One Night in a Student–Staffed Hotel in Colorado

Welcome to One Night In, a series about staying in the most unparalleled places available to rest your head.

When you’re a person of coastal persuasion, the interior of our great country can get confusing. That, and my fairly hippie New York City public school education means that while I have a great sense of direction, my understanding of what states are next to one another is…let’s just say not as good as it could be. So when I found myself headed to Grand Junction, Colorado, for a family event, my first response was to look up exactly where that might be.

Turns out, it’s four hours west of Denver, situated where the Colorado and Garrison Rivers meet, and is overlooked by the stunning Colorado National Monument, which makes the city a popular place for hikers, bikers, kayakers, etc. It’s also home to Colorado Mesa University, which has a robust hospitality management program. These details coalesced as relevant swiftly, as I realized that, like with most cities and towns you might be passing through, this wasn’t a place with a bevy of chicly designed accommodations. No shade to a Marriott Courtyard, but if I could, I wanted to stay somewhere that actually paid homage to its beautiful surroundings.

So I was pleased when I came across Hotel Maverick. Newly opened in the challenging early days of the pandemic, the 60-room hotel has joined the ranks of "teaching hotels" opened on and by college campuses, with the intent of serving two likely underserved populations—visiting families, and students studying hospitality. Students at Colorado Mesa and its sister community college can intern for six months working at the hotel or at its rooftop restaurant, Devil’s Kitchen. This detail intrigued me; college town hotels have had a slight rebrand in recent years, with brands like Graduate Hotels leaning into the potential for improved accommodations for families looking to make their visits to their offspring a little more comfortable. In lieu of a starkly and obviously design-forward option, the backstory of the Hotel Maverick drew me in, and, after reaching out to the team to see if I could set up a stay and getting a yes, I was excited to go back to school.

Friday

3 p.m.: We arrive in Grand Junction after a beautiful drive from Salt Lake City, which is about the same driving distance as flying into Denver would be. Stop offs could include iconic national parks such as Arches and Canyonlands, if you’re interested, but I’ve been to both, and we have stuff to do. We do, however, pause for lunch in Green River, where we eat at a food truck/former gas station, Tacos La Pasadita. I order the torta and a refreshing hibiscus ice tea. Highly recommend.

You won’t miss the Hotel Maverick; it’s the tallest building in town, and situated right on the edge of campus. Designed by the Denver-based Davis Partnership Architects, the aluminum panels wrapping the parallelogram were laser printed to look like wood, as real wood wouldn’t have been long-lasting enough as a building material in the snowy Colorado winters. We’re here at the end of September, and it's desert vibes all the way; extremely dry, with temperatures that fluctuate all day from sweltering to quite chilly depending on whether you’re in the sun or the shade. First we check in, and then head up to our top-floor room with a king bed, which features beautiful views of the surrounding mountains and quiet campus, including a mountain biking/skateboarding ramp. The insides of the rooms still have that new hotel feel, and a nu-mountain vibe—think the aforementioned rustic wood—decorated with old black-and-white photos of the college, which were very nostalgia-inducing, even if you don’t actually have nostalgia for this particular place. We stand out on the balcony and take in the view. (They also offer, cutely, a king bunk bed room for families.)

The awareness that students might be helping you made the whole thing particularly sweet; according to the Denver Post, the hospitality interns tend to be upperclassmen getting close to graduation, who work 20 hours a week shadowing full time staffers. Meanwhile, culinary students work at Devil’s Kitchen or the coffee shop in the hotel lobby. ("At the end of every rotation, students must write a paper about what they learned, their likes and dislikes, and any interesting experiences or scenarios they encountered," the Post notes.)