Craig-Gould

Steven Thayer and his wife just bought a house in Castle Rock's Craig and Gould neighborhood. "It's going to be a change of pace," said Thayer, the owner and managing broker of Keller Williams' Thayer Group in Castle Rock. "It's going to be fun and different."

Named after two of the town's founders, John Craig and Jeremiah Gould, this neighborhood is a 16-block historic district just east of downtown Castle Rock. Thayer says most of the neighborhood's houses – a collection of smaller cottages, Craftsman bungalows, and four squares -- date back to the mid-1800s and the early 1900s. He says developers are buying these older houses, updating them, and putting them on the market, so you have a wide price variation. A small cottage that needs a lot of work recently sold for $300,000, while a newly refurbished four-square with all the bells and whistles of a brand-new house at the center of the neighborhood brought in $1.4 million. Generally speaking, though, the average house in the Craig and Gould neighborhood fetches between $600,000 and $800,000.

These houses sit atop smaller, 6,000 to 8,000-square-foot lots with room for a small front yard full of native plants, a low fence at the front of the property, and a narrow driveway leading up to a garage someone added to the house after it was built. Streets in the neighborhood offer space for parallel parking, sidewalks line both sides of the street, and it's not uncommon to find a street tree planted between the sidewalk and the road when you walk down it. "It's a really different vibe," says Thayer, whose previous house was in the newer, suburban neighborhood of Meadowview.

He says one of the neighborhood's biggest selling points is its walkability. Because you're so close to downtown, you can walk to restaurants like Schleppi's, an Italian restaurant built into an old stone church with a round stained-glass window above the front door. The Garlic and Spice Kitchen serves appetizers, sandwiches and flatbread pizzas, while Lost Coffee and The Castle Rock Collective will happily get you that morning caffeine fix. These last two restaurants are on Perry Street, which you can follow south to the Plum Creek Shopping Center's Safeway grocery store. If this isn't enough convenience, the center of Craig and Gould is less than a mile from two exits on a stretch of Interstate 25 that leads north to Denver and south to Colorado Springs.

South Ridge Elementary School is also less than a mile from the heart of Craig and Gould, so it's possible to walk your children to school from kindergarten through the fifth grade. From here, they'll attend Mesa Middle School, which runs a school-wide behavior support program called ROAR that awards tickets in a monthly drawing to students who are responsible, open-minded, aware, and respectful. Neighborhood students will then graduate from Douglas County High School, which is about 1½ miles north of the neighborhood's center. Respectfully, these three schools received a B-minus, a B-plus, and a B from Niche. They're also part of the Douglas County School District, which the website said was the fourth-best of the Denver area's 20 public school districts.

And while you could walk to Douglas County High School, you might want to think twice because the most direct route – Perry Street to Front Street – cuts between a pair of retaining walls that separate Castle Rock Butte from a set of railroad tracks and I-25. This 370-foot-tall butte, which the town of Castle Rock was named after, sits just north of the Craig and Gould neighborhood. You can follow a 1.4-mile trail to the rhyolite formations at the top of the peak or spend an afternoon letting your children roam free at Centennial Park's playground before catching live music at one of Festival Park's First Friday summer concerts. During the winter, you can head over to the partially covered Rink at the Rock to hopefully not fall while ice skating downtown or visit the Castle Rock History Museum to learn more about Castle Rock Butte and the historic neighborhood at its base.

Written By

Mac Mclean

Photography Contributed By

David Sanden

Video By

Alexander Wong