The Painted Desert Inn, which was built in the 1920s amid what is now the Petrified Forest National Park, reopened on Memorial Day weekend, reports the Arizona Daily Star. Here's the news release from the National Park Service about it.
It's no longer used for lodging, but as a museum. Fixing up the place wasn't easy:
Ironically, the soils that characterize the mottled Painted Desert posed the biggest challenge to the inn's restoration.
"They are two of the worst soils you can build on," Baiza said, referring to the absorbent and active clay and bentonite in the area.
Ultimately, the shifting substrate led to severe roof problems, and with 19 separate roofs, the complications only multiplied.
The Western Archeological Conservation Center in Tucson had a role in refurbishing the original Civilian Conservation Corps light fixtures. The hammered-tin lamps from the late 1930s have been cleaned and rewired, giving off brighter light than they used to. The long outmoded plumbing and electrical wiring is now up to code. The restored skylights feature motifs found in nearby petroglyphs.
Historic photos couldn't convey the vivid colors that Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter used when she redesigned the building in the late 1930s, but park historians were able to recover the original colors from a dining room chair. Under layers of paint, they found the bright coral, turquoise and lemony yellow that Colter adopted for the interior.