Is This New Carbon-Positive Hotel in Denver the Future of Sustainable Travel?

The team that created the Populus Hotel in downtown Denver, Colorado, isn’t banking on the “sustainable travel” trend for success. Seven years in the making, the already buzzy hotel, with its all-white exterior created to look like an Aspen tree trunk, is promising to be the first carbon-positive hotel in the United States. Through a series of initiatives like composting and tree planting (more on that later), they promise to offset more carbon than the hotel emits.

Yet it isn’t the promise of sustainability they see customers coming for—though that will surely be the case for many visitors—it’s the stunning architecture, decor, and service. According to Jon Buerge, president of Urban Villages, the development company behind the hotel, building with the environment in mind is the responsibility of the business owners first. When people get there, they can learn about all the choices made to create it that way—hopefully taking away information about why it’s so important.

Thankfully, the building itself is a 13-floor, triangle-shaped wonder. The scalloped windows and bright white color make it stick out against the nearby Colorado State Capitol building and its surrounding parks. When you walk in the front doors, you’re immediately greeted with an upscale restaurant to your left and a high-end coffee shop to your right. Receptionists sit behind an upcycled giant oak tree desk, excited to tell you all about how your room key fob is actually a hidden wild tree seed that you can plant when you get home.

The building was designed by Studio Gang, an architecture firm based in Chicago. The inspiration was the Colorado outdoors, from the exterior all the way through the perfectly timed forest noises that play in the elevators (although hearing a bellowing moose without explanation was admittedly a little alarming at first). Buerge points out that the building and construction industries are responsible for a significant amount of emissions—37% according to recent reporting by the United Nations—and that their goal is to lead a change to show that you can build a hotel that is both an attraction and has a lower impact on the environment.

Inside the rooms, the shape of the windows makes for luxuriously soft natural lighting. Some feature padded hammock-like seating at the bottom of the windows, while others have nearly two full walls of windows spaced just a few feet apart. The suites are like most upscale hotels, complete with a full-size tub and a three-prong shower—but with all local decor and vintage finds. What’s more, every night you stay in one of these rooms, the hotel promises to plant a tree—a carbon offset strategy used because trees absorb CO2. The key is that they do it locally, with naturally occurring trees like Engelmann spruce, Lodgepole pine, and Douglas fir. (A critique of tree-planting initiatives is that they are an easy way out for corporations and when done improperly, can contribute to deforestation and ecological damage in vulnerable areas.)

The restaurants, however, are the real shining stars of the building. Locals mention that downtown, there aren’t many decent places to take a meeting or have an upscale cocktail and dining experience, meaning the opening of the downstairs restaurant Pasqul and the upstairs rooftop bar and restaurant Skylark is a welcome addition. When we arrived, it was the first day open, and the restaurants were already doing a roaring trade. The key decor piece of the hotel, meanwhile, is a mycelium leather art piece above the bar, made by Mycoworks. (Although curiously, despite having a vegan leather centerpiece, the plant-forward menu at Pasquel only had meat dishes for the main courses.)

That aside, what they do with the food after it’s served is the most interesting thing. 80 million pounds of food are wasted annually in the United States. The on-site circular food waste technology, Biogreen360, “allows us to take all of the food waste from any of our outlets, whether that’s food that was not eaten by guests or standard prep waste in our kitchens that can’t be fixed with the high-efficiency operation they have back there,” Thomas, the hotel sustainability manager, explained. “We like to call it from farm to table and back from table to farm.”

One piece of the sustainability puzzle that the designers at the Populus say they didn’t want to overlook was the clothing, particularly uniforms for staff. At the hotel, waitstaff and front desk wear chore coats (a choice that brings a more-casual local feeling vibe to an otherwise high-end establishment) made by Quince, a brand that claims to be Oekotex-certified. The aprons are made by a local Denver husband and wife design team, Valentich.

With the hotel just opening, time will tell if the goal of becoming one of the top sustainable travel choices in the country will be fulfilled. A staff full of self-proclaimed “eco-nerds,” as one bartender put it, sure seems ready to make it work.