Best Boutique Hotel — Downtown 2008 | Hotel Monaco | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Boutique Hotel — Downtown

Hotel Monaco

Hotel Monaco pushes its pet-friendliness — a "goldfish companion" is available if you're not traveling with your own furry pal. But it's the treatment of the human clientele that really stands out, from the solicitous concierge to the evening wine hour to the on-premises Renaissance Aveda Spa & Salon to the top-flight meals at Panzano. It's the kind of rose-petal-turndown place that builds a loyal following even among hardened business travelers and makes locals plan exotic weekend getaways in the heart of the city, of all places.

Best Boutique Hotel — Near Downtown

The Burnsley

Close enough to the urban core to be a short walk or free shuttle ride to downtown amenities, but far enough away to provide free parking, the Burnsley is a class act. The all-suite rooms are spacious, many with great views of the skyline — yet they're half the cost of what you'd pay for a marble-lined broom closet just a few blocks away. The staff is friendly, the neighborhood calm, and the restaurant serves a killer Reuben, which makes this the perfect place to stash visiting relatives or tightwad business associates looking to live large but not too large.

Best Boutique With a Split Personality

Fancy Tiger

When Fancy Tiger's divergent Bohemian personalities — Matthew Brown's hipster boutique and Jaime Jennings's DIY craft center — spread to a second location across the street from the original one, a good thing got better. It means more funky clothing, trendy graphic T-shirts, messenger bags and smart jeans in the new space, and an expanded selection of yarns, hip kits and fabulous, modish print fabrics for blooming do-it-yourselfers at the original. This tiger now has room to show its stripes.

Best Catch-All Slogan

"Bagpipes: Married or Buried, We'll Be There!"Michael Collins Pipes and Drums

Whether it's "Danny Boy" ye be needin' or simply "Taps," the Michael Collins Pipes and Drums ensemble (named for the father of the Irish Republic) can deliver, and their slogan says it all. Hire them on, whether you need cheerful, morose, danceable or mournful bagpipe music, with or without the rhythm section. As someone once said (we think it was "anon"): "Leprechauns, castles, good luck and laughter. Lullabies, dreams and love ever after. Poems and songs with pipes and drums. A thousand welcomes when anyone comes...that's the Irish for you!"

Best Coffee-Cup Sleeves

Marilyn Wells's Cup Cozees

Cute, reusable coffee-cup sleeves may seem like the next obvious step in our eco-minded, coffee-fueled world, but it took a woman like Marilyn Wells to make it happen. A seamstress with a degree in home economics, Wells worked for years making costumes for Denver-based films like Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead. But a couple of years ago, this thrifty single mom was looking for a new project and noticed how much paper she wasted every time she bought a coffee to go. Using a few scraps of fabric and two strips of Velcro, she created a miniature quilt to wrap around her cup, and her company, Cup Cozee, was born. Wells now distributes the sleeves to five Denver shops, including Cafe Europa, Devil's Food and the Tattered Cover. The intricately stitched cozies go for $12 apiece or $20 for two. Sugar, cream and a cozee, please.

Best Colorado Souvenir

"I See What You Mean"

When Lawrence Argent's giant blue bear — the piece of public artwork officially known as "I See What You Mean" — first appeared outside the Colorado Convention Center, it inspired all sorts of brainstorms among local boosters. Dressing the people who were pushing the extension of the arts tax in blue bear costumes, for example. Draping the sculpture itself in a giant orange scarf to hype the Broncos' season. There was just one snafu in all these schemes: The city owned the art, but not the rights to Argent's image. Some better-late-than-never legal work took care of that, and so Denver is now able to sell, through city outlets, authorized 12" and 16" high versions of the big blue bear, already Denver's most beloved icon (excluding John Elway). What? Were you expecting miniature models of "The Dancers"?

Best Conscientious Cupcakes

Lovely Confections Bakery

Sarah Hill Photography
Lovely Confections is an elegant cupcakery, filled with comfy couches, serving Novo coffee and featuring a bare-bones but scrumptious selection of five basic yet expertly executed cake flavors on weekdays: lemon, carrot, coconut, chocolate and vanilla (the latter two come with chocolate or vanilla frosting). On weekends, owner and head baker Porche Lovely whips up additional flavors, always keeping in mind the green practices of her place, incorporating natural and organic ingredients and using local suppliers. This bakery takes the cake.

Best Cupcakes on the Run

YumYums Delights

Cupcakes are the trendiest treat in town. Suddenly, bakeries all over are churning out the loveliest mini-cakes you've ever seen, decorated with sprinkles, dragées and pearlescent dust. In downtown Denver, YumYums Delights rules. Conveniently open until eight every night of the week except Sunday, this is the perfect place to grab something wicked to eat after dinner or before the theater. The cupcakes come in a chorus line of delicious flavors, from pure vanilla, inside and out, to more exotic fluff, including mango tango spice, pink lady, mimosa cream and brown cow. Yum yum!

Best Custom Cupcakes

The Shoppe

The Shoppe's master cupcake baker, Emma Lee Bettina Rose Skala (better known as Emma Rose), earned her BFA from Alfred University and has a background in ceramic art — both of which surely come in handy when she's artfully sculpting her delicious little cakelets. She starts with flavors as scandalously rich as Double Chocolate Kahlua or as hip as Mojito or Strawberry Champagne, then tops that with every custom theme imaginable, from a dinosaur to a lifelike mound of violets. Consider this recent special order: Skala created a dozen Totoro cupcakes, each capped with a paper-thin, bunny-shaped chocolate slab decorated in contrasting white chocolate to resemble Hayao Miyazaki's animated character. Pure genius. And the Shoppe even delivers your custom order, via Cheetah Couriers bike messengers.

Best Daily Cupcakes

Happy Cakes Bakeshop

Northwest Denver's premier cupcake bakery will boggle both your imagination and your tastebuds with its daily specials. On Tuesdays, Peanut Butter Cup and Apple Cinnamon cupcakes are featured, along with the staple variations on vanilla, chocolate and red-velvet cake; on Wednesdays, it's Carrot Cake and Cookies & Cream. The daily deals continue through Saturday, offering such unique flavors as a maple-infused French Toast, Orange Creamsicle, Jack & Coke (cola cake with bourbon frosting), Strawberry Pretzel and Root Beer Float. And you just never know what Thursday's Mystery Flavor will turn out to be! Live dangerously, cupcake.

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