South Denver · Neighborhood Guide
Cherry Hills Village, quietby ordinance since 1945
No streetlights to speak of. No strip of shops. Cottonwoods over the High Line Canal, horse fencing along Quincy, and driveways that disappear into the trees. At dusk the loudest thing in Cherry Hills Village is the canal water.
Read this one differently than any other address in metro Denver. The village was engineered, legally and deliberately, to stay rural-feeling six miles from downtown. Everything about living here, including the drive for a gallon of milk, follows from that one decision.
Where it starts and stops
Where is Cherry Hills Village, exactly,and why does mail say Englewood
Hampden Avenue, US 285, draws the north line. Belleview draws the south. Englewood holds the west flank, Greenwood Village and the I-25 seam take over on the east. Inside that frame: University, Colorado and Happy Canyon carry the traffic, and almost nothing else does.
The nuance that confuses out-of-town buyers: there is no Cherry Hills Village post office. Addresses here read Englewood, mostly 80113. The tax bill, the zoning and the police department are Cherry Hills Village. The envelope is not.
In 1939 the Cherry Hills Improvement Association, led by attorney J. Churchill Owen, pushed through the state law that allowed county zoning, with meetings hosted at architect Temple Buell's home. When a postwar airport was floated for the area in 1945, residents petitioned, voted, and incorporated that July.
Ordinance No. 9, the village's first zoning law, set minimum building sites of two and a half acres across roughly 60 percent of the town. The large-lot DNA has held through master plans in 1970, 1993 and 2007, and it is why the tree canopy reads like open country.
The street
What do you actually do here,if there is nothing to walk to
There is no commercial strip by design, and residents like it that way. Life runs on the canal, the clubs and a short list of drives everyone makes without thinking.
The High Line Canal
An 1880s irrigation ditch turned 71-mile greenway. The Cherry Hills stretch is the daily ritual: horses, trail runners, golden retrievers, repeat. Many properties back directly onto it, which is the quiet amenity that moves people here.
Cherry Hills Country Club
Where Arnold Palmer drove the first green and shot 65 to win the 1960 U.S. Open. Three Opens, two PGA Championships, and the 2023 U.S. Amateur. The club predates the city and gave it a name.
Glenmoor Country Club
The younger club on the village's south side, wrapped by its own gated enclave. A different membership rhythm than Cherry Hills, same zip-code gravity.
Quincy Farm
A working piece of the village's farm past, gifted to the city by Cat Anderson and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It straddles both banks of the High Line Canal and keeps the rural claim honest.
Kent Denver and St. Mary's Academy
Two of Colorado's marquee private schools sit inside the village. Madeleine Albright came out of Kent Denver, Condoleezza Rice out of St. Mary's. School-run traffic is the closest thing to rush hour here.
Wellshire Golf Course
A Donald Ross era municipal course on the village's northern shoulder. The public-access counterweight to the private clubs, with a clubhouse event hall Denver has married itself in for generations.
Dinner means a drive
Residents default north to Cherry Creek. Barolo Grill has been the special-occasion answer since 1992, with the rest of the Cherry Creek North grid behind it. South, the Tech Center handles the business lunches.
Errand country
Groceries, coffee and hardware live on the borders, in Englewood and along Happy Canyon. Nothing inside the village will sell you anything, which is precisely the point.
Be honest with yourself about the trade. You are buying land, light and silence, and you will drive for every espresso. Families who thrive here treat the canal as their main street and the car as a given. If you want to walk to dinner, buy in Platt Park and visit friends here on Sundays. If you want to hear owls from your own pasture line inside a 20-minute ride to downtown, nothing else in Denver does this.
The houses
Cherry Hills Village homes for sale,read this before you tour
The stock runs from 1930s and 1950s ranch estates on flat acreage to full-scale new construction behind gates. Old Cherry Hills, west of University near the country club, carries the legacy homes. Cherry Hills Farm, a 1980s subdivision inside the village, offers a more structured version of the same idea. Scattered enclaves like Glenmoor and Buell Mansion add gated options.
Construction nuance: this is teardown-and-rebuild country, and has been for decades. On any given street a 1952 ranch sits next to 12,000 finished square feet. What you are really underwriting is the lot: acreage, trees, canal adjacency, and what village design review will let the next owner do with it.
Watch-outs: a meaningful number of properties here run on septic systems, and irrigation wells and ditch rights surface in title work more often than buyers expect. Horse zoning, fence rules and floodplain lines along the canal vary parcel by parcel. None of it is a dealbreaker. All of it belongs in your due diligence before you write, not after.
Questions I get
Asked,answered
Is Cherry Hills the same as Cherry Hills Village?
In conversation, yes. When Denverites say Cherry Hills they mean the city of Cherry Hills Village, incorporated in 1945. The wrinkle is Cherry Hills Farm, which is a specific subdivision inside the village, and the country club, which is its own thing entirely. Listings use all three loosely, so check the legal description, not the headline.
Why do the addresses say Englewood?
The village never had its own post office, so USPS assigns Englewood, mostly 80113. Taxes, zoning, schools-of-residence and city services are all Cherry Hills Village. Out-of-state buyers searching by city name miss half the inventory because of this. Search by zip and boundary instead.
Can you build on less than an acre?
In some districts, yes. The village's original Ordinance No. 9 put two-and-a-half-acre minimums on about 60 percent of the town, but platted areas near the northern and western edges run closer to one acre, and a few pockets smaller still. The zoning map, not the average, decides what any lot can carry.
Is there anywhere to eat inside the village?
Outside the club dining rooms, no, and that is deliberate. The village zoned commercial strips out of existence. Residents run to Cherry Creek North, the Streets at SouthGlenn area, or the DTC. Ten to fifteen minutes covers nearly everything, and most people here will tell you the silence is worth the mileage.
What is the High Line Canal, actually?
An 1880s irrigation canal that now works as a 71-mile regional trail from the foothills to Aurora. Through Cherry Hills it is soft-surface under mature cottonwoods, and canal-adjacent lots are the village's quiet blue-chip. Walk it before you tour anything. It recalibrates what you think a city can feel like.
Next door
The company it keeps,four directions out
Cherry Hills sits at the center of the south side's best arguments. Here is who it argues with.
Go deeper
The lot is the asset,I read lots.
Give me a Cherry Hills address and I can tell you what the dirt is doing: canal adjacency, septic and well history, what design review has allowed on comparable parcels, and whether the value sits in the house or under it. That read never shows up on a portal.
Sources: City of Cherry Hills Village historical and zoning records, Cherry Hills Country Club history, High Line Canal Conservancy materials, U.S. Census data, National Register listings, and club and course records.