Indoor Ski Furniture for a Mountain Home, Built to Take It
There is a spot by our front door where the boots pile up every March, and for about nine years the fix was a folding chair nobody ever sat in. Then we put a ski bench there instead. It turns out the furniture built to survive a Colorado patio is also the furniture that survives a hallway with wet boots, a dog who treats the entry rug as a towel, and a teenager who drops a backpack from shoulder height. Indoor ski furniture for a mountain home is not a decorating trend. It is just the stuff that stops breaking.
The toughest piece in your living room probably came off a patio
Outdoor furniture has one job that indoor furniture never has to think about. It has to stay intact when nobody is being careful with it. Hail in June, a hundred degree swing between January and July, sun that fades a cushion in one summer, a sprinkler head aimed slightly wrong for six years. Anything built to live through that is wildly over engineered for a den.
That is the whole idea here, and it is not complicated. We build in Manitou Springs, Colorado, and every piece that leaves the shop is designed for weather first. Douglas Fir base. Exterior oil paint. Hardware that will not weep a rust streak down the side of a board. Then customers take the thing inside anyway. Not because we suggested it. Because the bench they bought for the porch turned out to be exactly the right height for the coffee table, and once it came in for the winter it never went back out.
The older way of thinking about this said outdoor furniture indoors reads as unfinished, like you ran out of money halfway through the room. That has not been true for a long time. Hand painted wood with real grain showing through reads warmer than a veneer box from a catalog, and it reads a lot warmer than the fourth identical gray sectional on your street. A retired ski still has its topsheet graphics. Somebody skied on that. You can see where the edges got worked.
There is also the honest reason, which is that this furniture takes a beating and shrugs. If you have ever replaced a particleboard entry bench because the bottom shelf sagged into a smile, you already understand the appeal. Build it for a Colorado winter and a living room is a vacation.
What it is made of, and why the materials matter more inside
Every ski chair we build starts with four to five pairs of retired skis. A set of two takes eight to ten pairs. A snowboard chair needs at least three boards, and a single snowboard makes a coffee table or a bench. Hockey stick chairs run twelve to fifteen sticks. A golf club chair takes one full set. Those numbers are not marketing. They are what actually goes into the piece, which is also why a room full of this furniture represents a fairly serious pile of gear that was headed for a landfill.
The base is Douglas Fir. It is stable, it takes paint well, and it is strong enough that our Adirondack chairs carry a 400 lb capacity. Murals and color work go on in exterior oil paint, hand painted, which is the same finish we would use if the piece were going to sit under a spruce tree for a decade. Indoors it just means the surface is not going to care about a spilled drink, a wet glass or a kid with a marker who has excellent aim.
People sometimes ask why we do not switch to an interior finish for interior pieces. Fair question. The answer is that we would rather build one thing well than build two versions of it, and the exterior finish is the better of the two. It cures hard, it wipes clean, and it does not get gummy in a room that runs warm. The trade is that a piece needs a few days of air after it is finished before it goes anywhere near a closed bedroom. We handle that on our end.
The one thing worth knowing before you buy is that skis are not lumber. They are cambered, they have a shape, and every pair is a slightly different length and flex. That is why the pieces have personality and why no two are identical. If you want perfectly matched and perfectly repeatable, buy a table from a catalog. If you want the piece that people ask about, this is the one.
The hallway problem nobody measures for
Here is a small tragedy that plays out in about half the houses in Colorado. Somebody buys an entry bench online, it arrives, and it is 22 inches deep. The hallway is 40 inches wide. Now the hallway is 18 inches wide, and everyone in the family develops a little sideways shuffle they will keep for the next four years.
The 3-Ski Narrow Bench exists because of that. It is three skis across and about 18 inches deep, roughly 60 inches long and 17 inches tall. That depth is the whole point. It sits against a wall without turning the hall into an obstacle course, and at 60 inches it seats two adults pulling boots on at the same time without anybody having to be polite about elbows. Capacity is 300 lb. Boots, mail, and one cat. It holds.
At 17 inches tall it also works as a coffee table for the nine months a year that nobody is putting on ski boots, which is the quiet reason it is our most common first purchase. It moves. It fits in a normal car. It weighs little enough that one person can carry it out to the deck for a party and back in when the weather turns. Finished for indoor or outdoor use, so nothing bad happens if you forget it out there overnight.
Measure your hall before you order anything, from anybody. Tape a rectangle on the floor and live with it for a day. You will learn more in that day than in an hour of reading dimensions, and you will find out whether the door still opens.
Who actually buys this, and what they tried first
The typical buyer is somewhere in their fifties, learned on straight skis, and has spent enough money on furniture over the years to have opinions about it. They are not decorating a ski lodge fantasy. They have a real house, often a normal suburban one, and they want two or three pieces that mean something instead of twelve that mean nothing.
A lot of them tried the mass market version first. There is a whole category of ski themed decor out there that is printed, laminated or molded to look like skis, and it always announces itself as a costume. Our customers can tell the difference across a room, which is not surprising, because they can also tell what somebody is skiing on from two chairs down on the lift.
The second group is people who have gear they cannot throw away. A parent’s old Rossignols. The skis somebody learned on in 1978 and kept in the garage through four moves. Those pieces come to us and go back as something that lives in the house instead of behind the water heater. That project is emotional in a way we did not expect when we started, and it is the reason the sentimental pieces exist as their own category.
The third group is short timers with long memories. People who moved away from Colorado and want one honest piece of the place in a house in Ohio or Georgia. That is most of our nationwide shipping, and it is the group most likely to call and talk for twenty minutes about which mountain to put on a mural. We do not mind. That is the good part of the job.
Room by room: where indoor ski furniture actually lands
The entry is the obvious one, and it is where most people start. A narrow bench, a wall of hooks, and the boot problem is solved for the life of the house. Crossed antique skis with coat hooks mounted above the bench turns the whole wall into one piece instead of two accidents. If you would rather buy that as one thing than assemble it out of two, the Entryway Boot Bench and Coat Rack Combo is $895 with the hooks already where they belong, and the rest of what we build to sit on lives in Benches.
The living room takes a coffee table better than most people expect. A single snowboard on a base gives you a low surface roughly the size of a standard coffee table with a graphic top that nobody else has. That piece is the Customizable Single Snowboard Coffee Table at $397, and the painted versions of it sit alongside the rest of the Tables. Put a tray on it if you are worried about drinks. You will stop worrying in a week.
Basements and bar rooms are where this furniture goes a little wild, in a good way. A set of two ski bar stools starts at $891, and if the room already has a corner picked out, the two stools and matching pub table set starts at $1,991 and does the whole thing in one delivery. Suddenly the room has a theme that was not applied with a stencil. If you have a finished basement that has never quite decided what it is, that is the fastest fix we know.
Home offices are the newest one. Since everybody started taking calls from a spare bedroom, a hand painted mountain mural behind the desk has become a real request. It reads well on camera, it is not a virtual background, and it does not look like a corporate art rental. Browse the indoor decor and furniture collection and you will see how many of those started as office calls.
The one room we would talk you out of is a small formal dining room. These pieces have a scale and a color to them, and in a tight dining room with a hutch already in it, you are just crowding a nice thing. Better to give it a wall it can own.
Making it yours without making it loud
Color is the lever most people should pull first. If your living room runs gray and blue, order the skis in gray and blue. We stain and paint bases to match, and a piece that echoes the room reads as furniture rather than as a souvenir. The customers who are happiest a year later are almost always the ones who went one shade quieter than their first instinct.
Murals are hand painted in exterior oils, one at a time, by an actual person with a brush. Mountains, aspens, a lake, a specific ridgeline you can see from your deck. Send a photo and we will work from it. This is the part of the process that takes real time, so if you want a mural, do not start the conversation in the second week of December.
Logos work differently, and this is worth being clear about. A logo is never painted. It goes on as a logo decal floated onto a painted background, with aluminum and plastic appliques available as alternatives. That is not us cutting a corner, it is the only way to get a logo crisp and consistent at that scale. Branded work is quoted on a call rather than priced online, because the answer depends on the logo, the count and the finish. Call 303.775.7273 and we will give you a real number.
If you already know exactly what you want and it is not on the site, that is what custom designs is for. About a third of what we build never appears in the catalog at all.
Care through the seasons, inside and out
Indoors, care is close to nothing. Wipe it with a damp cloth. Do not use a solvent cleaner or one of those orange oil sprays, because you do not need them and the oil finish does not want them. That is the entire maintenance routine, which is a strange sentence to write about furniture that cost real money.
Outdoors, or for a piece that migrates back and forth, there is a little more to it. Sun is the only real enemy, and it works slowly. A piece that lives in direct high altitude sun year round will show it before a piece under a covered porch. Snow does not hurt it. Rain does not hurt it. A season of hail will leave marks on almost anything, and it will leave fewer marks on exterior oils over Douglas Fir than on most alternatives.
If a piece moves inside for the winter, give it a few minutes with a dry brush before it comes through the door. Grit is what scratches finishes, not weather. And if you have a piece on a wood floor, put felt pads under the feet on day one, before the first time somebody slides it six inches to vacuum.
Every chair carries a 3 year warranty. Yup. If something goes wrong inside that window we make it right, and after it we charge cost on materials for repairs, which in practice means most repairs are inexpensive and most pieces never need one. We would rather fix a chair than sell you a second chair, mostly because we are the ones who have to look at it.
The gift that does not require guessing somebody’s taste
Buying furniture for another adult is normally a terrible idea. You are betting on their taste, their space and their patience, and you will lose at least one of those bets. Ski furniture is the odd exception, because it is not really a decor decision. It is a they skied for thirty years and now there is a bench about it decision.
The narrow bench is the easiest gift in the lineup and it is not close. It is under the price point where somebody feels obligated, it works in a condo or a cabin, and it does not commit the recipient to a look. A housewarming, a retirement, a fiftieth birthday, a coworker who just bought a place in the mountains. Nobody has ever had to fake a reaction to one.
For the bigger occasions, a coffee table or a set of bar stools carries more weight without becoming a burden. And for the gift you need to hand over in person on a specific date, check ready to ship pieces first, because those skip the build queue entirely.
One piece of advice from watching this go wrong. If you are buying for somebody with a very specific room in mind, get the room measurements before you order, not after. We can build almost anything to a size. We cannot shrink a finished bench, and the physics on that are not negotiable.
How ordering actually works
Most pieces are made to order and run two to four weeks. Some are done and sitting in the shop, and those ship right away. If you are working against a date, say so in the first message rather than the last one, because that is the single thing that determines whether we can help you.
Most chairs ship free to the lower 48. We deliver locally across Colorado ourselves, which for larger sets is genuinely the better option, and we ship nationwide the rest of the time. Big items travel in crates and arrive assembled or close to it. Nobody is spending a Saturday with an Allen key and a diagram drawn by somebody who has never met a human.
If you want a rocker instead of a fixed base on a chair, that conversion is $75 more and it runs on repurposed oak wine barrel slats. It is the upgrade most people skip and then wish they had taken, so consider that a small unsolicited opinion. The same reclaimed oak whiskey and wine barrel staves go into our barrel chairs, if you want the material without the skis.
The ordering process is deliberately low tech at the important moments. You can buy straight off the site, and plenty of people do. For anything with a mural, a logo or a specific size, a five minute phone call will save you two days of email. We are a small shop in Manitou Springs, Colorado, and the person who answers has usually touched the piece you are asking about.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can furniture built for outdoors really be used inside?
Yes, and it usually outlasts the indoor equivalent. The Douglas Fir base and exterior oil paint are built for weather, so a living room or an entry is an easy environment by comparison. Wipe it with a damp cloth and that is the whole maintenance routine.
Will exterior oil paint smell inside my house?
No. The finish is fully cured before a piece leaves our shop, and cured oil paint has no ongoing odor. Pieces get several days of air after painting specifically so that nothing arrives at your door still off gassing.
How much room does a ski bench need in a hallway?
The 3-Ski Narrow Bench is about 60 inches long by 18 inches deep by 17 inches tall, so it needs a 5 foot stretch of wall and 18 inches of depth. Tape that rectangle on your floor for a day before you order, and check that your door still swings clear.
Do I have to be a skier to own a piece like this?
Not at all, and a fair number of our customers are not. The wood, the color and the build stand on their own, and plenty of people buy a bench or a coffee table simply because it fits the room and will not fall apart.
Can you match the colors already in my room?
Usually, yes. Send a photo or a paint name and we will work to it in exterior oils, and we can stain or paint the base to match as well. Color matching is included in a custom build rather than billed as an extra.
If you have a hallway, a basement or an office that has been waiting on a decision, start with the piece that moves. The 3-Ski Narrow Bench is the low risk way in, and if you want a mural, a color match or something built to a size we do not list, call 303.775.7273 and we will talk it through. You can also browse the full indoor decor and furniture collection and see what the shop is finishing this week.
