The Broadmoor

In June 1918 Spencer Penrose, a Philadelphian who had made his money in the gold camps of Cripple Creek and in copper, opened a pink stucco hotel beside a lake at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain. The Broadmoor, on the south-western edge of Colorado Springs, has since grown into a resort of several buildings, golf courses and wilderness outposts in the mountains above, but the original main building still faces the water the way Penrose set it.

History

The land had a past before him. In the 1890s Count James Pourtales, a Prussian aristocrat, ran a dairy farm here and opened a casino by the lake. Penrose bought the estate in 1916 and set out to build the grandest resort in the Rockies, bringing in New York architects and European craftsmen. He and his wife, Julie, shaped much of the region around it. Penrose built the Pikes Peak Highway, founded the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo and raised the Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun on the mountainside above the hotel. In 1937 the couple created the El Pomar Foundation, which took control of the hotel after his death in 1939. The Gaylord family's Oklahoma Publishing Company owned it later in the century, and in 2011 the Anschutz Corporation of Denver bought the resort. The new owners have since added a string of properties around it, among them Seven Falls, Cloud Camp, the Ranch at Emerald Valley and the Pikes Peak Cog Railway, which reopened in 2021.

Architecture and design

Warren & Wetmore, the New York firm behind Grand Central Terminal, designed the main building in an Italian Renaissance manner, with pink walls, red tile roofs and a tower over the entrance. Inside, Penrose paid for painted ceilings, marble stairs and a collection of paintings and furniture that still lines the corridors. Later wings, Broadmoor South and Broadmoor West on the far side of the lake, kept to the same colours. Cheyenne Lake is the organising idea of the whole site. A path runs right round it, and most of the older rooms look across the water to the mountain.

Rooms and suites

Rooms are divided between the original building, the later wings and a set of cottages and larger houses for families and groups. Those in the main building keep the proportions of 1918, with high ceilings and tall windows. Those in Broadmoor West look back across the lake at the pink facade. The wilderness properties are a different stay altogether. Cloud Camp, on the site of a mountain lodge Penrose built for his own guests, has a lodge and cabins high on Cheyenne Mountain, and the Ranch at Emerald Valley sets log cabins in the Pike National Forest.

Dining

The Penrose Room, on the top floor of Broadmoor South, is the formal dining room, with the lights of the city below and the plains running away to the east. La Taverne, in the main building, is the grill, and Ristorante del Lago has tables by the water. The Golden Bee is the room regulars remember: an English pub fitted out in the 1960s with nineteenth-century panelling shipped from England, where ale comes by the yard and a pianist leads the room in song.

Wellness

The Broadmoor Spa occupies its own building near the lake, and there are outdoor pools by the water. Golf has been part of the resort since the start. Donald Ross laid out the first course for the 1918 opening, Robert Trent Jones Sr. added holes in the 1960s, and the East Course has held a run of national championships. Jack Nicklaus won the 1959 US Amateur here, and Annika Sorenstam took her first major, the 1995 US Women's Open, on the same course. Tennis, fly fishing, falconry and archery fill out the programme.

Weddings and events

Groups have long been a large part of the Broadmoor's business. Broadmoor Hall, a dedicated conference building, sits alongside ballrooms and meeting rooms in the main campus, and the resort handles large conferences and incentive groups as a matter of routine. Weddings take place on the lawns beside the lake and in the ballrooms.

Location

The resort lies at the south-western edge of Colorado Springs, above 6,000 feet, where the plains meet the Front Range. Colorado Springs Airport is about a quarter of an hour away by car, and Denver International roughly ninety minutes to the north. Pikes Peak, the Garden of the Gods and Manitou Springs are all close, and the Cog Railway climbs from Manitou to the summit of Pikes Peak. The Broadmoor works as a luxury hotel in Colorado Springs and as a mountain resort at once, and many guests barely leave its grounds. Much of the landscape around it, the zoo and the shrine on the mountain among it, bears the mark of the man who built the hotel.