Much like the highway leading into Woodland Park, the road to Tava House fully opening has been long and winding.

But now the town is poised to gain a major attraction as soon as next year. City officials and the ownership group of Tava House hope it will serve as a catalyst for further development in the mountain town roughly 20 miles from Colorado Springs.

Tava started as a “pet project” for CEO Derek Waggoner several years ago, he said. Waggoner started pitching ideas on what to do with the roughly 6.6 acres of land just south of Woodland Station, an old train station, watching to see what stuck.

The idea that stuck was a restaurant. It’s been refined over the past six years. Soon, Tava will add two restaurants and an event space to Woodland Park.

“I am hell bent on making this town a destination of entertainment, music, food, whatever,” he said. “I think this is the first pebble in the pond for it.”

Waggoner moved to Colorado in the early 1990s, after Hurricane Andrew, a category 5 hurricane, ravaged Florida. He got into climbing and bull riding, ultimately opening climbing gyms in Arizona and Colorado Springs. And to pay for “all that craziness,” Waggoner started a sports activity company that works with major cruise line companies.

Once complete, Tava will have a brewpub-type restaurant on the ground level, complete with 20 beers on tap in a “beer wall.” Upstairs will be a fine dining restaurant with views of Pikes Peak’s north face and balcony seating.

The menu is being built by award-winning chef Victor Matthews, who also runs the Black Bear Distillery in Green Mountain Falls.

The road to getting Tava House even started wasn’t easy. Some of the resistance is to be expected, with Mayor Kellie Case saying one of the town’s characteristics is “rigidity.”

The development team needed to move an old Cog Railway car from Woodland Station before they could progress on Tava. This was met with disapproval by some, according to past reporting.

Case sees the potential Tava has for Woodland Park, saying she believes it will spark more projects.

“It will actually just kind of be a catalyst for things to grow out of it,” Case said, adding she hopes to see more places to have a meal, shop and explore. “We’ve got some open space; we’ve got some development space in the business corridor that could respond. We have one area that still would even accommodate a big box (store).”

Residents may have reason to be cautious. The land where Tava now sits has been subject to several projects in the past that never materialized. Case is not ignorant of that history, and said “we can’t fail again, not on that dirt.”

Three years ago, the land was up for grabs and a competition between two developers ensued. One group, Forgeworks, offered to buy the land for $200,000 and put up a $1.8 million reserve fund for infrastructure. Waggoner offered to buy it for $800,000 cash.

The Downtown Development Authority board majority said it preferred Waggoner’s offer, according to past coverage by the Pikes Peak Courier. The DDA is the entity responsible for attracting business to the downtown district in Woodland Park. The city itself is forbidden from incentivizing anything, Case said, rather opting to lean on tax increment financing as set up when the city created the DDA.

“On July 31, the Teller County assessor valued the property $96,670,” board member Al Born said in 2022. “The $800,000 is probably an appropriate value for the dirt and the economic opportunity. Tava House steakhouse is an anchor facility, a launching point for the total project.”

The decision to go with Waggoner’s approach was not unanimous, with board member Jerry Good casting the sole vote against Waggoner, worrying about future expenses such as infrastructure costs.

Recently, Waggoner estimated the project to be approaching $10 million. Last month, Native American Bank and Park State Bank and Trust approved $6.9 million in financing for Tava. Even if the two banks had not stepped in with added money, Waggoner said he wouldn’t have been too concerned.

“I would have found another way,” he said. “Timing is everything… . For several months we self-funded this thing until we found that right partner.”

“I’m confident we would have found somebody, but this one just worked out.”

Construction at Tava was in high gear in recent days. It has to be: Waggoner wants to open the place by spring, though didn’t commit to any solid date. He’s confident though, and the venue is accepting reservations for weddings and other events, he said.

Waggoner said that as the project has made headway, he’s seen the Woodland Park community begin to buy into his vision.

“One of the firemen that was taking the tour, he’s actually making our chef’s table, drove up to Denver to pick up the slab of walnut,” he said. The firefighter is not doing it for free though, Waggoner added, but said it’s another local extending a helping hand “to make this project come together.”