The best custom projects start with a very specific problem. This one started with coats, helmets, and bags, and nowhere good to put them.
Studio Garrison, a full-service interior design firm based in Portland, Oregon and Palm Desert, California, came to us with a hospitality brief for Snowshoe Mountain Resort in West Virginia. Snowshoe is one of the premier ski destinations on the East Coast, part of the Alterra Mountain Company portfolio alongside Mammoth, Steamboat, and Deer Valley. With 257 acres of skiable terrain and 1,500 vertical feet, it is a serious resort with serious hospitality expectations.
The design team had identified something the standard furniture market was not solving: guests arriving from the mountain loaded with gear, draping coats over chair backs, leaving helmets on the floor, turning the dining area into a storage problem before anyone had ordered a drink.
Their solution was elegant in the way that the best design solutions always are. They did not want more storage. They wanted the chair itself to solve it.
The Hook
A hook was the answer, built directly into the back of the chair, positioned and sized to hold a coat, a ski helmet, or a bag. One detail, added to the structure of the chair at the manufacturing stage, that changes how the whole space functions the moment guests walk in from the slopes.
Three engineering decisions made it work properly.
The first was the hook itself, integrated into the frame rather than attached as an afterthought. The second was a protective guard around the hook, designed to prevent guests from accidentally grabbing it when moving the chair. In a busy dining room, the instinct is to grab the back of a chair at whatever point is most convenient. Without the guard, the hook becomes a hazard. With it, the hook is protected and the chair moves safely.
The third was a horizontal bar added across the top of the chair back, with a deliberate open space beneath it sized for a hand to pass through. That gap gives guests a clean, intuitive grip point for moving the chair — no reaching around, no awkward angles, no tipping. The chair moves the way a busy service environment requires it to move.
Each of these details is invisible when the chair is working correctly. That is the point. Good hospitality design solves problems guests never have to think about.
It is a small set of modifications in the context of the overall chair. In the context of how a ski lodge actually operates on a busy Saturday afternoon, it is the difference between a dining room and a coat check with tables.
Wood Meets Metal
Studio Garrison specified an ash wood seat paired with our signature powder-coated metal frame and back. It is a combination we do not use in the standard collection, and it changes the character of the piece significantly. The ash adds warmth at the point of contact, where a guest actually sits, while the metal frame carries the structural precision and commercial durability the chair needs to perform in a high-traffic hospitality environment.
Because the wood seat and metal frame are finished independently, the two can be tuned separately to fit the design direction of the space. Studio Garrison's brief called for a specific color and finish that complemented the lodge's interior palette. The result is a chair that reads as designed for the space rather than specified into it.
The wood is finished with a durable, wear-resistant treatment built for daily hospitality use, not a light residential stain. This is furniture that will be sat in hundreds of times a week for years. The finish is calibrated for that reality.
Built to Stack, Built to Move
Lodge seating has to be flexible. It gets cleared for events, rearranged for the season, stacked for storage between services. The chair is fully stackable, and it comes in three heights — chair height for dining and lounge seating, counter stool height for bar tops and high tables, and bar stool height including a custom ADA option — so a single design family can outfit the entire property from the dining room to the bar to the lounge.
Every height shares the same design language: the wood and metal seat, the coat hook detail, and the color flexibility. One cohesive family of furniture, end to end.
Custom Color at Scale
Over 200 RAL powder coat colors are available on every Bend Goods frame as standard. For larger orders we extend to custom Pantone matching, so a brand color reproduces exactly across every piece at every location, not approximately.
For a hospitality group with multiple properties, or a single lodge that needs a specific color to match a visual identity, that level of precision matters. We wrote more about how that process works in our post on Bespoke Engineering at Scale.
Working with Studio Garrison
Studio Garrison brought a clear brief, a specific problem to solve, and the design discipline to know that the right answer was a detail rather than a different product entirely. That is the kind of collaboration that produces something worth building.
If your project has a detail like this one, something specific to how the space actually gets used rather than how it looks in a render, that is exactly the kind of problem we like to solve.
We wrote more about how that process works in Bespoke Engineering at Scale. If your project has a detail like this one, something specific to how the space actually gets used, that's exactly the kind of problem we like to solve. Get in touch and let's talk about what custom could look like for you.