Chris Elliott is very familiar with the old Lutheran hospital in Wheat Ridge.

“My mother worked here for about 20 years … I spent three weeks there getting my appendix out,” he said.

The 69-year-old Arvada native runs E5X Management Inc., a Centennial-based firm. On Tuesday afternoon, he was formally announced as the developer buying the 100-acre former Lutheran Medical Center campus.

Elliott said he expects to close on the land and begin building this fall. He declined to disclose a sale price or the expected total cost of redevelopment.

Lutheran parent company Intermountain Health moved the hospital three miles west last year. Redevelopment of the former site has been planned for years in anticipation of the move.

Plans for the land are still being ironed out. The main hospital building will come down. Pieces will be used in the construction of between 1,200-1,500 new homes and apartments.

The campus spans 32nd to 38th Avenue between Dudley and Allison Streets. Single-family homes will be placed on the properties east, west and southern edges, transitioning to more dense residential in the center and north of the property along the busy 38th Avenue corridor. Retail and civic uses will be incorporated into the development. Twenty percent of the land will be reserved for parks and open space.

Elliott plans to keep some of the hospital buildings intact, however.

“The chapel is down here. It’s a prominent piece of the structure that you can see from 38th and that’s going to stay. We’re going to make sure that that stays. We don’t need any extra incentive from any historic designation,” he said.

Other buildings that will stick around include an old blue house at the southwest corner of 38th and Lutheran Parkway, completed in 1905. It was one of the first structures built there, when the hospital was a small collection of tents treating tuberculosis patients who came to Colorado for the dry, clean air. Elliott said he plans to keep one of those old tents around.

Elliott has experience in large-scale, master-planned projects like the one he’s undertaking at Lutheran. His company, E5X Management, has completed a number of projects that span hundreds or even thousands of acres. The company is currently developing in Parker, Arvada and Erie.

— Matt Geiger, BusinessDen