Stanley Hotel Estes Park Front Range Ceramic Art Tile
— the white hotel that wrote its own ghost story.
Not only on a wall.
“A white-clapboard hotel on a low rise above Estes Park, at the eastern gate of Rocky Mountain National Park. Freelan Stanley built it in 1909 after the mountain air saved his lungs, and ran his own Steamer cars up the canyon to fill the rooms. In October of 1974 Stephen King stayed one night in Room 217, the last night of the season, and walked out with the book that would name the place forever. The Front Range rises behind it like a back wall. The colour stays white against the dark of the trees.
Stanley Hotel Estes Park Front Range Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Stanley Hotel sits on a low ridge above the town of Estes Park in Larimer County, Colorado, at roughly 7,500 feet on the eastern flank of the Front Range. Freelan Oscar Stanley, co-inventor of the Stanley Steamer automobile, built the main hotel in 1909 in a Georgian Colonial Revival style, four stories of white clapboard with a long verandah facing west toward Longs Peak. He arrived in Estes Park in 1903 seeking the high dry air for his tuberculosis. The hotel is three miles east of the Fall River entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.
On the night of October 30, 1974, Stephen King and his wife Tabitha were the only guests in the closing-night-of-the-season hotel. King was assigned Room 217. He walked the empty corridors after dinner, dreamed of his son being chased by a fire hose down a long hallway, and woke with the first scaffolding of The Shining in his head. The novel published in 1977; the Kubrick film exteriors went to a lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon, but Kubrick's choice to film elsewhere only deepened the Stanley's claim. Every October the hotel hosts a Shining Ball and a horror-film weekend, and Room 217 is the most-requested key on the property.
The hotel operates throughout the year as a working property of about 140 guest rooms across the main Stanley and the Lodge. Daytime ghost tours run hourly from the lobby for a fee; a longer night spirit tour costs more. Room 217, Room 401, and Room 428 are the rooms requested for paranormal stays, and they book a year ahead for October weekends. The verandah and the public rooms (the music room with the F. O. Stanley piano, the billiard room) are open to non-guests during daylight hours. The hotel is at 333 Wonderview Avenue. The Fall River entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park lies three miles west.