India Yellow and the Floors I Refused to Touch
CHAPTER 2
There's a moment in every room I design where the whole thing clicks, and in the foyer of the Gold House, it happened at about 4:30 on a fall afternoon. The sun drops behind the peaks early here, and for twenty minutes the light goes low and honeyed, and the walls (Farrow & Ball's India Yellow, if you want the exact recipe) started to GLOW. Not yellow like a kid's crayon. Gold like the inside of a lantern. I sat down on the bottom stair with a coffee going cold in my hand and just stared at it. Fifteen coats of dust and doubt, worth it.
The foyer is the first finished room in this house, which feels right, because it's the first thing the house says to anyone who walks in. In a 150-year-old Leadville home, the entry has greeted miners, families, a century and a half of snowy boots. I wanted mine to say: warmth lives here. Come in.
India Yellow was a leap for me. My instinct after twenty years of clean, contemporary work is quieter, cooler, more restrained. But this house keeps pulling me somewhere braver, and honestly, a saturated historic gold in a historic gold-town house… the color was already in the walls' bones. I just made it visible.
Above the art, I hung gold light fixtures (leaning into the theme, zero apologies), and then built out a gallery wall that I kept editing and re-hanging until my level and I were no longer on speaking terms. A gallery wall in an entry is one of my favorite moves for any home, but especially a second home or mountain home: it's the fastest way to make a space feel unmistakably like YOU before a guest takes five steps. Pieces I've collected, pieces tied to people I love, pieces that make me laugh. Every time I walk in with groceries, I get a little hit of my own story.
But here's the part of this room I want to talk about most, and it's the part I DIDN'T do.
The floors are original. 150 years old. And I left them raw. Unfinished, unsealed, bare.
Believe me, that was not the easy call. I refinished the living room floors (stained them a deeper brown, and they're gorgeous, more on that in a future post), so I know exactly how satisfying that transformation is. And I'm the person who wants everything done yesterday!!! But the foyer is the hardest-working square footage in a mountain house. Snow, mud, grit, race-day gear dumped by the door. Whatever finish I chose would get destroyed while I'm still deciding whether this space eventually wants a hard surface like tile or stone.
So I chose restraint. Raw floors, on purpose, until the right answer shows up.
Twenty years of design has taught me that restraint IS a decision, and often the most confident one in the room. There's a real difference between unfinished and undecided-on-purpose. One is neglect. The other is patience with a plan. It's the same thing I tell the athletes I coach: sometimes the strongest move is holding back, staying easy, waiting for the moment that actually matters.
The house keeps teaching me this.
I keep (slowly) learning it.
Next up in the series: the living room floors, and the weekend I almost quit them.
