Popination Destination
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: the bar at hotel St. Julien.
You know, I could really get used to this posh staycation thing that we’ve been doing at multiple places lately. Remember the whole Aspen trip and Stranahan’s and the W? Well I was back in Boulder recently, partner by my side, to meet up with a couple old friends from high school at the other luxury hotel in our city of origin: St. Julien. Unlike the other spiffy posh hotel in town (the Boulderado), the St. Julien is not old and historic, but shiny and new. It’s also a spa, and next time I go I have to remember that part.
And so instead of limiting our enjoyment of the super cool lounge fare, or having to drive back in the early winter dark for more than an hour to get home, we decided to get a room. Exhausted stumbling distance, just up an elevator into a good night’s sleep and a beautiful mountain view of our most famous natal environmental ornaments: the Flatirons.
We hadn’t seen these old friends of ours for several years—back at our 30th highschool reunion party, I think. That would have been back in 2021, which…were we still masking at that point? I don’t remember (COVID trauma is real, yo) but I do remember it was over at The Rayback, outside. But before that it would have been all the way back in highschool. These two were theatre kids with us and it was delightful to see them again: one of them still lives in Boulder and is a filmmaker; the other now lives in New Mexico and works in nonprofits. So if I go visit her next year around my birthday as we tentatively planned, I’ll be sure to bring some Santa Fe (and maybe Taos) Popinations back with me to share. But I digress.
St. Julien is plonked on the bricks just past the busy pedestrian stretch of Boulder’s historic Pearl Street Mall, looking pretty out of place amid the old red bricks and old fashioned looking storefronts that make up most of the mall. Walking in through the huge brass fitted glass front doors, the giant lobby spools out beyond one’s line of vision: many clusters of armchairs tucked into corners and strategically placed pillars designed, it seems, to make you wander and get lost. This time of year, there’s a big ol’ gold-balled Christmas tree right in the middle, anchoring the confusing spirals of seating.
But a hotel lobby is not a bar!
(Even if you can get drinks served to you out there.)
The contrast between the hotel’s bar/lounge and the lobby is stark: while the lobby is huge, open, and bright with white marble, gold, and lots of natural light; the bar is a barely lit lounge with a cove-like room off to the side and dim amber lighting, giving speakeasy vibes and pretentious artisanal mixology.
What is it about hotels and liminal spaces? Is it because hotels by their very nature are transient? Or, at least, the services they provide are fluid and temporary, and so the strange corner with the oddly placed lamp above the armchair that has never been sat in, randomly in an empty staircase landing, just goes with the territory? I find it fascinating, and my partner, who travels very frequently for his work, has accrued a vast collection of pictures of liminal spaces that don’t actually look like they exist within Euclidean geometry. There were a few at St. Julien and in its bar, too, one of which I’d posed in back in the pre-pandemic era of fancy business conventions and such.
Like I said, I could get used to this posh staycation thing we’ve been doing lately, and actually even the less posh staycations have been great as well. Though I have happened to notice that the overall costs of the posh ones are really not that much more than the other ones. But it is a good way, I think, to rise up out of the miasma of the work-from-home stuckness that’s so easy to get trapped in. It opens up the brain, blows away a lot of the fog (if not all of it), and refreshes the synapses.
Plus, there are some damn good cocktails to experience in the world, and they’re not very far away. Many of them aren’t even very expensive. So, you know.
I grew up here and so I was so used to this view. But the other day at St. Julien, I was actually in awe at this sight, that I’d looked at thousands of times before. The mountains aren’t super visible from my current home in Denver, and I guess I was no longer accustomed. It’s funny: I remember back in my Colorado Shakespeare Fest days, when I was in my early 20s and lived in the beetle-ridden apartments that housed the casts and crews. Many of the actors were in Boulder doing what’s called ‘summer stock’ work, and hailed from MFA programs across the country, as CSF was the second or third best Shakespeare fest in the country at the time. I remember hanging with a couple stunning blondes from NYU’s famed Tisch School of the Arts, who were marveling at Boulder’s beauty as we hiked down the campus Hill from the CSF apartments down to Pearl Street’s bars. One of them asked me where I grew up, where I was from, and I answered: oh right here; I grew up across town.
He (and the others listening) expressed disbelief, then astonishment that this was my hometown. He said, ‘No, you travel to El Dorado. You take a journey to Shangri-La. You don’t grow up in Paradise.’ Which I found hilarious, but then it also made me think. And whenever else one of them would take a moment and point up at the Flatirons, I stopped too, and looked with them.
That’s what I did this past weekend too. What a gift, to find a fresh way to see something so beautiful yet too familiar.