Caddis Collaborative is delighted to announce that it has won the award for Best Overall Design in the 2025 Design Challenge from Boulder’s Month of Modern (MoM).
The 2025 MoM competition asked architects, designers, and students to reimagine the Boulder Elks Club, an historic mid-century community hub. The goal was to blend historic charm with modern spaces, outdoor upgrades, and thoughtful furnishings. “The jury loved the design’s visionary spirit and applauded how boldly it reimagined the Elks Club’s potential,” says MoM’s Stephanie Bingham.
MoM is an annual celebration in Boulder, Colorado, dedicated to modern design, architecture, and culture and featuring a series of events throughout September. MoM’s mission is to cultivate a conversation about Colorado modern and to present the region as one of the nation’s most vibrant hubs of modern design.
The Elks Club currently has meeting space, a ballroom, and a pool. Caddis’s entry – Elevated Lodge – reinvents the club, creating an indoor-outdoor space and providing room both for members-only Elks Club meetings and events as well as public areas that can be rented to individuals and groups.
In our redesign, consolidated Elks Lodge space is relocated to the northern gathering room. This space can house member uses with a private northern access or function as a flexible community space for gallery art shows or events that need smaller spaces.
Public space includes a walkable earthen roof that pulls the western land over the existing building and partially covers new outdoor space on the west side of the property. The western ballroom wall opens up to allow light into the building and provide access to new outdoor space. A corner bar sits between the pool, the ballroom, and outdoors, thus activating new uses that flow and circulate for large gatherings, celebrations, weddings, and even indoor/outdoor film festivals such as Sundance.
The standout feature of our design is the energy-efficient earthen roof, which creates paths, rooftop event possibilities, and exceptional views. Other elements of our design include ribbed metal siding (rather than the current cedar shake), art murals, a new recreational area for tennis and other uses, added entry signage, parking lot landscaping, and paths around the building on the rooftop and connected spaces.
Caddis senior architect Chad Kipfer, who led the design process, grew up right behind the Elks Club. He attended prom there, and now his kids participate in swim race at the club’s pool. So he knows both the central functions of the club and the potential of the underutilized space on the west side of the property.
“We ignored some of the existing direction and tried to do something different with the site,” Chad says. “Those were bold decisions. The ideas of the plan and what could happen within the building are really good movements that show how they could use it in different ways and reenvision it.”
Although the winning designs will not necessarily be built, it is fun to see how the Elks Club space could be reimagined. Caddis architectural associates Cathy Dong and Julian Fischer Frank assisted with the design. Kudos to Chad, Cathy, and Julian for a job well done!
These renderings show Caddis Collaborative’s vision for a renovated Elks Club. The top rendering shows how the new outdoor event space would look positioned under the proposed earthen bridge to the roof. The bottom rendering shows the proposed walkable earthen bridge to the building’s roof.
