West Steamboat's Basecamp Corner Is About to Belong to One Chef

Walk past the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Elk River Road these days and you'll notice the pattern has shifted. The bike wrenches at Orange Peel are still turning, the treadmills at Steamboat Fit are still running, and the swing analysis screens at M3 Golf Lab are still lit up. But the gravel lot next to Big Iron Coffee's counter has excavation equipment parked on it now, and if you've lived on this side of town long enough to remember when this whole block was still the old Steamboat Pilot & Today printing plant, you already sense what's coming. This corner is being rebuilt again, and this time the person doing the rebuilding is going to end up owning more of your daily routine than you'd expect.

That person is Collin Kelley, the chef behind Primrose and Cypress, two of the restaurants that already define Steamboat's higher end of the dining scene. He's building a market here called the Forty West Mercantile, and the plans have been public since a broker preview event in mid-December of last year. What hasn't been as widely understood is what happens to the coffee counter that's already there.

How the corner got built the first time

Basecamp didn't arrive all at once. The Lofts, 73 rental units carved out of the old newspaper building, opened in late 2023. Retail followed in pieces. Steamboat Fit opened a second location here in January 2024, a 4,600-square-foot space with rowing machines, Peloton bikes, and a reformer Pilates setup, aimed squarely at west-side residents who didn't want to drive across town for a workout. Big Iron Coffee, which had been roasting and slinging drinks out of a smaller west-side spot since 2020, closed that original location on August 11, 2024, and reopened a week later on the northwest corner of the Basecamp building. Orange Peel Bikes and M3 Golf Lab filled out the rest of the retail footprint.

For about two years, that was the whole picture: a gym, a bike shop, a golf simulator, and a coffee counter, all tucked into a converted newspaper plant a mile and a half from downtown. It worked as a functional cluster. It didn't have a name people associated with food beyond a bagel and a burrito.

What Kelley is actually building

The Forty West Mercantile is designed to change that in a specific way. Kelley described a European-style market with a pizza kitchen, a deli counter, hand-cut steaks and meats pulled from the same cases that supply Primrose and Cypress, and a seafood counter with fresh oysters. There's a planned mezzanine level for guests who want to eat what they just bought instead of taking it home, and garage doors that open onto a west-facing patio. An ice cream truck parks on site, and the scoops get hand-dipped inside.

The timeline has moved in stages since the December announcement. Kelley told the Steamboat Pilot & Today in mid-April that he was submitting a formal development packet to the city that week, with groundbreaking targeted for the end of summer and completion aimed at spring 2027. Construction on the roughly 4,500-square-foot ground floor was expected to begin in June. We're sitting right at the edge of the "end of summer" window Kelley himself set publicly. If the project is holding to its own schedule, this fall is when the corner stops being a rendering and starts being a construction site you drive past twice a day.

The part that changes your coffee order

Here's the detail that doesn't show up in most of the coverage of the mercantile itself. The café and bakery Kelley is building as part of this same project isn't going in next to Big Iron Coffee. It's going in instead of it. Developer Kevin Riegler, whose company built out Basecamp's first phase, has framed the addition as filling a gap in quality and consistency on this side of town, and the plan calls for Kelley's team to operate the daily coffee and bakery counter at Basecamp going forward.

That's a meaningful shift for anyone who's built a morning routine around the current setup. Big Iron isn't a struggling outsider getting pushed out. It's a business that moved into this exact corner two years ago, has a loyal following, and is now getting absorbed into a larger vision built around one chef's name. What stays the same is the rest of the retail lineup: Steamboat Fit, M3 Golf Lab, and Orange Peel Bikes aren't part of the change. What changes is who's behind the counter when you stop in for a coffee on your way to the gym.

Why the timing isn't a coincidence

None of this is happening in isolation from the rest of the corner's momentum. In March 2026, the building that houses the Lofts and the existing retail space sold for $41.6 million to an entity called 970 Basecamp, LLC, a transaction that shows outside investors are treating this stretch of the west side as a mature, income-producing piece of the neighborhood rather than a speculative build. Kevin Riegler stayed involved even after the sale and is still the developer behind the mercantile project, which tells you the corner's next chapter was planned before the last one closed.

Zoom out a block or two and the west side's food identity was already forming without Basecamp's help. Storm Peak Brewing Company, How Ya Doin' Pizza, Moe's Original BBQ, and Big House Burgers all sit within a short walk or drive, giving this stretch of town a casual, unpretentious food scene that's grown up alongside the housing. The mercantile doesn't create that identity from nothing. It gives it a higher-end anchor that's been missing.

What to actually watch for this fall

If you live on the west side, the practical version of this story is simple. Expect construction noise and some rerouted parking near the Lincoln and Elk River corner as work ramps up this fall and winter. Expect Big Iron's current spot to eventually close and reopen as something new under Kelley's team, though no firm date for that swap has been made public yet. And expect the mercantile itself to still be a ways off. Spring 2027 is the target, which means this winter is about watching the shell go up, not about walking into a finished market.

The corner was never just a gym and a coffee counter. It was always going to become whatever the next developer with a big enough plan decided to make it. This time, that plan has a chef's name attached to it, and it's about to touch the one part of your day you probably didn't expect a construction project to reach.

If you're curious about how projects like this one are shaping property values and daily life across West Steamboat, or you want a local read on what's changing block by block, Sarah Saunders is always glad to talk through it. Let's Connect.