Old Faithful Inn log lobby
— — the joinery the woods remembered.
Not only on a wall.
“The log frame is whole lodgepole pine, milled only where the joinery demanded it and left twisted everywhere else. Reamer wanted the inside to feel like the forest that was still standing two miles out. The Crow's Nest above the third balcony once held a small orchestra for evening dances. The pine has darkened almost a century into amber, and the resin still carries on a cold morning. — from the studio
Old Faithful Inn log 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.
The lobby is the central volume of the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone, a seven-story space framed entirely in lodgepole pine cut from the surrounding park in the winter of 1903. Robert Reamer specified that the structural logs be left in their natural twisted and gnarled forms wherever possible, milled only at the joints. The room measures roughly seventy-six feet floor to ridge. It opened to guests on June 1, 1904, and remains the heart of the largest log hotel still standing in the world.
The lobby holds its own weather. Heat from the great rhyolite chimney rises through the open balconies and is drawn out at the ridge vent, so the upper galleries run several degrees warmer than the floor even in shoulder season. The pine resin still carries on a cold morning. Outside the front doors the basin steams continually, and on still winter mornings the lobby smells of woodsmoke, sulfur, and dry timber together, in that order.
Self-guided tours of the lobby and lower balconies are free during the inn's operating season, roughly early May through mid-October and again from mid-December to late February. Ranger-led architectural tours run twice daily in summer at no charge, leaving from the front desk. The Crow's Nest above the third balcony, which once held a small string orchestra for evening dances, has been closed to guests since the 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake shifted its supports.