The Ramble Hotel

The Ramble Hotel

The Ramble stands on the corner of 25th and Larimer in Denver’s River North Art District, about two kilometres north of Union Station, on a parcel that Gravitas Development Group held for eight years before building on it, and when it opened in May 2018 it was the first hotel in a neighbourhood of old warehouses and factories that had already turned into one of murals, galleries, breweries and working studios. It is a new build that does a convincing impression of an old one, 33,000 square feet of hand-cut brick by the Denver architects Johnson Nathan Strohe, a nod to the city’s brick and timber industrial stock, with 50 rooms and suites above a lobby bar, a restaurant and an outdoor garden. Ryan Diggins, the Gravitas partner who conceived it, also built the shipping-container food court across the street, and owns and runs the hotel independently, which in a downtown increasingly given over to national brands counts for something. The interiors, by Avenue Interior Design, take their cue from the 17th-century Parisian salon, so the lobby works as a high-ceilinged reading room by day and closes its velvet curtains at night. Rooms have wide-plank hickory floors, antique rugs, panelled headboard walls and furniture made by Denver steel fabricators and woodworkers, and the art throughout, chosen by the Denver consultancy NINE dot ARTS, is all by local artists, many with studios within a few blocks. The lobby bar is Death & Co, the cocktail bar Ravi DeRossi and David Kaplan opened in the East Village in 2006, and this was its first location outside New York. It has since appeared on North America’s 50 Best Bars list. The restaurant space, home for nearly eight years to Dana Rodriguez’s pan-Latin Super Mega Bien until it closed in March 2026, is now Soda Club, DeRossi’s vegan pasta and natural wine bar, which holds four Michelin Bib Gourmands in New York. It opened here in September 2026 with a Sicilian-leaning menu from executive chef Amira Gharib, Jon Robbins (formerly of Bistro Barbès) as chef de cuisine, Roman pinsa, and a list of around 200 bottles built by Drew Brady. What the Ramble really is, and this is a compliment, is a very good bar that happens to have 50 bedrooms upstairs. On a Friday night the lobby is one of the liveliest rooms in the city, full of locals who have no intention of checking in, and the hotel’s character is the bar’s character: dressed up, well lit, serious about drinks without being solemn about them. Upstairs is quieter and more domestic, closer to a well-furnished apartment than a hotel room. It suits a two or three night stay built around eating, drinking and walking, with RiNo’s galleries and breweries on the doorstep and downtown a short ride away. You should not come if you want a calm lobby at eleven on a Saturday, a spa or pool, a base for skiing, or a restaurant downstairs that serves meat, since Soda Club is entirely vegan and the nearest steak is a walk away. You should come for one of the best hotel bars in America, a room that feels lived in, and a neighbourhood you can explore on foot without needing a car. The short version: A 50-room independent hotel at 25th and Larimer in Denver’s River North Art District, opened in 2018 by developer Ryan Diggins, with Death & Co as its lobby bar, Soda Club in the restaurant space, and rooms hung with work by Denver artists.