The Ramble Hotel

The Marquise de Rambouillet received her guests in the chambre bleue, a Paris salon hung with blue brocade, and rebuilt her house as smaller connecting rooms so they could move about between them. The Ramble Hotel, which opened in RiNo in 2018, took its idea from her salons, and the debt shows. Behind reception the plaster is blue, worked in swirls above a desk buttoned in bottle-green leather. The lobby is double height, brick and black-framed glass under crystal chandeliers, with the furniture grouped on antique Persian rugs so there is always another corner to go on to. Death & Co pours in it, beneath three arched mirrors. Of the fifty rooms, ask for a Corner King, with windows on two walls over the red-brick blocks of the neighbourhood.

Recommended for grown-ups who come to Denver for the drink and the art and would rather have a cocktail bar downstairs than a pool; children may stay, but nothing is laid on for them. The art begins on the hotel's own wall, a mural by EL MAC and Hoxxoh, and RedLine Contemporary Art Center is three minutes' walk, as is Denver Central Market, a food hall. Union Station is fifteen minutes on foot. The drinking runs in shifts. DC/AM does coffee and breakfast from seven, then hands over to Death & Co at three; from May to October The Garden adds drinks and dinner on the patio, and Soda Club, along 25th Street, makes its own pasta and pours natural wine. Death & Co keeps going until half past midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, late enough to wear out even a seventeenth-century salon.