A Stitch in Time
19 Jan 2014
This home’s legacy is in keeping with its patchwork history.
By Lisa Marshall From the cozy third-floor workshop of Peter and Lynne Troup’s Mapleton Hill home, it’s easy to imagine what life might have been like for its original owner, Emma Louise Clark. Perhaps the widowed dressmaker surrounded herself with fabrics and patterns here, stitching away as she gazed through a circular window on the distant Flatirons and towering silver maples. More than a century later, the newest lady of the house passes the time in a remarkably similar way.
“I can’t make a dress to save my life, but this I can do,” says Lynne, as she runs her hand across one of the five exquisitely detailed quilts she’s working on. In one corner, 40 others are neatly stacked, waiting to be wrapped for holiday gifts and friends’ baby showers. Bolts of colorful fabric abound next to a design wall where she sketches out ideas. Around the room are quilted pillows and elaborate family scrapbooks in various stages of progress—the product of a creative mind, a steady hand, and the well-earned luxury of time.
“I’m just following in Emma Clark’s footsteps,” smiles Lynne, as she and Peter show a visitor around their historic bed-and-breakfast turned retirement dream home.
If you’d asked the Troups five years ago where they would spend their golden years, they probably would have said the East Coast. They lived in Baltimore for decades, with Peter working as a marketing executive for the cosmetics industry and Lynne raising their two daughters, Anne, now 28, and Hope, 23. “We figured we would be there forever,” Lynne says.
But during a 2009 visit to Colorado with Hope, Lynne paid a visit to Boulder and fell in love. “There was this vitality here, with interesting people at every level,” she recalls. “I went home and said to Peter, ‘What would you think about moving to Boulder?’ Something just drew us here.”
Soon they were walking the historic Mapleton Hill neighborhood in search of a home that matched their respect for history, their eclectic aesthetic, and their wish to be within walking distance of rich culture. They found it in a red brick masterpiece that has served as a Boulder stopover to many during its colorful 114-year history.
Built in the Edwardian Vernacular style of architecture, the home “had all the external charm we loved about the neighborhood, and on the inside it was just pristine,” Lynne says.
According to press reports and historical documents, the home was built in 1899 for Clark, then a 37-year-old woman from Prince Edward Island, Canada. She’d been widowed at 29 and moved to Boulder with her two children, Mildred and Maurice. She used the home as both a headquarters for her dressmaking operation and a boarding house for local schoolteachers, and lived there with her daughter until her death at age 103 in 1965.
Since then, the home has changed hands several times and grown to more than 5,000 square feet as a series of owners tastefully added to the back side, while preserving the home’s signature overhanging eaves, gabled dormers and romantic balconies out front. From the 1990s to 2006 it was run as the Inn on Mapleton Hill (previously known as the Magpie Inn), a seven-room B and B coveted for its balcony views of the Flatirons and its key location a block from Pearl Street.
