The Winter Club Room at the historic Ahwahnee Hotel is a cozy, comfortable sitting room offering floor to ceiling display cases, a winter sports theme, vintage photos, a corner fireplace, and large windows that create a relaxing mood that’s especially comforting in winter. It was named for the Yosemite Winter Club, a non-profit organization founded in 1928 and dedicated to promoting winter sports in Yosemite. The club has gathered in that room for over eighty years, and when we were asked to refresh the decor we returned once again to the National Park Service archives for clues as to how the room looked back when Yosemite was competing to host the winter Olympics of 1932 (Lake Placid was selected instead).
The room’s early history helped us choose the fresh blue and white plaid fabric for the simple drapery panels and the backs of the existing dining chairs (their seats are upholstered in a more practical, dark blue commercial fabric). The new seating arrangement before the main window, anchored on a newly acquired antique Persian rug, invites casual conversation or contemplation, while the four tables with chairs are welcome destinations for board games, beverages, or staking out a spot to spend a few hours writing Christmas cards.
As with all the public spaces in the hotel, our aim was to restore some integrity and functionality to the Winter Club Room — and to restore a view that had been obscured by yards and yards of extraneous fabric. When we removed those heavy, swagged draperies from the windows, a manager who’d worked in the hotel for many years exclaimed, “Wow! You can see Half-Dome from here!”
Exactly.
