Hotel Boulderado Front Range Ceramic Art Tile
— a sky of coloured glass, indoors.
Not only on a wall.
“The hotel opened on New Year's Day, 1909. The canopy of stained glass over the lobby is the centerpiece: coloured light on the tile floor through the afternoon, the cantilevered cherrywood staircase climbing five storeys around it. Boulder grew up around the building. The Flatirons sit a mile to the west. The Pearl Street Mall starts half a block south. The hotel has put up Robert Frost, Louis Armstrong, and a long line of writers and musicians passing through a college town as it became one. Still a working hotel, a hundred and seventeen years in.
Hotel Boulderado Front Range Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Hotel Boulderado opened on January 1, 1909, at the corner of 13th and Spruce in downtown Boulder, Colorado, at an elevation just above 5,300 feet (1,624 metres). The building was designed by the Denver firm of William Redding and Sons in a mix of Spanish Renaissance Revival and Italian Renaissance Revival, and was financed by local subscription as a civic statement that the town had earned a hotel of its own stature. The name fuses Boulder and Colorado. The Flatirons rise a mile to the west, the Pearl Street Mall runs a block to the south, and the University of Colorado campus sits a mile to the southeast. The building has been continuously operated as a hotel since opening.
The lobby's defining feature is a canopy of stained glass set into the ceiling above the main floor. It throws coloured light onto the tile floor through the day, and onto the cantilevered cherrywood staircase that rises five storeys around it. The original canopy was installed when the hotel opened in 1909, sourced from Italian leaded glass. A heavy snow in 1959 collapsed part of the panel; the hotel commissioned a faithful restoration in 1968 using the same colour palette and pattern. The canopy now lights the lobby as it did during Robert Frost's stays at the hotel. It is the most photographed room in the building and the reason a steady stream of visitors stops in even when they are not staying the night.
The hotel sits at 2115 13th Street, half a block north of the Pearl Street Mall, the four-block pedestrian stretch that anchors downtown Boulder. Check-in is on the ground floor, just off the main lobby with the canopy. The hotel has 160 rooms across two wings: the original 1909 building and a connecting addition completed in 1989. The Corner Bar operates on the ground floor, and License No. 1, a speakeasy-style bar named for the first liquor licence issued in Boulder County after the end of Prohibition, occupies the basement. The lobby and the staircase are open to the public during daytime hours. The Flatirons trailheads at Chautauqua Park are a short drive west.