Carbon-positive hotel with exterior design inspired by aspen trees opens in Denver

DENVER (KDVR) — The Populus Hotel near Civic Center Park is now open for business, with aspen-eye-shaped windows and a muted, natural color scheme to help travelers feel in tune with nature while staying in downtown Denver.

The building was announced in July 2023 and is now a reality.

The building has an eye-catching exterior, with regular eye-shaped windows that peer from the building’s 265 rooms and 13 stories on 14th Street and Colfax Avenue. The design imitates that of an aspen tree, with its many “eyes” embedded in the bark.

The building is a partnership between Holcim US , a sustainable building solutions company, and Urban Villages , an environmental real estate developer, and The Beck Group , an integrated design-build firm, to build the hotel with a focus on sustainability. The hotel was built with Holcim’s low-carbon concrete mix, and many environmentally friendly measures have been built into the hotel as well.

One such environmental promise is to plant a tree for every guest night. The company said it hopes to plant 20,000 trees in 2024. It also plans to plant a “canopy of trees with an innovative infrastructure” surrounding the hotel on ground level. The project is funded by grants from The Nature Conservancy and the Downtown Denver Partnership’s Urban Forest Initiative. The technology will allow the trees to mature fully by mitigating Denver’s harsh sunshine. Tree canopies provide much-needed cooling effects in concrete jungles like Denver .

In June, the developers announced two new “nature-based” restaurants that will be embedded into the hotel, in addition to a cafe. The cafe is a partnership with Denver-based Little Owl Coffee , bringing the roastery’s offerings to the hotel lobby.

Pasque “offers a refined cuisine that explores the riches of each season,” according to the hotel website, and is named after an early-blooming wildflower native to Colorado.

The second restaurant is housed on the building’s roof and is called Stellar Jay . The restaurant serves shared plates and “celebrates live-fire flavors.” Holcim said the hotel’s “signature” rooftop bar and restaurant will feature a garden terrace planted with regional vegetation. The rooftop vegetation will also serve to help naturally cool the building.

The hotel is using “food cycling” technology from BioGreen360 to divert food waste from landfills and into compost. The food waste will be “inserted into BioGreen360’s waterless, continual feed aerobic digesting system that uses microbial formulae” to compost the materials. The product of the process will then be distributed to Colorado farms to enrich the soil.

“We’re transforming global sustainability standards for our industry. Projects like Populus, one of the first hotels of its kind in the United States, show how building materials are a vital part of the sustainability solution,” said Toufic Tabbara, Region Head of North America at Holcim, in the group’s initial announcement of the hotel .

“We’re driven to find ways to decarbonize buildings across their entire lifecycles to mitigate the impact of today’s growing population and rising urbanization, and we’re thrilled to partner with Urban Villages to help bring the construction of Populus to life,” Tabbara added.

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