Why Hotel de Paris Museum Doesn't Reopen as a First-Class Luxury Hotel

"Why don't you reopen the hotel—even if it's only a few guest rooms?" 

This is one of the most frequent questions we receive at Hotel de Paris Museum...and it's understandable. Staying overnight in Louis Dupuy's legendary inn seems like an extraordinary opportunity to experience the past; however, the mission of Hotel de Paris Museum is to collect, preserve, and share history associated with Louis Dupuy's Hotel de Paris while serving as a catalyst for tourism. 

Since 1954, the property has been owned and operated by The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America in the State of Colorado as a museum dedicated to preserving one of Colorado's most remarkable historic places.  Although reopening portions of the building for overnight accommodations may seem appealing, doing so would conflict with the very purpose for which the museum exists.

A Preservation Success Story

As early as 1945, historians with the State of Colorado recognized Hotel de Paris as an irreplaceable historic resource due to its completeness. Unlike many historic hotels that were remodeled beyond recognition or lost altogether, this building survived with an extraordinary degree of integrity.  Over the past seven decades, extensive preservation, restoration, and conservation work has focused on safeguarding the building and its artifact collection—not preparing it for modern overnight stays. Reopening guest rooms would place many of these achievements at risk.

Inescapable Wear and Tear

Historic buildings survive because use is carefully managed by the museum's owners and professional staff.  Even a small number of lodging guests would dramatically increase foot traffic on original floors and stairs, accelerate wear on historic finishes, require more frequent cleaning, and increase the handling of original doors, windows, locks, and hardware. Every additional use shortens the life of irreplaceable historic materials that cannot simply be replaced once worn out.

Protecting the Extraordinary

One of Hotel de Paris Museum's greatest distinctions is its remarkable collection of original furnishings that remain in or near their intended locations.  Operating guest rooms would inevitably increase the risk of accidental damage, breakage, and loss while creating significantly greater security challenges. The museum's responsibility is not simply to protect the building, but also the thousands of objects that tell the story of the site and the people who built it, worked it, and occupied it.

Room 9, Restored

Authenticity Matters

The goal of historic preservation has been to present the hotel as it appeared during Louis Dupuy's ownership—not to recreate it as a functioning twenty-first-century hotel.  Modern lodging requires bathrooms, fire suppression systems, emergency lighting, accessibility improvements, climate control, expanded electrical service, internet access, expanded security measures, and contemporary furnishings and amenities. Engaging these necessities would largely require substantial alterations that would diminish the building's genuineness.  Ironically, protecting historic artifacts might also require removing them from guest rooms altogether, making those spaces less authentic.

Room 9, Modernized

Museums and Hotels Have Different Focuses

Museums and operating hotels exist for fundamentally different purposes.  A history museum prioritizes preservation, research, and education. A hotel prioritizes guest comfort, convenience, and customer expectations. When those priorities conflict, historic preservation inevitably comes under pressure to accommodate modern lodging standards.

Preserving a Time Capsule

Louis Dupuy's Hotel de Paris is frequently described as the most unique and complete parcel of early Colorado history—a rare "time capsule" that offers visitors an authentic glimpse into the nineteenth century.  Converting preserved guest rooms back into commercial accommodations would fundamentally change their role. Historic rooms would become revenue-producing assets rather than preserved spaces, altering how visitors experience the site and potentially weakening the very qualities that make the property significant.  Such a change could also affect the philanthropic support upon which the museum has depended for decades.

Modern Infrastructure Comes at a Cost

Operating a hotel requires far more than beds and linens.  Reliable plumbing, expanded electrical capacity, heating and cooling systems, internet service, and modern life-safety systems all require extensive capital, installation, and ongoing maintenance. These upgrades often involve invasive work within historic walls, ceilings, and floors that historic preservation seeks to protect.

Honoring Investment

Millions of dollars in public, private, and philanthropic support have been donated to preserve Louis Dupuy's Hotel de Paris as a museum and cultural resource.  Those investments were made with the understanding that the property would remain dedicated to historic preservation, education, and interpretation. Returning portions of the hotel building to commercial lodging would represent a significant departure from that long-standing commitment.

Room 7, Restored

Increased Liability

Unlike museum visitors, overnight guests occupy a building for extended periods without direct supervision.  Potential risks include fire, water damage, accidental breakage, vandalism, personal injury claims, unauthorized access to restricted areas, theft, and damage caused by luggage, food, beverages, or pets. A single incident could undo years of careful stewardship.

Room 7, Modernized

Protecting the Experience

Museum visitors experience Hotel de Paris Museum as a protected historic resource.  Hotel guests naturally personalize the spaces they occupy by unpacking luggage, moving furnishings, charging electronics, eating meals, and otherwise treating rooms as temporary homes. This changes the visitor's relationship with the historic setting and diminishes its interpretive and educational values.

National Responsibility

Louis Dupuy's Hotel de Paris is important not simply because it was once a high-end hotel, but because it remains one of the nation's most complete examples of a nineteenth-century hotel preserved as a museum.  Its management carries responsibilities that extend well beyond local tourism. Preservation and conservation standards consistently emphasize protecting historic buildings and collections when continued commercial use would compromise long-term integrity.

Looking Forward

The good news is Hotel de Paris has already found a sustainable new purpose.  Since 1954, it has evolved from a threatened and deteriorated French inn into a nationally significant museum, tool for education, catalyst for heritage tourism, and community gathering place. That transformation represents one of Colorado's great historic preservation accomplishments.

The ultimate measure of success is not whether guests can once again spend the night within the hotel's historic walls. Rather, it is ensuring future generations can pass through the building and experience it much as visitors did during Louis Dupuy's lifetime.

Decades of careful restoration, conservation, and stewardship have preserved something exceedingly rare: an authentic nineteenth-century hotel that has become an artifact in its own right. Reopening guest rooms—even on a limited basis—would reverse that philosophy by treating the building as a hotel rather than preserving it as one of Colorado's (and, arguably the nation's) most extraordinary museums.

In the end, the greatest luxury Hotel de Paris Museum offers is not a night's stay. It is the opportunity to step into a place where history itself has been carefully preserved for the public.

If you would like to stay at a historic hotel in Colorado -- or anywhere in the United States -- visit Historic Hotels of America (the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation that recognizes and celebrates the finest Historic Hotels).

Hidden Fragment, Global Story

Tucked beneath a corner vanity, a small fragment of wallpaper quietly gestures toward a much larger story—one that stretches across oceans and cultures.

Out of sight in Louis Dupuy's Hotel de Paris is a remnant of the property's earliest days. With its delicate pattern inspired by Anglo-Japanese style, what is left of the polychrome wall covering reflects a moment in the 19th century when American and European tastes were profoundly reshaped by an artistic encounter with Japan.

Preserved wallpaper, Room 8

The Opening of Japan—and the Flood of Influence

For over two centuries, Japan maintained a policy of relative isolation from the Western world. That changed in 1853 with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry, whose expedition initiated a series of treaties that opened Japanese ports to foreign trade.  What followed was not just commerce—but fascination.  Japanese goods—woodblock prints, ceramics, textiles, lacquerware—began flowing into Europe and the United States. To Western eyes, these objects felt radically different: asymmetrical compositions, flattened perspectives, natural motifs, and an elegance rooted in restraint. This aesthetic movement became known as Japonisme.

Dinner caster, Restaurant Dining Room

Bristolware vase, Restaurant Dining Room

From Elite Curiosity to Domestic Style

Initially, Japanese art captivated collectors, artists, and designers.  Figures like American painter and artist James McNeill Whistler and American artist and designer Louis Comfort Tiffany incorporated Japanese principles into their work.  But the appeal did not stay confined to galleries.  By the 1870s and 1880s, the Anglo-Japanese style--an offshoot of the broader Aesthetic Movement made popular by Irish author and poet Oscar Wilde--began appearing in middle-class homes (and, in our case, a commercial property).  Pattern books, imported goods, and domestic manufacturers translated Japanese design into accessible forms:  birds, bamboo, and florals; emphasis on negative space and simplicity; and, flattened, decorative compositions rather than illusionistic depth.

Ceiling fixture (detail), Sample Room 2

Squat globe, Sample Room 2

Harmony Between Nature and Design

Even in the remote Rocky Mountain mining camp of Georgetown, Colordo, these global currents made their mark.  The popularity of Japanese-inspired design in 19th century America wasn’t accidental. It answered several cultural desires at once:

1. A reaction against industrial excess

As industrialization accelerated, many Americans sought alternatives to mass-produced clutter. Japanese design—with its clarity and restraint—offered a kind of visual relief.

2. A Taste for the Exotic (the Romanticized “Elsewhere”)

Japan was imagined as refined, mysterious, and timeless. Incorporating its motifs allowed Americans to participate in a global, cosmopolitan identity.

3. Alignment with the Aesthetic Movement

The idea of “art for art’s sake”—that beauty itself had value—found a natural partner in Japanese decorative arts, which elevated everyday objects into works of art.

A Fragment as Evidence of Connection

Our surviving piece of wallpaper in Room 8 is out of sight, so it is easy to miss. And yet, it embodies a remarkable truth: even in a frontier setting like Louis Dupuy's Hotel de Paris, global artistic movements were not distant abstractions—they were lived, chosen, and embedded into daily life.  It suggests that the people who passed through these rooms—travelers, workers, artists, dreamers—were not isolated from the wider world. They were participants in it.

Looking Closer

Fragments invite us to look more carefully—not just at what is preserved, but at what lingers in the margins. Beneath furniture, behind walls, in overlooked corners, history waits in partial form.  And sometimes, a fragment is enough to tell a global story.

Wallpaper labled "0 352 A.W.P.M.A." (American Wall Paper Manufacturers Association) 

Awaiting Your Inspection

With the help of Bo Sullivan of Arcalus Period Design and Wayne Mason of Mason & Wolf, we located our wallpaper pattern in the archive of the Benson Ford Research Center at Henry Ford of Dearborn, Michigan.  See the full-size reproduction for yourself, now on display in Room 8.  Printing by Grizzly Creek Gallery, 512 6th Street, Georgetown, Colorado.

A Contemplative Setting Deepens Emotional Connections

The West Courtyard at Louis Dupuy’s Hotel de Paris was used for butchering meat, and storing  cords of firewood and a pile of coal. 

Enclosed by stone walls built by Chinese laborers in the late 19^th century, the West Courtyard at Hotel de Paris Museum is shielded from the hustle-and-bustle of the modern world.  This creates a calm area, a kind of palate cleanser, where visitors can sit and absorb history they learned on one of our self-guided tours.

The West Courtyard provides a reset—something grounding after moving through interior spaces.  Visitors can chat with companions, scroll through photos, or just sit in silence.

Hotel de Paris Museum is a member of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), which advocates for museums to function as “community anchors” that provide spaces for rest, reflection, and emotional processing.  Therefore, Hotel de Paris Museum has upgraded and reopened its West Courtyard as a quiet zone to help reduce sensory overload, and to facilitate and support visitor well-being and inclusion in a calm space.

Our West Courtyard enhances the visitor experience by providing a physical and psychological break from the museum’s dense Victorian interiors to a serene, open-air environment that allows self-reflection and healing.  For those seeking rest and reflection, it offers a “secret garden” atmosphere that contrasts with the detailed indoor tour.

After 1901, the courtyard transitioned from work to relaxation.  Photographs show members of the Burkholder Family enjoying the sun-drenched, private space.

In addition, our West Courtyard seating encourages visitors to slow down and connect more deeply with Louis Dupuy’s story of reinvention and second-chances.  According to AAM, 4 out of 5 museum-goers are looking for a place to sit, relax, and decompress; therefore, our courtyard delivers exactly that in a setting that feels intentional and restorative.  Framed by historic architecture and thoughtfully furnished, the space invites visitors to pause while touring, reflect on what they’ve experienced, or simply take a breath.