Boulder hasn’t seen a new hotel since 2018. While more than 20 hotels are scattered across the city, there is none in University Hill, one of the city’s main commercial districts. 

That’s about to change.

After nearly a decade of work, the Moxy Boulder hotel is putting in final touches on its 189 rooms and building out the lobby as the city, developers and local businesses hope it will be a catalyst for revitalization in an area heavily dependent on the University of Colorado Boulder.

Its debut is scheduled May 8, the hotel’s management told the Denver Gazette.

A way to infuse new energy into the district

The Hill is made up of bars, restaurants, a theater, and sorority and fraternity houses. The commercial district, about a 15-minute walk south from downtown, has sidewalks full of college students and construction workers.

Bringing a hotel to the area was one of the Top 10 priorities for business owners in the district, according to a 2018 city survey of Hill businesses.

“We need the hotel. We need the hotel. We need the hotel,” a survey response said.

“It’s the one site where something can happen to change the current dynamic,” said another.

Business on the Hill has been stagnant and its primary customers are college students, said Mark Heinritz, co-owner of Boulder’s oldest restaurant, The Sink, located one block from the new hotel.

When students leave for winter or summer break, so do most of the customers.

“The hotel will bring in an instant change of demographic,” Heinritz said.

The Moxy Boulder hotel on 1253 Pleasant Street will have 5,300 square feet of indoor and outdoor function space and 10,000 square feet of retail. It was developed by Denver-based development firms BMC Investments and Nichols Partnership and will be operated by Tennessee-based Vision Hospitality Group.

“The Hill has been in decline for a while,” said BMC Investments CEO Matt Joblon. “When you start to study the opportunity there, you realize that one of the largest universities in the United States does not have a hotel that serves at its front door.”

Moxy Boulder will have rooms for typical university guests, such as parents, prospective students, visiting professors or sports teams. Joblon said it also aims to attract technology professionals coming to the growing scientific hub or outdoor enthusiasts visiting the Rocky Mountains during the summer.

Moxy is a newer banner under Marriott. The hotel conglomerate first introduced it in 2014 as a boutique chain for millennials.

But recently, it’s been expanding toward targeting guests between 26 and 76 years old, said Matt Swisher, general manager of Moxy Boulder. More specially, those “young at heart,” he said.

Instead of a standard front desk, Swisher said guests will check in at the bar and get a free cocktail on the house, adding the hotel’s decor was inspired by the Flatirons and Boulder’s natural scenery with an “elevated” aesthetic of natural stone and earth tones.

Rooms will be modern, minimalist and smaller than the average hotel room. Hotel “suites” with views of the foothills are the size of a standard room, Swisher said. The ground floor will have a lounge room, outdoor patio, bar, Aviano Coffee café and Denver’s Michelin Bib-Gourmand award-winning restaurant Mister Oso.

This hotel is designed to get guests out of their room, Swisher said, and then toward businesses up the Hill.

“That’s the Moxy brand,” he added. “It’s all about communal space and that sense of community not only for our hotel guests, but for the locals around.”

Decades in the making

The city began exploring bringing a hotel and a convention center to the Hill in the early 2000s.

But there’s not much available land in the area.

“We’re talking about infill redevelopment,” said Boulder Community Vitality Director Cris Jones. “There were preexisting uses on the parcels that have been developed before. And in assembling those parcels there was a lot of work that had to be done in partnership with the business community and the city.”

The developers had to assemble three separate plots of land from different owners, including the city of Boulder. The site was home to many beloved local businesses, which were offered a relocation fund to move elsewhere.

Of the 19 businesses that got relocation support, six stayed on the Hill and seven stayed in the city, according to Jones. Others moved elsewhere in the county or into a second existing location.

When Denver-based BMC Investments got involved nearly a decade ago, Joblon said he thought it would take four or five years to bring one to the area.

Not how long it has.

Many in the hotel development industry wouldn’t take on a project like this because investors can have a “short-minded” approach and this requires serious commitment because of Boulder’s comprehensive development standards, Joblon said.

After assembling the land, Joblon said a major setback was having a new City Council in power with different desires for the project, and they had to design the hotel from scratch several times.

Zoning and design took nearly seven years, the developer said. And the project broke ground in the midst of the pandemic, when construction costs soared and the future of the hotel industry seemed uncertain.

When the pandemic shook the hospitality industry, it made the Boulder hotel’s developers rethink how it would be a gathering place for the community.

A lot of focus is on activating the courtyard and having the businesses on site spill outdoors. Filling the retail space shifted primarily to attracting food or beverages businesses, Joblon said.

“The thing that I’ve learned with hotels is you can’t really be successful with restaurants and a hotel unless the community accepts it and wants to be there and is always going back there.” Joblon said. “You just can’t financially succeed.”

A new University Hill?

The Moxy is not the only hotel coming to the Hill.

On the other side of Broadway, part of the CU Boulder campus, a construction crane soars working on a conference center and 250-room Limelight hotel set to open in 2025.

Many companies and nonprofits in Boulder host annual galas or fundraisers, but they would have to go to Denver or Longmont because there isn’t enough space in the city, said Visit Boulder Director of Sales Fig Wirkler.

With the Moxy, Limelight and CU conference center, meeting space in Boulder will grow significantly, Wirkler said. It’ll not only attract new large events but keep some in the city, as well. 

Once both hotels are open and fully operating — sometime in 2026 — the city expects more than 220,000 more people on the Hill a year, Wirkler said.

It’ll be especially important during the summer months, when group and leisure business peaks for Boulder but students leave the Hill, she added.

“The Hill doesn’t get to see a lot of the love that downtown sees during the summer months … It’ll be a big difference,” Wirkler said.

The city is considering how to rebrand the district with the opening of the new hotels, committee leaders of the University Hill Commercial Area Management Commission discussed in a public meeting on Tuesday.

“When people come to these new hotels and this conference center in particular, if they have a bad first impression, it’s not a good thing,” Visit Boulder CEO Charlene Hoffman told the committee.

She pointed to broken sidewalks, leaning lamp posts, bikers racing down the Hill, confusing roads and homelessness, which could hurt first impressions of meeting planners skilled at evaluating which locations are suitable for hosting events of 800 to 1,000 people.

“We need to show up in a very strong way when this comes out,” Hoffman said.

The committee discussed adding better signs for people to navigate the area, beautifying the space with murals and better lighting and beginning serious conversations about what the community wants to be known for.

Improvements will happen, but maintenance also needs to happen, committee Chair Ted Rockwell said.

“One of the things that the Hill has struggled with is to have enough revenue to keep a stasis of presentability,” Rockwell said.

Visit Boulder is in the early stages of potentially creating a hotel improvement district, where guests would pay a tax that would go toward a fund supporting all Boulder hotels. It could help the tourism agency use less of its budget toward marketing the hotels and more into things like improving the Hill, the agency’s CEO, Charlene Hoffman, told the committee.

The idea has support from the local hotel industry, she said, but it’s still a long ways away.

After nearly 20 years of talking about it and 10 years of development, the community is anticipating the hotels to breathe new life into the neighborhood and is looking toward the next step forward.

“The Hill has just been neglected for the longest time and these hotels are finally now doing what we need to do, which is to put the spotlight on the Hill,” committee vice-chair Andrew Shoemaker said. “Now, everybody’s got to pay attention.”