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Text by Mary Forsell •
Styling by Laurel Walter and Jennifer Bright •
Photograph by Matthew Millman
Four years ago, when Lynne Butcher went shopping in Upper Lake, a low-key
Northern California outpost, she didn’t intend to buy the biggest antique in
town: an 1895 hotel.
As is often the case with impulse buys, something
clicked when she saw the “for sale” sign. “The building was in pretty bad
shape,” she admits, “yet you could see that the place had possibilities.” She
and her husband, Bernard, had plans on the drawing board for a hotel elsewhere,
but changed their minds. “I made an offer right away,” she recalls.
Although
the purchase was impulsive, the restoration of the Tallman Hotel, its original
name, was anything but. Lynne contacted designer Candra Scott, who assembled a
team to restore the hotel’s glory. Drawings and photos from the past revealed
that this forlorn, tilting building had once stood proud with broad porches,
surrounded by other period structures that had been torn down or lost to fire.
Candra and her crew not only took on the hotel, but set about reinventing a
complex of architecturally diverse outbuildings, including a saloon and
farmhouse, covering five lots. “We interwove the character of different
periods,” says project architect Ian Murray. “We wanted to create the effect
that these things had happened over time.”
(a) In the lobby,
an antique egret from Paris anchors a nature-themed
diorama. (b) The team that resurrected the Tallman Hotel, from left to right: artist Carol
Thosath, landscape designer Tamara Crocker, architect Ian Murray, and
the
interior design duo of Richard Anderson and Candra Scott. (c) The
garden rooms resemble Craftsman cottages. (d) Every staircase is an adventure. (e) Black-eyed Susan vine and potato vine scale the porch posts.
(f) Unveiled in 2006, the
former stagecoach stop looks much as it did in
the Wild West days of the 1890s.
(g) Décor takes
its cue from the area’s flora and fauna. Framed vintage prints of frogs and
insects and a 1920s tramp art table are among the rustic parlor furnishings.
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