Lake McDonald Lodge historic lobby
— — a room that has held a hundred winters.
Not only on a wall.
“A Swiss-chalet lodge raised on the shore in 1913, with a lobby that has barely changed since. Three stories of cedar and fir hold the room up. A great stone fireplace anchors one end. The pictographs the Blackfeet and the Salish painted on the concrete floor are still there, walked over, looked down at, slowly read. — from the studio
Lake McDonald Lodge historic lobby, 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.
The place, in three passes.
Lake McDonald Lodge sits on the southwest shore of Lake McDonald, the largest lake in Glacier National Park, ten miles up the lake from West Glacier, Montana. It was built in 1913 and 1914 for hotelier John Lewis, designed in the Swiss-chalet idiom by Spokane architect Kirtland Cutter, and replaced an earlier hunting hotel on the same site. The National Park Service acquired it in 1930, and in 1987 the lodge was designated a National Historic Landmark, recognised as one of the finest surviving examples of park rustic architecture in the American West.
The lobby is held up by full-length cedar and Douglas-fir logs, bark still on, gathered from the surrounding valley. At one end stands a stone fireplace built three stories tall from local stream cobbles. The concrete floor carries pictographs painted by Blackfeet, Salish, Kootenai and Cree artists during a 1914 stay arranged by Lewis. Lanterns hang from the rafters. The room reads now much as it did when Going-to-the-Sun Road was still a survey line on a map, and the railroad delivered guests by steamboat to the front door.
The lodge operates seasonally, typically late May through late September, with the surrounding road and most park services closed in winter. It is reached by Going-to-the-Sun Road, about eleven miles from the West Entrance at Apgar. The lobby is open to non-guests; the fireplace, the pictograph floor, and the back porch overlooking the lake are the parts most people come in to see. Glacier National Park itself was established in 1910 and covers just over a million acres along the Continental Divide on the Canadian border.