Every skier treasures the chairlift. Of all the ways to reach a mountaintop, there’s something unique and peaceful about gliding through the sky on a couch next to your best friends, or a stranger with a few good stories. Every skier—no matter how young or old, inexperienced or well-traveled—has been there before.
The crew at Ski Lift Designs knows the nostalgic feeling of sitting on a slow double chair and has created a way to bring that feeling to your backyard, front porch or office space with their amazingly beautiful and functional custom refurbished chairlifts.
Usually, when a resort upgrades its lifts or shuts its doors, those old chairlifts are left to rust away in the weeds. However, with the keen eye and artistic touch from Jaques Boiteau and Matt Evans, co-founders of Ski Lift Designs, and their talented team of Denver, Colorado-based painters and metalworkers, those rusted-out benches are being transformed into centerpieces and conversation-starters.
When FREESKIER relocated its headquarters to Denver last June, our goal was to create an office space that nurtured creativity and reminded us why we’re all here in the first place: because we love skiing. Working with Boiteau and his team, we were able to conjure up the perfect complement to our office space. Our customized FREESKIER chairlift now sits in the entranceway of our new digs and has become a go-to laptop zone for the crew. From the laser-etched cherry wood bench featuring our FREESKIER snowflake logo to the snippet of cable that hangs overhead, it’s the ideal workplace addition for us mountain-goers.
But how does it all come together? Ski Lift Designs sources chairlifts from small, closed-down resorts, skier’s backyards, auction houses and wherever else they can find ’em. After transporting the beat-up seats to Denver, the lifts are sandblasted down to their bare bones. “Once you get the paint and the rust off, they’re actually beautiful,” notes Boiteau. “The welds and the metal; it has a whole different feel to it than what you see hanging at the ski resort.”
Once stripped, the chair is coated with a special ceramic paint that provides a glossy finish and protects the metal for years to come. The process is finalized by adding a laquer-stained wood bench–which can be customized with laser-etching like ours—turning the metal skeleton into an inviting, nostalgic place to take a load off.
Most importantly, the refurbished lifts that Ski Lift Designs produce evoke a sense of nostalgia and a feeling of being back in the mountains, no matter where they’ve been installed. For ski-crazed folks like us in the FREESKIER office, having a place to step away from our desks and “hop on the lift” to answer a few emails is truly inspiring.
If you’re someone who yearns for more time in the mountains and wants to bring that experience closer to home, someone with some serious space to fill in that corporate corner office or you’re just a ski-crazed homeowner looking to spice up the furniture in the backyard, hurry up and get in touch with Boiteau and his team at Ski Lift Designs.
