Ski Lift Designs gives new life to old ski lift chairs

Need a lift in your life? You might have to settle for a ski lift chair on your porch or in the office.

A ski lift chair may not be the first choice for home décor, but Ski Lift Design’s Jacques Boiteau makes the case that they can be both functional and serve an aesthetic purpose: “Every chair is unique,” he said. “So we get something that has rusty paint on it, and it has a past life. When it gets to us, we take that story … and combine it with this awesome skill set that is metal fabrication and wood fabrication to create a functional piece of art.”

Boiteau and business partners Matt Evans and McCall Perry created the company in 2017 after Boiteau and Evans brought a few chairs back to Denver from a ski resort in Tucson, Ariz. After refurbishing the chairs and selling a few on craigslist, they found the chairs were more popular than they anticipated.

“Those first few chairs kind of turned into an idea and snowballed into something bigger,” Boiteau said. That’s when they needed to find a metal fabricating shop.

However, working with antique chairs is not as easy as the finished product may lead a customer to believe. Old and faulty welds often need fixing, and chairs typically must be stripped of 60 years’ worth of rust.

As Boiteau’s background is in industrial and petroleum engineering and Evans is a lawyer, they reached out to Jeremy Kavan of Wide Open Fabrication to help them with the gas metal arc welding (GMAW or MIG) and gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) necessary in the refurbishing process. Any technical tubing or bends that a restoration requires comes from Kavan.

“I would say most of our process is primarily MIG welding. We have to cut and reweld to adjust the height so that these older chairs can fit into a house. We also have to build from scratch the brackets that mount to the ceiling,” Boiteau said.

In addition to welding, the team also sandblasts the chair and applies a powder coating finish on it. To finish the chair, Boiteau creates a hardwood seat, something he does in-house.

“It’s a good balance to something that is industrial. It gives it a unique feel when you put something on the seat that’s warm and inviting,” he said. “It balances really well.”

In addition to doing some of the welding and all of the woodworking himself, Boiteau and his team do the installations of the chairs themselves, both for local and out-of-state orders (see Figure 1). However, if clients are too far to reach by car, they ship the chairs with additional installation instructions for general contractors or for clients that want to do their own installations (see Figure 2).

But for Boiteau, his favorite part is the collaboration: “My favorite challenge is working with someone who has seen what we’ve done and said, ‘Here’s my vision.’ You and this customer come together and get to a point where our experiences and artistic visions come together. We get to a point where it’s a leap of faith for them and a leap of faith for us.”

Collaboration between Ski Lift Designs and its customers happen mainly over the internet. The parties share engineering drawings and installation ideas (see Figure 3) to create something that Boiteau thinks of as art.

“It speaks volumes if someone is willing to put a ski lift chair in the entryway of a house, at a ski resort, or off a patio in Palm Springs, Fla. You know that it has to be something more than just a metal object you can sit on,” he said. “It has to tie into art. It has to tie into a feeling.”

Boiteau sees this as the beginning of his company’s story.

“We’ve scratched the surface of where this can go,” he said. “If you get back to the antique, the aesthetic, and home décor side of things, Ski Lift Designs is a brand that I hope can communicate the love of skiing and the history of skiing. Chairlifts will be our flagship product, but I also see other industrial parts of the lift, such as wheels or whatever else, being used for installations.”

Ski Lift Designs, https://skiliftdesigns.com

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