Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Here is the part people miss about Baker. The reason those tight rows of Queen Anne Victorians are still standing, still gorgeous, still lived in, is that nobody wanted to build here for decades.
This was the red-light district. And Kevin Henderson, who is chairing his sixth Baker Home Tour this year, will tell you straight up that the reputation is what saved the houses. Little development investment came in. So when the mid-20th century rolled around, owners did not tear down and rebuild. They restored what was already there. The neglect became the preservation. That is the whole irony of the place.
Henderson knows the work firsthand. He is renovating his own 1889 Queen Anne right now while running the tour. That is the kind of person who ends up in charge of something like this.
The Baker Home Tour runs 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 8, 2026. Advance tickets are
It starts at DCIS at Fairmont, 520 W. 3rd Ave., and a portion of the proceeds goes to the elementary school, which I like. This is not just gawking at nice houses. It funds the neighborhood.
And the lineup this year is not only Victorians. You get an Art Deco fire station, a Collegiate Gothic elementary school, a rare Second Empire home, a Hobo Craftsman bungalow (yes, that is a real style, I looked it up so you do not have to), a midcentury modern showroom, and an English Cottage stone church.
But the one I would plant myself in front of is a mercantile built around 1880. Somebody started reimagining it back in 2013 into a modern residence, and now it has a rooftop view of the city. A general store from the 1880s turned into a home with a skyline deck. That is Baker in one building.
Baker has the highest concentration of Queen Anne Victorian homes in Denver's historic center. Roughly half the buildings in the historic district are Queen Anne style. That is not an accident and it is not common. Most Denver neighborhoods got picked apart over the decades. Baker did not.
A lot of the credit goes to one man. Prominent Denver architect William Lang, the guy who designed the Molly Brown House, built 39 homes in this neighborhood. Thirty-nine. So you are literally walking past the same hand that made one of Denver's most famous landmarks, house after house.
The bones go back to the 1870s. Thomas Skerritt laid out South Broadway from Englewood to Cherry Creek, and the neighborhood grew up around it. Landmarks you already know are here too. The Mayan Theater. Fairmont School. First Avenue Presbyterian Church.
Here is a detail that gets me every time. A lot of the sidewalks are sandstone slabs, and they are still in good shape more than a century after they were laid down. Over a hundred years of Denver freeze and thaw and they held. They do not pour them like that anymore.
The protections came late but they came. Baker landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, and it became a Denver historic district in 2000. That designation is the wall between these homes and a developer with a bulldozer and a spreadsheet.
That historic district status is a double thing. It protects the character, which is why Baker looks the way it looks. It also puts real limits on what you can change if you buy in. So if you are house hunting here, understand you are buying into rules, not just charm. People pay for both.
And honestly, that scarcity is the point. You cannot manufacture a block of 1880s Queen Annes with original sandstone underfoot. When something is this rare and this protected, it holds value in a way a new build off the highway never will.
The Baker Historic Neighborhood Association started this tour in 2013, and one Saturday a year the residents actually open their restored homes and let you inside. That is the part I keep coming back to. These are private homes. People live in them. And for four hours in August they let strangers walk through and prove the neighborhood was worth saving.
So grab the