At a moment when homes around Denver are wowing with their high-altitude prices, anybody who knew who John W. Madden was might marvel at how low this one is priced.

The owner of the penthouse built atop a 3-story office at 5700 S. Quebec Street in the Denver Tech Center was the developer of 10 million square feet of office and mixed-use space, much of it in 300 acres now the heart of the DTC. He built Harlequin Plaza, Tuscany Plaza, Fiddler’s Green Amphitheater and its surrounding offices. He built and owned Greenwood Athletic Club, now Club Greenwood, and generously endowed the arts in the area.

MOVED FROM OMAHA

The home is on the market at $2.98 million. Fifty years after he moved his company from Omaha, $3 million isn’t a rare price for any home lucky enough to lie close to the infrastructure he launched. In Cherry Hills Village, $3 million is a median-priced house; and in Greenwood Village (median $1.5 million) that number is routinely bettered.

Last week the Wall Street Journal ran a story about a house at $18 million a few miles west, where the seller boasted about sitting beside his infinity pool, from where “you stare across the pool and you see your Ferrari.”

That’s a far cry from the large but surprisingly modest condo (no HOA) where Madden and his wife Marjorie lived for 40 years.

“Dad and mom, they stuck with their midwestern identity,” said son J. Madden, CEO of Club Greenwood. The 5,500 square-foot unit has the 1980s architecture of the concrete building below where Madden’s company was based. Up a private elevator, the unit’s exterior blends into the office’s atrium below, each showing Space Odyssey-era detailing.

The building still looks good, and the penthouse would have made for spectacular parties.

“It was a fun place for hospitality,” the younger Madden recalled. Anchoring the entertaining area is a 3-sided marble fireplace and a view west to the Front Range, Pikes to Longs Peaks showing four fourteeners.

Madden said the pair did plenty of entertaining, while also spending time on the Florida gulf coast. But they retreated back here as they advanced in age. “The older they got, they sort of sunk into the furniture and the memories; they were riding out their time,” Madden says now. John Madden passed away two years ago at 94.

PASSIVE SOLAR

Despite the size, much of the interior is a blank slate. They remodeled little, and fixtures are ‘80s vintage. The master suite and two baths are on the sunny south end, where Madden, who had an early interest in renewables, did a passive solar sunroom with mass floor.

LIV Sotheby’s agent Anne Dresser Kocur, Denver’s top-selling single agent with $134 million in 2025 sales, notes that this has residential/commercial zoning and huge parking, as well as access to the rooftop surrounding — room for multiple pickleball courts. It could end up residential or repurposed for commercial. She has two buyers nibbling at a purchase.

But J. Madden said he hopes it will stay a home.

“I want to find the right person to take (my parents’) legacy and make a future for themselves.”

SHOW BY APPOINTMENT:

WHERE:  5700 S. Quebec #A, Greenwood Village; from Belleview at I-25, head west one block to South Quebec, turn south and continue south past East Berry Avenue, to entry.

SIZE: 3-bedroom/4-bath, 5,512 square feet.

PRICE: $2,980,000

OPEN:  Shown by appointment.

WEB: AnneDresser.com

AGENT:  Anne Dresser Kocur, 303-229-6464.