Ground is broken in Louisville, Colorado. On October 14, 2026, AdventHealth started construction on AdventHealth Louisville, a five-story, 373,000-square-foot hospital on a 40-acre campus in the Redtail Ridge development, near U.S. 36 and Northwest Parkway. The Turner-FH Joint Venture — Turner Construction paired with Denver-based FH Construction Group — is building it. Completion is anticipated in early 2029, and AdventHealth expects to open the hospital in the first quarter of that year.
This is a replacement hospital, not a market entry. AdventHealth Louisville succeeds AdventHealth Avista, the only acute care hospital in Louisville, which has operated from its current site since 1990 and traces its roots to the Colorado Boulder Sanitarium of 1896. AdventHealth told the City of Louisville it needed both a different location and a different building: better access for patients, and room to expand that the current campus does not have.
What is being built?
The approved plan carries 153 inpatient rooms. Thirty of them are shelled for future build-out, which puts 123 fitted rooms in the hospital on opening day; AdventHealth’s public figure for the project is “up to 150 beds.” The program named in the city’s project narrative is a working hospital’s core: operating rooms, an Emergency Department, and Imaging, operating around the clock, with roughly 500 staff across all shifts.
The Emergency Department sits at the south end of the building, and AdventHealth says the new location will significantly expand emergency care access — its estimate is a shorter drive to emergency care for more than 400,000 people. A helipad is part of the entitlement package, placed on the west side of the hospital alongside the ambulance parking and drop-off area.
Beside the hospital, Phase 1 includes a 62,000-square-foot medical office building staffed by an expected 50 to 60 people. Phase 1 is not the end of the plan. The campus is entitled to grow over the next 10 to 20 years to roughly 800,000 square feet in total: a hospital of about 639,600 square feet and 300 beds, with medical office space reaching about 160,000 square feet, at full buildout around 2040.
What does the site plan tell a facility team?
The circulation plan separates its flows the way a hospital campus should. Four entrances serve the site: a main entrance off Rockcress Drive that doubles as the ED entrance, a dedicated ambulance entrance on Sorrel, a service and delivery entrance also on Sorrel, and a secondary entry for the medical office building — all tied together by an internal loop road, so moving between the ED lot and the main lot never requires going back out to a public street. The main entrance faces southeast, oriented for wayfinding as patients come off Highway 36 onto Northwest Parkway.
Service functions are aggregated on the west side of the hospital, away from the public face: a recessed loading dock, a 1,917-square-foot storage building, medical gas storage, a screened outdoor electrical yard, the helipad, and a mobile imaging port. The filed site plan also labels oxygen tanks, underground fuel tanks, transformers, and EV charging. The campus access plan carries a specific local lesson: AdventHealth says it draws on lessons from the Marshall Fire, with improved campus access and multiple points of entry for safety.
One landscape element is worth a design team’s attention. A dry-creek-bed feature called the Ribbon runs along the east side of the hospital — native prairie grasses, forbs, shrubs, and trees on gently sloped banks, built to read as the entry experience, give inpatient rooms a natural view, hold two healing walks, and filter stormwater runoff from the building and pavement. Lawns across the site are shortgrass prairie rather than irrigated turf, in keeping with Colorado’s turf law.
Who is building and designing it?
The Turner-FH Joint Venture pairs a national healthcare builder with a regional one. Turner, based in New York City, brings what its vice president Scott Bustos called “100 years of healthcare expertise” to the project. FH Construction Group is headquartered in Denver and has delivered more than $500 million of healthcare, education, and commercial construction across the Mountain West. Reported project value is $475 million.
AdventHealth also lists ADAMS, SmithGroup, WSP, and Kimley-Horn as partners on the campus. SmithGroup’s Denver office is the design presence on the city’s filed documents — its letterhead carries the project narrative, its title block is on the PUD site plan, and the project’s official rendering is credited to the firm. Kimley-Horn’s title block appears on the site plan as well.
What does a ground-up campus give design and facility teams to work from?
Start with the shell strategy. Thirty shelled inpatient rooms inside a 153-room hospital is a decision bid teams can read directly: fit-out work is deferred, not cancelled, and the building’s systems have to be commissioned in a way that lets those rooms come online later without rebuilding the floors around them. The same logic runs through the campus entitlements — a site approved to double its bed count and more than double its hospital square footage is a site whose Phase 1 infrastructure decisions echo for twenty years. (The filings do not publish equipment or central-plant schedules, so how far the Phase 1 plant is sized toward the 300-bed buildout is an inference to test in bid documents, not a stated fact.)
The Denver metro context makes the project bigger than one campus. Louisville sits in the same northwest-metro growth corridor where hospital systems have been racing to plant campuses at major interchanges — the pattern HFH mapped in its look at Denver’s hospital building wave. A ground-up, five-story replacement hospital with a two-decade buildout runway gives design and architecture firms a long program to bid against: Phase 1 now, shelled-room fit-outs and MOB growth next, and a second hospital expansion inside the same entitlement envelope after that.
For facility operators, the project is also a clean case study in replacement-hospital planning: a health system keeping its legacy campus running — Avista’s outpatient services stay put in the near term — while its replacement rises across the highway corridor, then dedicating 7.5 acres of the old campus as protected open space in partnership with the city. And because the building is new rather than renovated, its design work runs against the current edition of the FGI Guidelines from day one — the room-size and compliance changes HFH tracks in its FGI Guidelines comparison are the baseline this project’s clinical spaces were drawn to.
What happens to Avista?
AdventHealth Avista keeps working while its replacement is built. Outpatient services are expected to remain on the Avista campus in the near term, and the system says it is still assessing the site’s future use. The one settled piece is the land: 7.5 acres of the Avista campus are dedicated as protected open space, in partnership with the City of Louisville.
AdventHealth Louisville is one move in a busier Colorado year for the system. AdventHealth currently operates five hospitals in the state — Avista, Castle Rock, Littleton, Parker, and Porter in Denver — and in September it opened AdventHealth Aurora Highlands, an $81 million emergency and medical office campus that is phase one of a planned dual-phase development. Louisville is the largest of the moves: a full replacement hospital, on a greenfield campus, with its growth already entitled.
Project snapshot
- Project: AdventHealth Louisville — replacement hospital for AdventHealth Avista
- Location: Redtail Ridge development, 900 Rockcress Drive, Louisville, Colorado (near U.S. 36 and Northwest Parkway)
- Owner: AdventHealth (Altamonte Springs, Florida)
- Builder: Turner-FH Joint Venture — Turner Construction + FH Construction Group (Denver)
- Design/partners named: SmithGroup, ADAMS, WSP, Kimley-Horn
- Hospital: 373,000 sq ft (Turner’s figure; AdventHealth reports 375,000 and the city filings 371,600), five stories, 153 inpatient rooms with 30 shelled
- Public bed figure: up to 150 beds
- Phase 1 campus: hospital + 62,000 sq ft medical office building on 40 acres
- Full buildout: ~800,000 sq ft total, 300 beds, ~160,000 sq ft of medical office space, by ~2040
- Reported value: $475 million
- Groundbreaking: October 14, 2026
- Opening: first quarter of 2029
Healthcare Facility Hub tracks the standards, surveys, and construction practice behind projects like these — hospital expansion, campus planning, ICRA containment, and the codes these buildings are held to. If you work in Colorado facilities, design, or construction and see something here that needs correcting or sharpening, we want to hear it: talk to the Hub — facility leaders’ corrections make these briefs better, and we credit contributors by name and organization, or anonymously, as they prefer.