The Walnut Suite

Of the five rooms the inn offered, the Walnut Suite was the one guests asked for by name. This page — successor to the suite's original photo page — records it as it was. Archival record; not bookable.

The Grand Suite

The Walnut Suite occupied a generous corner of the second floor, named for the carved black-walnut bedstead that anchored it. The inn's listing was characteristically brief — "grand suite with king bed, full sleeper, en suite private bath" — but the brevity undersold the room. The king bed's headboard rose dark and glossy against papered walls; a full-size sleeper made the suite workable for three; and the bath, the only one in the house that opened directly off its bedroom, made the Walnut the inn's most requested accommodation.

Why Walnut

Black walnut was the prestige hardwood of the Victorian American interior — dense, chocolate-dark, and carvable to a crispness that softer woods blur. A house finished in 1907 for two of Trinidad's leading merchants would have had its pick of materials arriving by rail, and the second floor's principal chamber got the best of them. The bedroom set attributed to the suite was older than the house itself, in the way of good Victorian furniture that follows families from address to address.

In the Life of the Inn

Anniversary couples took the Walnut almost by default; so did travelers marking a first night of a Colorado tour before striking north toward the Sangre de Cristos or west along the Highway of Legends. Guests woke to the smell of the day's breakfast climbing the stairwell, and to Fisher's Peak filling the south windows down the hall.

Continue the record: the suite's furnishings and antiques, and its architecture and light — or return to all five rooms.