The Brickyard: Castle Rock's $400 Million New Neighborhood

Drive west on Plum Creek Boulevard and you'll pass a construction site that used to be a brick factory. By 2027, it's supposed to have a fieldhouse, a hotel, six restaurants, and a few hundred new neighbors.

What's Happening

The Brickyard is a 31-acre mixed-use district going up on the site of the old Acme Brick Co. plant, west of I-25 off Prairie Hawk Drive in Castle Rock. Confluence Companies, the Golden-based developer that spent the last several years remaking downtown Castle Rock, bought the site for $7 million after the brick plant shut down in 2019 and is putting roughly $400 million into what comes next.

The centerpiece, and the part already visible from the highway, is the Castle Rock Sports Center — a 145,000-square-foot indoor recreation facility the Town of Castle Rock is building in partnership with Confluence and Saunders Construction. The Town broke ground on October 28, 2025, and the roughly $75 million facility is on track to open summer 2027 with two competition gyms, an 11-lane pool and warm-up pool, an indoor track, fitness studios, and locker rooms.

Around that anchor, Confluence is building out the rest of the district: apartments, a hotel, restaurants, offices, and eventually for-sale condos. In December 2025, Confluence and Chicago-based Origin Investments announced a joint venture to build the 298-unit Brickyard Apartments on a 3-acre parcel within the district — studios up to three-bedrooms, renting roughly $1,600 to $3,150 a month, with a rooftop pool, a golf simulator, and a dog spa.

The Same Developer Behind Riverwalk

If the name Confluence Companies sounds familiar, it should. This is the same firm that built Riverwalk, the five- and six-story mixed-use buildings on Wilcox Street in downtown Castle Rock that opened in 2019 — $64 million, 230 apartments, 16,200 square feet of retail, and 31,700 square feet of office space, with a below-grade parking garage. Riverwalk is where Wide Awake Eatery sits today, and it helped anchor a run of new tenants along Wilcox Street, not far from shops like Mod Mountain Boutique. Confluence says it has now put more than $180 million into downtown Castle Rock overall, with roughly 70 businesses relocating downtown in the years since Riverwalk broke ground.

That's the pattern: Confluence doesn't just build one building and move on. It picks a downtown, builds the first anchor project, then keeps going. It's doing the same thing right now in Parker — the firm is behind East Main, a 300-plus-unit apartment building across from Discovery Park and the PACE Center, anchoring Parker's "My Mainstreet" plan to extend Mainstreet east with new restaurants, retail, and housing. The Brickyard is Confluence applying that same playbook to Castle Rock's west side — a part of town that, until recently, was a working brick factory.

What's Coming, Piece by Piece

The full buildout is expected to run in phases through roughly 2030. Beyond the Sports Center and the 298-unit apartment project already underway, Confluence's plans for the Brickyard include:

• A hotel — a roughly 125-room, four-star property branded Hotel Castle Rock, with banquet space and a spa/fitness center
• Six restaurants already under contract — Voodoo Brewing Company, Sushi Row, White Pie, John Saunders, Where Food Comes From, and Journeyman's Bar
• Office and event space, including an outdoor gathering space Confluence calls Brickyard Square
• About 160 for-sale condominiums in a later phase, on top of the apartments already planned
• A bike and pedestrian path under I-25, tying the district back to the rest of Castle Rock

All told, that's roughly 460 homes between the apartments and condos — in the ballpark of the "~500 homes" figure Confluence has floated for the district's full residential buildout.

Why It Matters

For a town that's nearly doubled in population since 2010, the Brickyard is a genuinely new piece of Castle Rock rather than another subdivision on the edge of town. It sits right next to Philip S. Miller Park, and the Town's planned Industrial Tributary Trail will eventually connect the Brickyard, the Sports Center, and PSM Park back to downtown on foot or by bike — closing a gap that's currently split by the railroad and East Plum Creek.

It also means the west side stops being a place you drive past and starts being a place you drive to — for a swim, a game of pickleball, dinner, or a weekend at the hotel — the same shift Riverwalk drove downtown a few years ago.

More on What's Being Built

The Brickyard is one of several major projects reshaping Castle Rock right now, alongside the Crystal Valley interchange and Dawson Trails on the far west side. For the full, regularly updated list of what's under construction across Douglas County — Castle Rock, Parker, Highlands Ranch, Lone Tree, and Castle Pines — see what's being built across Douglas County.

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Sources: Confluence Companies — The Brickyard; The Brickyard — Brick by Brick; Confluence Companies — Riverwalk; Town of Castle Rock — Castle Rock Sports Center; Douglas County News-Press, October 2025; Origin Investments — Brickyard Apartments joint venture; Connect CRE, "$400M Castle Rock 'Brickyard' Taking Shape"