How to Choose Art for a Mountain Home

Most of our work hangs in Colorado's Roaring Fork and Vail Valleys, which is to say it hangs against log, stone, steel, and a view the whole house was built to face. Mountain homes are glorious. They are also unforgiving. A few things we've learned, sometimes the hard way.

Don't compete with the view

We'll say it plainly: the most common mistake in mountain houses is hanging a painting of the exact view the window already provides, only smaller and worse. The window won that fight before you moved in. Give the room what the glass can't: still lifes, portraits, abstraction, works on paper you have to walk up close to. When we do hang landscapes, we pick ones with a different temperature than whatever is outside.

Respect the materials

Timber and stone are strong characters, and they will flatten a meek little print without noticing. What holds its own is work with real texture: folk art, oils with visible brushwork, photography with deep blacks. There's a log home in Basalt we've been filling for years with folk art, landscapes, and works on paper, and the whole point is that it looks gathered over time, not bought in a weekend. Collected, not decorated. That's the instinct.

Take the altitude seriously

Now the unglamorous part. Alpine light fades works on paper, textiles, and photographs faster than anyone expects, and it does not care what you paid. Museum glass on anything sensitive, placement out of direct southern exposure, and a framer who knows the territory. This is the least fun money you will spend on your collection, and the most important.

Scale up, then up a little more

Great rooms with twenty-foot walls humble normal-sized art. That painting that looked commanding in the gallery? Above a stone fireplace it reads like a postage stamp. Sometimes the answer is one genuinely large work. Just as often it's a salon wall, a stacked pair, or a long horizontal that holds a hallway. Either way, commit. One confident piece does more than four polite ones.