The Raised Dog Bowl Stand Made From Retired Skis
Somewhere in your garage, on a mat that has seen better days, two dented metal dog bowls sit at ankle height. The dog eats hunched over like he is bobbing for apples, water gets slapped onto the floor, and you have long since stopped noticing because that is just where the bowls live. A Ski Dog Bowl Set from Colorado Ski Chairs fixes all of that with something you would actually be proud to leave out, a handmade raised dog bowl stand built from retired skis and solid wood, hand painted in your colors and made to order in Manitou Springs, Colorado. It feeds the dog at a comfortable height and finally gives that corner of the kitchen a little personality.
Why a raised dog bowl stand beats a bowl on the floor
Let us start with the practical part, because there is a real reason these things exist beyond looking sharp. A raised dog bowl stand lifts the food and water up off the ground to roughly chest height for your dog, which means less craning, less gulping air, and a lot less of that slow-motion water slosh that ends up as a puddle you find with a sock. For older dogs, big dogs, and any dog with a stiff neck or hips, eating level instead of nose-to-the-tile is simply more comfortable. Ask anyone who has watched a Labrador try to eat off the floor at eleven years old. It is not graceful.
The Colorado Ski Chairs version stands 9 inches tall and 24 inches wide, which is a friendly height for medium and larger breeds and roomy enough to hold both a food and a water bowl side by side. It is not a dainty little dish holder. It is a proper stand with two recessed openings, built so the bowls sit down into the wood instead of perching on top where an enthusiastic eater can send them flying. If your dog treats dinner like a competitive event, you will appreciate that.
And because it gets the bowls up off the floor, cleanup gets easier for you too. No more bending all the way down twice a day. No more nudging the bowls back into place with your foot. The stand stays put, the dog knows where dinner is, and the whole operation looks like it belongs in the room instead of hiding in it.
Made from real skis, not a mass-produced mold
Here is where it stops being a generic pet product. This raised dog bowl stand is made from actual skis and wood, cut and finished by hand. Colorado Ski Chairs builds furniture and decor out of recycled and new skis and snowboards, and the dog bowl set is the same idea shrunk down to something that fits your kitchen. The ski becomes part of the structure, its graphics and color still visible, so every stand carries a little of that on-mountain history with it.
No two are exactly alike, which is the whole point. A ski has a life before it becomes furniture. It has scratches from a rock nobody warned you about, a topsheet design from whatever year it was made, a shape that tells you something about how people skied back then. When that ski gets built into a raised dog bowl stand, all of that comes along for the ride. You are not buying a thing that rolled off a line in a factory ten thousand at a time. You are getting a piece somebody actually made.
The wood base is solid and finished to hold up to real daily use, including the occasional splash and the reality that dogs are not careful. Speaking of which, the whole set is water and weather proof, so a sloppy drinker or a rainy back porch is not going to ruin it. More on that in a minute.
Pick your colors, because your dog has a brand too
The Ski Dog Bowl Set is customizable, and this is the part people have more fun with than they expect. You pick the colors. Want it to match your kitchen so it blends in like it was always there? Done. Want it loud and mountain-bright so it stands out on the patio? Also done. Some folks match it to their dog, some match it to their cabin, and a few match it to their favorite ski resort just because they can.
Each raised dog bowl stand is hand painted, so the color is applied by a person, not printed by a machine. If you have a specific look in mind, that is exactly the kind of thing to mention when you order. Colorado Ski Chairs does custom work for a living, so a particular color combination is a normal request, not a weird one. This is a gift item that can be made to feel personal, which is a rare thing in the world of pet supplies where everything comes in the same three shades of beige.
Built for indoor or outdoor life
Plenty of nice-looking pet furniture is really only meant for one spot indoors, and the second it sees a drop of water it starts to look tired. This stand is made for indoor and outdoor use, sealed to be water and weather proof, so you can put it where your dog actually eats instead of where a catalog thinks a dog should eat.
In a mudroom it takes the daily abuse of muddy paws and shaken-off snow without complaint. On the back patio it holds up to sun and the occasional summer downpour. At the cabin it earns its keep, because a mountain place with a dog is a mountain place with wet paws, and you want gear that does not mind. If your dog splits time between the house in town and the place up in the hills, this is the kind of thing that can live in either without you fussing over it.
Colorado is hard on outdoor gear. Bright sun, dry air, cold nights, the whole range in a single afternoon sometimes. A stand built in Manitou Springs by people who deal with that weather themselves is built with it in mind. That is not marketing, that is just where it comes from.
The gift for the dog person who has everything
We all know the one. The friend whose dog has a longer holiday card list than most humans. The couple who booked the dog-friendly cabin before they booked their own flights. The coworker with three photos of the dog and none of the spouse, and honestly, fair enough. Buying for that person is tricky, because they already have the leash, the bed, the toys, the little raincoat you swore you would never buy for a dog and then bought for a dog.
What they probably do not have is a handmade raised dog bowl stand made from real skis in their dog’s colors. It hits the sweet spot of useful and personal, which is the whole trick to a good gift. It is not another chew toy destined for the yard. It is a piece of the house that happens to be for the dog, and it says you actually thought about it. For a skier with a dog, it lands even harder, because it ties two things they love into one object they will see every single day.
At $149, currently marked down from $199, with free shipping, it also lands in that gift range that feels genuinely generous without requiring a serious conversation with your bank. You can browse the rest of the indoor decor and furniture collection if you want to build out a whole ski-cabin look, but the dog bowl set stands on its own just fine as the one nice thing you bring to the party.
Sized right for the dogs you actually have
The set measures 24 inches wide, 12 inches deep, and 9 inches tall. In plain terms, the 9-inch height suits medium and larger dogs comfortably, the kind of dog who has been eating off the floor with mild resentment for years. The 24-inch width gives you room for two bowls, food on one side and water on the other, without them crowding each other.
If you have a smaller dog, the height still works fine for many breeds and the footprint is not so large that it dominates the room. And if you are the sort of household with more than one dog, having both bowls up and steady on a solid stand cuts down on the mealtime shuffle where two dogs, four bowls, and one narrow strip of kitchen floor turn into a small traffic jam. Because the stand is custom and hand made, if you have a specific need worth mentioning, the shop is used to those conversations.
How ordering works
The Ski Dog Bowl Set is made to order, which is why you get to pick the colors in the first place. You place the order, you tell Colorado Ski Chairs what look you are after, and the piece gets built and hand painted for you rather than pulled off a shelf. Because it is handmade from real skis, give it a little lead time the way you would for anything custom. It ships nationwide, and shipping on this one is free, which takes the sting out of ordering a handmade piece from a small Colorado shop when you happen to live three states away.
If you are local to Colorado, even better. Colorado Ski Chairs is based in Manitou Springs, near Garden of the Gods, and does local pickup and delivery in the area. Either way, you end up with a raised dog bowl stand that started life on a mountain and now lives in your kitchen, which is a pretty good story for a dog bowl to have.
What makes Colorado Ski Chairs different
There is no shortage of places to buy a dog bowl. There are far fewer places where a person cuts down an old ski, builds it into a stand, paints it by hand in the colors you asked for, and ships it to your door. Colorado Ski Chairs makes handcrafted furniture and decor from recycled and new skis and snowboards, everything from Adirondack ski chairs and snowboard benches to wall art and, yes, raised dog bowl stands. The dog bowl set is one of the most affordable ways into that world, which is exactly why it makes such an easy gift or a low-risk first purchase.
Buying from a small maker means the thing you get was actually made, not assembled. It means when you pick a color, a human reads that and paints it. It means the ski in your kitchen had a real life before it got here. In a house full of mass-produced stuff, one honest handmade piece goes a long way, and it is a nice bonus that this particular one keeps a perfectly good ski out of a landfill.
From the lift line to the feeding station
Think about where a ski actually goes before it lands in your kitchen. It rode up a hundred lifts, chattered across ice on cold mornings, floated through the good powder days you still talk about, and got tossed in the back of the truck more times than anyone counted. Somewhere along the way it got retired, either because the bindings aged out, the shape went out of style, or its owner finally admitted the knees had opinions now. That ski could have ended up in a dumpster. Instead it becomes the backbone of a raised dog bowl stand.
There is something fitting about that second life. A ski spends its first career carrying somebody down a mountain, and its second one holding dinner for the family dog on a sturdy little stand. Both jobs are about showing up every day and doing the work without a fuss. When people ask what to do with old skis they can not bear to throw away, this is one of the better answers going, because the gear stays useful and stays visible instead of gathering dust in the rafters. You get to keep the story and lose the clutter.
For a lot of Gen X skiers, that resonates more than they expect. You learned on straight skis, you remember when a lift ticket cost about what lunch costs now, and you have a hard time letting go of gear that still has good bones. A raised dog bowl stand made from that era of skis is a way to hang onto the memory without keeping a pile of boards you will never click into again. The mountain days live on in the corner of the kitchen, which beats living in a landfill.
Where it fits in your home
The obvious spot is the kitchen, tucked against a wall where the bowls used to slide around. But this piece earns a place in more rooms than that. In an entryway or mudroom it becomes the dog’s official welcome-home station, the first thing that greets muddy paws after a walk. On a covered patio it turns the outdoor feeding corner into something you do not have to apologize for when guests come over.
At a mountain cabin it fits right in with the whole aesthetic, especially if you already lean into the ski-and-snowboard theme. A dog bowl stand made from real skis is not a costume in a place like that, it is the genuine article. Pair it with a few other reclaimed-ski pieces and the room starts to tell one consistent story instead of a bunch of unrelated purchases. Even in a sleek, modern space, one handmade object with real texture and history keeps the room from feeling like a showroom nobody actually lives in.
Because it is built to a real height and a real footprint, it also anchors its corner. A bowl on the floor is invisible until you trip on it. A 24-inch stand with painted skis and two steady bowls reads as furniture, a small intentional piece of the room rather than an afterthought shoved against the baseboard. That is a nice shift for something that, at the end of the day, is where the dog eats.
Keeping it clean season after season
One of the quiet advantages of a raised feeder like this is that it is simply easier to keep clean. The bowls lift out, so you can wash them the way you always would and wipe the stand down without getting on your hands and knees. Because the whole piece is sealed to be water and weather proof, a damp cloth handles most of the daily mess, and the finish is not going to swell or warp the way bare wood would after a few splashy dinners.
Outdoors, that same durability pays off across the year. Snow gets shaken off onto it in winter, pollen dusts it in spring, sun beats on it all summer, and it keeps doing its job. Give it the occasional wipe-down and it holds its look. There is no fussy maintenance routine here, no special conditioner you have to remember to buy, no covering it up every time the forecast turns. It is built by people who make outdoor ski furniture for a living, so weathering the seasons is baked into how it is made, not an afterthought bolted on.
The bowls themselves are the easy part, and the stand is designed to keep them from becoming a hazard. Set down into the wood, they resist the shove and skid that sends a floor bowl clattering under the table. Fewer spills means less to clean up, which is the sort of small daily win you stop noticing precisely because it just works. That is the mark of a good piece of everyday furniture. It quietly makes one small chore less annoying, twice a day, for years.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a raised dog bowl stand and why use one?
A raised dog bowl stand holds your dog’s food and water bowls up off the floor at a more comfortable eating height. It can reduce neck and joint strain for older and larger dogs, cut down on spills and mess, and keep the feeding area tidier. The Colorado Ski Chairs Ski Dog Bowl Set stands 9 inches tall and is made from real skis and wood.
What is the Ski Dog Bowl Set made from?
It is handcrafted from recycled skis and solid wood in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Each stand is hand painted, water and weather proof, and made for both indoor and outdoor use. Because real skis are used, every piece looks a little different.
Can I choose the colors?
Yes. The Ski Dog Bowl Set is customizable and made to order, so you pick your colors when you order. It is hand painted by Colorado Ski Chairs, so a specific color combination is a normal request. Just note what you want when you place the order.
How big is it and will it fit my dog?
The set measures 24 inches wide by 12 inches deep by 9 inches tall, with room for two bowls side by side. The 9-inch height suits medium and larger dogs well and works for many smaller dogs too. If you have a specific sizing question, the shop builds these by hand and is happy to help.
Give the dog a spot worth keeping
Your dog is not going to write you a thank-you note, and honestly the wag is better than a note anyway. But a raised dog bowl stand made from an old ski, painted in your colors, standing proudly in the corner where two sad metal bowls used to slide around, is the kind of small upgrade that makes the whole house feel a little more like yours. Take a look at the Ski Dog Bowl Set and pick the colors. Worst case, the dog eats in style. Best case, your friends start asking where you got it.
