Room at the Inn

“If people want to pigeon hole you then just view it as an opportunity to prove them wrong.”
— E. Gordon Gee

Nicole seems to be in charge of the music when she works the front desk.

Her tastes include major hits from my early adulthood: “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees and “Just the Way You Are” by Billy Joel, played from her mobile phone through speakers in the lobby.

“Is the music too loud,” she asks one day as I pass through the lobby of the Boulder Broker Inn, a quirky old hotel that looks and feels like it might have once served as a casino in the 1920s.

But neither was true: The music wasn’t too loud and neither the hotel nor the oak-paneled lobby existed in the 1920s.

The Inn, with its lavish Victorian styling, sprawling lobby with a grand staircase leading to what were once dining and gathering areas, was opened by Sheraton around 1974 and has changed hands several times. It is now owned by local people, as it was in the mid-1970s. It rests almost in the shadows of the iconic Flatirons, a set of renowned and towering reddish-brown sandstone rock formations.

For some time, there was a respected restaurant at the Inn, famous for its unlimited shrimp with lunch and for its champagne weekend brunches. But the clientele thinned out and the restaurant closed in 2014. 

The Inn also turns out to have a history that at times has been as bumpy as the washboard stretches of road construction as I rolled toward Boulder from Nebraska. After the restaurant closed, the building briefly became better known for its patrons’ drug use habits, which resulted in an explosion in one rooms

But in 2021 the Inn was sold again and has been working to recover ever since — renovating the lobby that is appointed with leather-cushioned chairs and a sweeping grand staircase to an upstairs area with a bar and two glass-walled interior rooms so guests could enjoy some privacy.

In some of the halls of the hotel are large color photographs of members of the Colorado Buffaloes, the University of Colorado NCAA Division 1 football team.

Behind the main desk in the lobby is a wall of “pigeonholes,” presumably once used to save notes or mail for guests or to store their room keys when they went out. 

Finally, the hotel is supposed to be spared in a proposed redevelopment plan known as Williams Village with plans for more than 400 dwelling units as well as retail space near the Inn, across 30th Street from current University of Colorado Boulder student housing. 

That outcome would be appropriate for this grande dame. It would be a shame to let it go.