The Brown Palace Hotel and Spa

Henry Cordes Brown, a carpenter who had made a fortune in Denver land and had given Colorado the site of its State Capitol, owned a triangular plot where Broadway, Tremont Place and 17th Street met. In 1888 he hired the architect Frank E. Edbrooke to fill it with a hotel. The Brown Palace Hotel and Spa opened on 12 August 1892 and has not closed since, which in Denver, a city that has rebuilt most of its downtown twice, makes it an anomaly.

History

Brown himself did not keep the hotel long: the Panic of 1893 ruined him and the building passed to his creditors. The hotel outlasted the silver crash and every downturn after it. The hotel states that every United States president since Theodore Roosevelt has stayed, Calvin Coolidge excepted. Sun Yat-sen was a guest in October 1911 when news reached him of the Wuchang uprising that would make him president of China. Dwight Eisenhower ran his 1952 campaign from the hotel, and a dent in the fireplace of the suite named after him is attributed to a stray golf ball. The Beatles stayed in August 1964 on their way to Red Rocks. Each January since the 1940s the grand champion steer of the National Western Stock Show has been led into the lobby for an afternoon. The hotel joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1970 and Marriott's Autograph Collection in the 2010s.

Architecture and design

Edbrooke worked in the Italian Renaissance manner, with Colorado red granite and Arizona sandstone on the outside and a surprise inside: an atrium rising eight storeys to a stained-glass ceiling, ringed by balconies of ornamental cast iron. Two of the iron panels were installed upside down and have stayed that way. The lobby walls are faced in Mexican onyx. The hotel's water has come since the beginning from an artesian well drilled 720 feet beneath the building, and it supplies the taps, the tea and the spa.

Rooms and suites

The triangular footprint means no two rooms share quite the same shape. The presidential-grade suites carry the names of guests, among them the Eisenhower Suite and the Beatles Suite, and the Top of the Brown suites occupy the upper floors with views of the Capitol dome and the Front Range.

Dining

The Palace Arms, opened in 1950, is the formal dining room and holds a collection of Napoleonic-era artefacts. The Ship Tavern dates from 1934, built after the repeal of Prohibition around a collection of model ships. Ellyngton's serves breakfast and a well-attended Sunday brunch, and the Churchill Bar keeps cigars. Afternoon tea is served in the atrium with a pianist or harpist, a Denver habit for generations of families.

Wellness

The spa occupies a suite of rooms off the atrium and uses the artesian water in its treatments. There is a fitness room, and the spa and salon handle wedding parties on the morning of the day.

Weddings and events

Weddings are held in the atrium itself, under the stained glass, and in the Grand Ballroom and the Onyx Room. Meetings use the ballroom and a set of smaller rooms on the lower floors. The hotel's position at the foot of the 17th Street financial corridor keeps it busy with corporate dinners through the year.

Location

The hotel stands at 321 17th Street in the centre of downtown Denver, a few blocks from the State Capitol and the 16th Street Mall, with Union Station about fifteen minutes on foot down 17th Street. Denver International Airport is about 40 minutes by car, or by the A Line train to Union Station. The Brown Palace is the luxury hotel in Denver that the city itself uses, for stock show dinners, political receptions and family teas.