Fall Themed Outdoor Decor for a Mountain Porch That Lasts
The aspens above town go gold somewhere around the first week of October, hold it for maybe ten days, and then one afternoon a wind comes through and takes the entire show down at once. Every year people stand on their deck during that window with a cup of coffee, watching the best ten days their property will ever have, and thinking the exact same thought. This is as good as the view gets, and I am watching it from a plastic chair I bought at a big box store in 2019. Fall is not really a decorating problem. It is a seating problem wearing a decorating costume.
Fall Is When a Porch Tells the Truth
Summer is forgiving. In July everything is green, the light is generous, the grill is going, and nobody is looking closely at your furniture because there is too much else happening. Then the leaves turn, the yard goes brown and gold, the low light comes in sideways at four in the afternoon, and suddenly you can see every single thing on that deck with uncomfortable clarity. The faded resin chair. The cushion that has been rained on so many times it has developed opinions. The folding camp chair with the busted armrest that somebody keeps meaning to throw out.
This is why fall themed outdoor decor for a mountain porch usually goes wrong. The instinct is to add. A pumpkin here, a bale of straw there, a wreath of plastic maple leaves that were manufactured in a country with no maples. By the second week of November the pumpkin has collapsed into itself, the straw has started composting on your steps, and the wreath has gone the color of a manila envelope. You spent money and effort and what you have to show for it is a mess to clean up in the cold.
The alternative is to fix the thing you actually look at every day. One good piece of furniture does more for a porch in October than a truckload of seasonal props, because it is still doing the job in January, and in April, and the following October when the aspens go again. Fall decor that has to be thrown away is not decor. It is a subscription.
There is also the small matter of actually sitting outside. Colorado autumn afternoons are some of the best sitting weather in the country. Fifty five degrees, no bugs, no wind, the light going amber. If the only seat available is a wobbly plastic thing, you go back inside, and you miss the part of the year you wait for.
What Actually Goes Into One of These Chairs
Start with the skis. A single Adirondack ski chair takes four to five pairs of retired downhill skis, which surprises almost everyone the first time they hear it. A matched set of two takes eight to ten pairs. Those skis get cut, drilled, layered and fastened into the seat and the back, which is why the seat back on one of these has a texture and a rhythm to it that you cannot fake with slats of pine.
Underneath the skis is a Douglas fir base, which is the part doing the structural work. The skis give you the look and the story. The fir gives you a chair that holds 400 pounds and does not go soft after a season outside. Every chair gets a ski binding mounted as a cup holder, which is the detail that makes people laugh the first time they see it and then quietly become attached to.
Dimensions run about 45 inches tall, 36 deep and 32 wide on the standard build, with some designs standing 55 inches. They are comfortable for people anywhere from three feet tall to six feet ten, which covers grandkids through the tallest guy at the barbecue. Paint is exterior oil, applied by hand, which is a slower and more expensive way to do it than spraying on something water based, and also the reason these hold color out in the weather instead of chalking up.
Three year hassle free warranty. Yup. On outdoor furniture. That is not a normal thing to offer, and it exists because the chairs are built in a shop in Manitou Springs, Colorado by people who have to answer the phone if one of them fails. Most chairs ship free to the lower 48.
Why a Hand Painted Mural Reads So Well in October
Here is something that took a while to figure out. The murals that look best in fall are not the fall murals. They are the ones with warm light in them. Sunsets, alpenglow, that specific orange and pink that Colorado does on the back side of a mountain in late afternoon. Put a chair like that on a deck surrounded by gold aspens and the whole thing agrees with itself.
The Aspen Maroon Bells Sunset Mural Ski Chair is the clearest example we have of this. The Maroon Bells at sunset, hand painted in exterior oil across the back of a full size Adirondack chair built from retired skis on a Douglas fir base. It stands 50 inches tall, 36 deep and 32 wide, with the ski binding cup holder. It runs $1,441.
Every one of these is hand painted, which means the mural takes real hours from a real person holding a real brush. It also means no two come out identical, partly because of the painting and partly because no two sets of retired skis are the same. If you get precious about wanting a perfect factory match to a photo on a screen, this is probably not your kind of furniture. If you like that the thing you own is the only one of its kind, it very much is.
Worth being clear about one thing, because people ask. Murals are hand painted in exterior oils. A logo is never painted. Logos go on as a logo decal floated onto a painted background, with aluminum and plastic appliques available as alternatives. That applies whether it is a ski resort mark, a college, or a company. Pricing on branded work gets quoted on a call, because it depends entirely on what you want.
Who Buys This Instead of Another Pumpkin
The honest answer is people in their fifties and sixties who are done buying disposable things. They have owned the cheap patio set. They have owned two of them, actually, because the first one lasted three summers. They have reached the point where spending more once and being finished with it sounds better than saving money four separate times.
A lot of them are skiers, or were. Somebody who learned on straight skis and still has a pair of them in the garage rafters because throwing them out felt wrong. That pair has been up there for twenty years waiting for a purpose, and the purpose turns out to be a chair. We build those too, from your own skis, over in the sentimental pieces. People send in a parent’s old skis, a kid’s first pair, a set from a season that meant something.
Then there are cabin and second home owners, who have a very specific problem. Their furniture sits unattended through a winter. Nobody is bringing cushions in when a storm rolls through in February. They need something that can be left alone from October to May and still be worth sitting in when they come back, which is a much shorter list of products than you would think.
And there are people who just fell for the look. They saw one on a porch in Breckenridge or outside a lodge in Winter Park, took a photo of it, and spent a year wondering where it came from. That happens often enough that we can usually guess which chair before they finish describing it.
Where It Actually Belongs on the Property
Front porch is the default, and it is the default for a reason. A hand painted chair facing the street does something a wreath cannot. It says a person lives here who cares about the place. If you have room for two, put them at a slight angle to each other rather than square to the door, because nobody sits comfortably in a chair that is aimed at a wall.
Fire pit is the other big one, especially in the fall. This is when the fire pit finally earns its cost. Three or four chairs in a loose ring, far enough back that nobody’s shins cook, close enough that you do not have to shout. If you are building that out from scratch, the patio sets get you matched pieces without having to assemble them one at a time over three seasons.
Then there is the spot most people forget, which is a single chair somewhere slightly odd. The end of a deck. Under an aspen at the back of the lot. Beside the shed facing west. One chair, alone, pointed at something worth looking at. It gets used more than the porch furniture does, every time. Nobody plans that spot. It plans itself once the chair shows up.
Indoors is legitimate too, particularly for the mural pieces. A ski chair in a mudroom or a great room next to a wood stove works, and there is a whole run of indoor decor and furniture built with that in mind. The oil paint does not care which side of the wall it is on.
Making It Yours Without Making It Weird
The custom side is where most of the interesting work happens. Send a photo of the view from your deck and it can get painted onto the back of a chair. Pick a range, a peak, a lake, a stand of aspens in October. We charge $75 an hour for customization, so the cost tracks the actual complexity rather than a made up tier structure.
Color is the easy lever and the one people underuse. You do not have to take a design as shown. Tell us what you want and what you do not want, and the ski brands and graphics on the skis themselves can be steered toward or away from certain looks. If your house is all warm browns and rust, we are not going to hand you a neon blue chair and wish you luck.
Rocker conversion is $75 more, built on repurposed oak wine barrel slats. On a porch, a rocker is the correct answer more often than people expect. There is a reason porch rockers outlived every trend that tried to replace them.
If you want the whole thing to lean into fall specifically, aspen leaves and falling leaf motifs are a standing request and they paint beautifully against a sunset background. The Aspen Tree Sunset Mural Adirondack Ski Chair is that idea already built, at $695, if you would rather point at something than describe it over the phone. Browse what has been built before over in custom designs and use it as a starting point rather than a menu. Almost nobody orders exactly what is pictured, and that is the point.
Care From First Frost Through Mud Season
Short version. You do not have to do much. That is most of the appeal.
Exterior oil paint over a Douglas fir base is a genuinely weatherproof combination. These chairs sit out through Colorado winters, which involves sun at altitude, freeze and thaw cycles, wet snow sitting on a seat for a week, and then sixty degrees in February. That is a harder test than most of the country runs, and it is the environment they were designed around.
If you want to be good to it, do three things. Brush the heavy snow off the seat when it piles up, not because the chair minds but because water sitting in one spot for months is water sitting in one spot for months. Keep it off soft ground where the legs can sink into mud and stay wet. And once a year, in spring, give it a wash with mild soap and water and look it over.
What you do not need is a cover, a storage plan, a garage spot or a set of cushions to haul in and out. A lot of people buy outdoor furniture and then spend the next decade doing chores for it. The whole idea here is furniture that owes you nothing.
If something does go wrong in the first three years, that is the warranty, and it is a real one. Call the shop. You will get somebody in Manitou Springs, not a ticket number.
Fall Is When Holiday Orders Start, Whether You Like It or Not
Nobody wants to hear about Christmas in October. Here is the practical reality anyway. Made to order pieces run two to four weeks, sometimes longer during the busy stretch, and the busy stretch is November and December. Every year a handful of people call in the second week of December wanting a hand painted chair under a tree, and every year the conversation is more awkward than it needed to be.
If a chair is the gift this year, October and early November is the comfortable window. You get the full range of customization, you get the mural you actually want, and nobody is doing math about shipping cutoffs. Order in fall, forget about it, and then be the person who is completely relaxed on December 18th.
These land hard as gifts, which is worth saying plainly. A retirement, a fiftieth birthday, a last season on the mountain, a couple moving into a cabin. It is a piece of furniture that gets a story attached to it, and it stays in the family. Nobody has ever regifted one of these. The gift items category has the smaller pieces if a full chair is more than the occasion calls for, and the ski gifts for him and her collection sorts the same range by budget. If what matters is that the thing was genuinely made here rather than imported and rebranded, Colorado made gifts is the shorter list.
And if the timeline has already gotten away from you, check ready to ship. Those are finished pieces sitting in the shop right now with no build time in front of them. Selection is whatever it is on a given day, which is the tradeoff, but they move fast.
How Ordering Actually Works
It is less formal than most people expect. You can order straight off the site, and plenty of people do. But if there is anything custom in play, a mural, a color direction, a set of your own skis, a deadline, the better move is to call 303.775.7273 and talk it through for ten minutes. That conversation prevents almost every problem that ever comes up later.
Production runs two to four weeks on most made to order pieces. If you have a hard date, say so up front, because it can usually be worked around. What does not work is a hard date that surfaces after the piece is already in the queue.
Shipping is free on most chairs to the lower 48. Local delivery covers Colorado broadly, Colorado Springs, Denver, Breckenridge, Vail, Aspen, Winter Park, Crested Butte, Glenwood Springs, Boulder, Fort Collins and plenty of towns in between. If you are in state, ask about delivery rather than assuming freight.
Budget is a fair thing to bring up. There is real range in the ski chairs lineup, from straightforward builds to full mural work, and the shop would rather find something that fits than lose the conversation. Say the number. It is not rude, and it usually helps.
One Chair, Two Chairs, or Something Bigger
People almost always underestimate how many seats they need, then correct in the wrong direction. Here is the shape of it. One chair is for a specific view or a specific person. Two is for a porch where somebody actually sits with someone else. Four is a fire pit. Anything past that is a lodge, a rental property or a family that hosts more than they admit.
If you are torn between one and two, buy two. Not as an upsell, just as a practical matter. A single Adirondack chair on a porch reads as a decision somebody made about themselves. A pair reads as an invitation. Ordering a matched set at the same time also means the skis and the paint come from the same run, which matters more than you would guess when they sit side by side for a decade. A pair like the Cloudy Sunset Mountain Mural Ski Chairs is $1,991 for both, and there is more of that in sets of two if you want to compare murals before you commit. Remember it takes eight to ten pairs of skis to build a set of two, so speak up early if you are sending your own.
A bench is the other direction, and it is worth considering in the fall specifically. Instead of two chairs facing a fire, one wide bench facing a view, which is a different way to spend an October afternoon. There is a full run of ski benches built on the same principles, same repurposed skis, same Douglas fir, same exterior oil. A single snowboard makes a bench all on its own, which is how the Light Blue Mystic Mountain Mural Snowboard Coffee Table and Bench lands at $471 and doubles as a coffee table once everybody moves inside.
And if the goal is one piece that makes people stop walking, look at the oversized builds. A 55 inch chair on a front porch changes the scale of the whole house. It is a lot of chair. That is entirely the point.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many pairs of skis does one chair take?
One Adirondack ski chair takes four to five pairs of retired downhill skis. A matched set of two chairs takes eight to ten pairs. That is why the seat and back have the depth and texture they do.
Can these really stay outside all winter in Colorado?
Yes. They are built from repurposed skis on a Douglas fir base and finished in exterior oil paint, which is a weatherproof combination designed for exactly this climate. No cover or winter storage is required, and the piece carries a 3 year hassle free warranty.
Can you paint my company or resort logo on the chair?
A logo is never painted. It goes on as a logo decal floated onto a hand painted background, and aluminum or plastic appliques are available as alternatives. Pricing on branded work is quoted on a call at 303.775.7273 because it depends on the artwork and quantity.
How long does a made to order chair take, and does it ship free?
Production is typically two to four weeks, occasionally longer during the holiday rush, and hard deadlines can usually be accommodated if you mention them when you order. Most chairs ship free to the lower 48, with local delivery available across Colorado.
Can you use my own old skis?
Yes, and it is one of the most requested things the shop does. Ship them in, drop them off, or arrange a pickup in Colorado, and they become the chair. A single chair needs four to five pairs, so plan accordingly if you are hoping to use one specific set.
If the aspens are already turning and you are looking at your deck wondering what to do about it, the fix is one good piece, not ten disposable ones. Call the shop at 303.775.7273 and talk through what you want on it, or start with the Aspen Maroon Bells Sunset Mural Ski Chair and go from there. Everything is built by hand in Manitou Springs, Colorado, and it will still be on that porch the next ten Octobers.
