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New Tattered Cover bookstore headed to Westminster in 2020

The Denver-based Tattered Cover bookstore chain will open a new 5,000-square-foot location in a fast-growing development in Westminster in April 2020, owner Len Vlahos said today.

“We’ve been working on this for quite a number of months after we became aware of this massive redevelopment for a downtown, mixed-use area in Westminster,” Vlahos said. “I don’t remember who got in touch with who, but seeing Alamo Drafthouse, Origin Hotel and others go in made it seem like a really great fit for us.”

The Westminster Tattered Cover will share space with the Origin Hotel, which is currently under construction in the multi-developer Downtown Westminster project. The Tattered Cover chain, which Vlahos and business partner Kristen Gilligan acquired from previous owner Joyce Meskis in 2015, operates four stand-alone locations and smaller shops inside Denver Union Station and Denver International Airport.

Origin Hotel, which operates a location in Golden, will act as the Tattered Cover’s landlord. Guests will be able to enter the bookstore from the lobby of the 125-room hotel just off U.S. 36 during Tattered Cover business hours — a trick Vlahos and his team learned from the Tattered Cover’s satellite locations.

“We’re incredibly inspired by the Union Station location, with lots of traffic from the trains and Crawford Hotel,” Vlahos said of the miniature bookstore inside downtown Denver’s transit hub. “The model for the Westminster store has the flavor from that but will be similar in size to our suburban Aspen Grove store in Littleton.”

Vlahos declined to discuss the cost of the store but pointed out that independent booksellers have been growing steadily since recovering from the 2008 recession, even as other physical media have suffered at the hands of the digital revolution.

“There are more of us every year. The world of print books has taken a slightly different tack with digital than it has with music, newspapers, film or video content,” he said. “E-books really hit a wall in 2012 or 2013, and the growth stopped. So what we’ve been seeing is a world where digital and print can co-exist. People are also looking for real, community experiences, and book stores provide that.”

The design of the new store — the Tattered Cover’s first new location since 2014 — will take cues from what Vlahos described as Meskis’ “genius” way with layout, which has helped previous locations feel inviting and homey. Architectural renderings and interior concepts are still being worked on, he said.

“Our travelers are searching for truly local experiences,” Walker Thrash, partner at Origin Hotel, said in a media statement. “And Tattered Cover delivers a product that is simply different from the rest.”

The Westminster location also will fill an independent bookstore gap that exists between Boulder and Denver, Vlahos said. While books are available at chain stores, groceries and other outlets in Westminster, Arvada and Broomfield, the biggest independent book stores are in Boulder and Denver.

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