's been dormant for longer than most current residents have lived here.

Keep an eye on Ford Street this fall. The Golden Mill isn't going anywhere, and neither is the rest of the district's packed calendar. What's new is that the quiet stretch past it finally has a reason to fill in.

If you're curious how a shift like this tends to ripple into home values, resale timing, or what it might mean for a property near Ninth Street specifically, that's the kind of on-the-ground question The Fox Group answers every day. Contact Us.