Hotel Boulderado

Hotel Boulderado

A block north of the Pearl Street Mall in downtown Boulder, on the corner of 13th and Spruce with the Flatirons to the south-west, the Hotel Boulderado opened on New Year’s Day 1909 after the town, which had been agitating for a first-class hotel since 1905, organised the thing itself, named it by folding Boulder into Colorado, and gave the design to the local practice of William Redding & Son, who produced five storeys of brick in a mix of Italian Renaissance and Spanish Revival that the city now protects as a landmark. It opened with 75 rooms at a dollar to two-fifty a night, gained its fifth floor in 1910, served its first legal drink in 1969 after six decades of local prohibition, and was bought in 1980 by Frank Day, the restaurateur behind Old Chicago and Rock Bottom Brewery, who with his wife Gina spent the next forty-five years restoring it, converting the small original rooms into suites and adding a North Wing in the late 1980s. There are now 160 rooms, 42 in the historic building and 118 in the newer wing along Broadway and Pine Street. In March 2025 the Days sold a majority stake to AJ Capital Partners, the firm that founded the Graduate brand before selling it to Hilton, and the hotel is working through a phased renovation that brings it into the Graduate by Hilton collection with its name intact. Frank Day died later that year, at 93. The lobby is the reason to come, a two-storey room under a stained-glass ceiling, with a cherry staircase rising to a mezzanine that has framed several generations of wedding portraits, mosaic floors laid in 1909, the old front desk with its key boxes and safe left in place, and an original Otis elevator still run by an attendant. Upstairs in the historic wing the rooms are Victorian in the full sense, floral wallpaper, fringed lampshades, antique vanities, and smaller than the rate suggests, while the North Wing is calmer and plainer, with more space and fewer 1909 touches. Spruce Farm & Fish opened in 2014 in the original dining room, keeping its first tiles and replacing the stained glass with reproductions, and cooks Colorado trout, oysters, seasonal vegetables and a Boulderado Benedict with Irish bacon at breakfast. In the basement, where the Catacombs restaurant opened in 1969, License No. 1 takes its name from one of the first liquor licences issued after Boulder County went wet, and was named among the top 25 historic bars in America by Historic Hotels of America in 2025. The Corner Bar, off the lobby, is the casual option. Staying here is less about the room than the building, and the building belongs as much to Boulder as to its guests. Locals use the lobby for coffee, for live jazz on some evenings, for the holiday traditions on the mezzanine, and on summer Saturdays there is usually a wedding on the stairs, so the experience is of being a guest in a civic institution, not a cloistered boutique. It suits people who like their history with the dust still on it, who find the elevator attendant a pleasure, and who want to walk to dinner and drive ten minutes to a trailhead. The open question is the renovation: the Graduate brand has a collegiate, knowingly kitsch house style, landmark status protects only the exterior, and how much of the fustiness survives is not yet clear. The sale also cost around two dozen jobs, and staff have been organising a union. With the Sundance Film Festival moving to Boulder in 2027, the hotel will be busier than it has been in decades. You should not come if you want quiet, minimalism or a spa. There is no spa, events are frequent and sound carries, some rooms are a long walk from the elevator, parking is extra, and a Hilton affiliation may undo the romance for some. You should come for the lobby at five o’clock, a drink in a basement named for the end of prohibition, and a night in the building Boulder built for itself, with the mountains at the end of the street. The short version: A 160-room brick hotel opened in 1909 a block from Boulder’s Pearl Street, built by the town, owned for 45 years by Frank and Gina Day, with a stained-glass lobby, an attendant-run Otis elevator, and a basement bar named for one of Boulder’s first post-prohibition liquor licences.