The Hand Painted Ski Chair Built for Aspen Sunset Season
Every fall, somebody in Colorado pulls over on a dirt road, points a phone at a hillside full of gold aspens with a pink sky behind them, and takes a picture that looks nothing like what they are standing in front of. The color is there and the light is there, but the photo flattens it. That gap between what you saw and what you got to keep is the whole reason the Aspen Sunset Alpine exists. It is a hand painted ski chair, built from retired skis on a Douglas Fir rocker frame in Manitou Springs, with an aspen and sunset mural painted across the ski backs so the thing you could never quite photograph ends up sitting on your porch instead.
The Chair That Started as a Photo Nobody Could Get Right
Ask anyone who lives near aspen country and they will tell you the same thing. The two weeks the trees turn are the best two weeks of the year, and they are impossible to hold onto. You can drive Kebler Pass or the road up to Crested Butte or the aspens above Manitou Springs and the whole world goes orange and gold, and then a week of wind takes it all down and you are back to bare branches and waiting until next September.
So instead of chasing the photo, the Aspen Sunset Alpine paints it. The mural runs across the back of the chair in warm oranges and pinks, with pale aspen trunks standing in front of the light. It is not a decal and it is not a print. Somebody stands there with exterior oil paint and lays the scene down by hand, which is why the version on your porch will not look exactly like the one in the product photo. The skis are different widths, so the trunks land at slightly different spacings on every chair, and the sunset gets mixed a little differently each time. If you have ever wanted a piece of a Colorado fall that does not blow away in October, this is the closest thing we make to it.
It reads as a story before it reads as furniture, and that is on purpose. The people who buy this chair are usually buying a memory, not a seat. The seat is just how the memory gets to stay.
What a Hand Painted Ski Chair Actually Is
Here is the honest version, because the phrase gets thrown around loosely. A hand painted ski chair from Colorado Ski Chairs is an Adirondack-style chair whose back and seat are built from real retired skis, mounted on a solid Douglas Fir base, and then painted by hand with an exterior oil mural. The skis are the visible part. They are the fan of slats you see across the back and the run of slats under you. The Douglas Fir is the frame that holds the whole thing square and takes the weight.
Retired skis are a strange, good building material. They are engineered to flex, to shed water, and to survive a Colorado winter getting dragged across ice and rock, so a ski that is done with the mountain still has years of outdoor life left in it. We build them into the chair with the top-sheet graphics facing out where they still look good, and where the old graphics have gone tired the paint goes over the top. The aspen and sunset mural is that paint. High quality exterior oil, chosen so the sunset colors do not wash pale by August, which is exactly when a cheaper finish would start to fade on a south-facing deck.
The Alpine part of the name is the frame. It is our more compact chair design, a little smaller in the footprint than the full-size Adirondack, which matters more than you would think once you go to actually place it. More on that below. And the whole thing rocks, because it sits on the Alpine rocker frame, so it moves the way a good porch chair is supposed to move.
One more honest note. This is a chair made from skis, not a chairlift and not a replica of one. Colorado Ski Chairs builds both, and the lift benches are their own thing, but the Aspen Sunset Alpine is a rocking chair. Nobody pulled it off a mountain. It was built to order on a bench in Manitou Springs.
How Many Skis It Takes, and Whose Skis They Are
This is the question people get wrong the most, usually because they are hoping the answer is smaller than it is. A single Adirondack-style ski chair like this one takes four to five pairs of skis. Not one pair. Not two. Four to five pairs go into the back and the seat and the arms of one chair, which surprises almost everybody, because almost nobody has four or five pairs of retired skis sitting in the garage.
That is fine, and it is where the Sentimental option comes in. If you want your own skis in the chair, the way it usually works is you send us the one or two pairs that actually mean something. The pair from the season you finally skied a black without stopping. The pair your dad handed down. The pair you learned on. We build those into the visible parts of the chair, the places your eye goes first, and we match the rest from our own stock of vintage and retro skis so the piece is complete and structurally right. You are not obligated to come up with a whole quiver. You come up with the skis that carry the memory, and we handle the rest.
If you are not doing a sentimental build at all, we build the whole chair from our own retired stock, and it comes out exactly like the one you see. Either way, the count is the count. If someone tells you one pair of skis becomes a chair, they are selling you a story that does not hold up on the workbench.
The Rocker That Fits a Smaller Porch
Numbers first, because they matter. The Aspen Sunset Alpine stands 45 inches tall, 30 inches deep, and 26 inches wide measured out to the binding cup holders. That compact width is the point of the Alpine frame. A lot of people fall for a big Adirondack ski chair online, get it home, and then discover it eats the entire porch and blocks the screen door. This one is built to actually live on a normal deck, a condo balcony, a cabin porch that is more cozy than grand, or a spot by the fireplace inside where a full-size chair would crowd the room.
The other thing the arm gives you is a ski binding cup holder, which is exactly what it sounds like. An old ski binding, repurposed into the arm, holding your coffee or your beer. It is the detail guests point at first, every time, and it is the kind of thing that makes people ask where you got the chair, which is how a lot of our chairs end up selling more chairs.
And it rocks. The compact Alpine frame is a true rocker, so this is a chair for actually sitting in for a while, not a stiff decorative piece you walk past. There is a specific kind of good that comes from rocking slowly on a porch in late September with a hot drink while the aspens do their thing across the valley. This chair was built around that exact moment.
Where This Chair Earns Its Keep
The obvious home is a porch or a deck in aspen country. A cabin outside Crested Butte, a place up near Vail or Breckenridge, a mountain-town front porch where the fall color is right there and the chair is basically a frame around the view. Put one out, or put two out with a small table between them, and you have the spot everybody fights over in October.
But a good number of these chairs never see a Colorado winter. We ship them to people who honeymooned here, or spent one unforgettable fall week here, and want a piece of it back home. There is an Aspen Sunset Alpine on a deck in Texas right now doing the job of reminding somebody of a trip they took, and the fact that Dallas does not have aspens is not the point. The chair is the memory. The zip code is negotiable.
Inside works too. The exterior oil finish means the chair does not care whether it lives out in the weather or in a sunroom or beside a fireplace, so plenty of them end up indoors as the one piece of furniture in the room with an actual story attached. It reads as art that you are allowed to sit in, which is a rare thing for a chair to pull off.
Making It Yours
The chair in the photo is a starting point, not a fixed menu. Want the sunset warmer, more reds and deep oranges like the last ten minutes before dark? We can do that. Want it cooler, more of that pink-into-blue thing that happens right as the color drops? That too. Want the aspen trunks denser, a real stand of them instead of a few, or spaced out with more sky between? Tell us what you are picturing and we paint to it.
Because every chair is hand painted to order, this is the norm, not a special favor. The mural is custom by default, since two people never describe the same sunset the same way. If you are doing a sentimental build with your own skis, the customization goes further, because now the specific skis in the chair carry their own story under the paint. The call is the easiest way to sort out exactly what you want. Ring 303.775.7273 and describe the fall you are trying to keep, and we will build the chair around it.
The one thing worth saying plainly is that we do not fake it. If you want something we cannot do well, we will tell you, because a chair that outlives the paint job it never should have had is nobody’s idea of a good time.
Built to Sit Outside Through a Colorado Year
A porch chair in the mountains has a hard job. Sun that is stronger at altitude, snow that sits on it for weeks, spring mud, summer thunderstorms, and then the whole cycle again. The Aspen Sunset Alpine is built for that job from the parts up. The skis were designed to live outdoors in exactly those conditions before they ever became furniture. The Douglas Fir base is a solid, weather-tolerant wood chosen to take indoor or outdoor life. And the mural is laid down in high quality exterior oil paint, the kind meant to hold its color against UV, which is why we can promise the sunset will not go pale on you by the end of one summer.
Care is not complicated. Keep it as you would any good outdoor wood piece. A cover or a garage spot for the deepest part of winter buys you years, though the chair does not demand it. Wipe it down when it gets dusty. That is about the whole maintenance manual.
Behind all of that sits the warranty, and this is the part where we get to be a little smug. Three year hassle free warranty. Yup. After that, anything that ever needs fixing is billed at materials cost only, because the shop that built it is the shop that repairs it and we are not interested in nickel and diming a chair we made. Furniture built to last should be backed like it, and this is.
The Gift That Outlives the Wrapping Paper
A lot of these chairs are bought as gifts, and they are very good at it, because they solve the specific problem of the person who has everything. The milestone birthday where nobody knows what to get. The retirement of someone who spent thirty years driving to the mountains every weekend. The couple whose big Colorado trip you want to mark with something better than a framed print. A hand painted ski chair is a gift that will still be sitting on their porch in fifteen years, which is not a thing you can say about most presents.
It works as a business gift too, for what it is worth, and this is where the sentimental version quietly becomes a serious recognition piece. Think about the difference between handing a thirty-year employee a plaque that goes in a drawer and handing them a chair painted with the mountains they love, maybe even built with a pair of skis they mailed in from their own garage. One of those gets tossed in a move. The other one gets talked about at the retirement party and used every weekend after. For a service award, a milestone, or a genuine thank you to someone who earned it, a piece of furniture with a story in it lands in a way a gift card never will. It is a lot harder to forget the company that gave you the chair you still rock in every fall.
How Ordering Works and Why Colorado Ski Chairs
Ordering is straightforward. You can buy the Aspen Sunset Alpine right off the product page for $675, or you can call first if you want to talk through a custom sunset, a denser stand of aspens, or a sentimental build with your own skis. Every chair is made to order in Manitou Springs, and we ship nationwide, so it does not matter whether you are down the road in Colorado Springs or across the country in a state that has never seen an aspen.
Why buy from us and not from a big-box store selling something ski-shaped? Because we actually build these, by hand, one at a time, from real retired skis, in a shop in Colorado run by people who ski. The chair is not stamped out on a line overseas and shipped flat. It is welded and painted and assembled here, and when you call the number on the site, you are talking to the people who make the thing. That is also why the quality holds up. Nobody is cutting corners on a chair with their own shop’s name on it and a three year warranty behind it.
Colorado Ski Chairs has been turning retired skis and snowboards into furniture and art for years now, from Adirondack ski chairs and snowboard benches to chairlift replica benches and wall art, and the Aspen Sunset Alpine is one of the pieces people come back for. It is a Best Seller for a simple reason. It does the one thing a photo of a Colorado fall can never quite do, which is let you sit down inside it.
Two Chairs and the Table Between Them
One Aspen Sunset Alpine is a good chair. Two of them is a scene. The compact Alpine frame is built to pair, and a matched set with a small table between them turns a porch into the place people actually want to sit, which is a different thing from a porch that just has furniture on it. If you are furnishing a cabin deck or a mountain rental you want guests to remember, a pair reads far better than a single, and it gives you the second coffee and the second rocker for the person who wandered out to join you.
You do not have to order them identically, either. Some people want two that match, a mirrored pair of the same sunset. Others want two that talk to each other, the same aspens under a slightly different sky, so they read as a set without being copies. Because every chair is painted to order, both are easy, and the second chair is where a sentimental build often shows up. One chair from your skis, one from ours, sitting side by side, which is a quietly perfect way to mark a couple’s Colorado story. Call 303.775.7273 if you want to work out a pair, and we will make sure the two chairs belong together on the same porch.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many skis does it take to make one ski chair?
A single Adirondack-style ski chair like the Aspen Sunset Alpine takes four to five pairs of retired skis. That surprises most people, since it means one pair does not make a chair. If you want your own skis in it, you typically send the one or two pairs that mean the most and we match the rest from our own stock of vintage skis so the chair is complete and built right.
Is this a real chairlift chair or a replica?
Neither, actually. The Aspen Sunset Alpine is a rocking chair built from real retired skis on a Douglas Fir frame, not a chairlift and not a replica of one. Colorado Ski Chairs does build chairlift benches, both replicas and the occasional genuine retired lift, but those are separate products. This one is a hand painted ski chair made to order in Manitou Springs.
Can it stay outside all year?
Yes. The skis, the Douglas Fir base, and the exterior oil mural are all built for outdoor life, including strong mountain sun and snow. A cover or a garage spot for the worst of winter extends its life, but the chair is made to live on a porch through a full Colorado year, and the sunset colors are painted to hold against UV rather than fade.
Can I customize the sunset or the aspens?
Yes, and it is the norm rather than a special request. Because each chair is hand painted to order, you can ask for a warmer or cooler sunset, denser or sparser aspen trunks, or a sentimental build using skis you send in. Call 303.775.7273 and describe what you are picturing, and the mural gets painted to match.
Bring the Fall Home
The aspens will turn again in a few weeks, and they will come down again a couple of weeks after that, same as always. The Aspen Sunset Alpine is the one way we know to keep a little of that color on the porch year round, built from real skis, painted by hand, and made to rock for a very long time. Take a look at the Aspen Sunset Alpine rocker, browse the rest of our ski chairs and Adirondack chairs, or call 303.775.7273 to talk through a custom sunset or a build using your own skis. The photo never quite worked anyway.
