IN THE EARLY years of the twentieth century, Hollywood stars and other wealthy Americans liked to retreat to luxurious native-themed hotels along the Santa Fe railway lines that snaked across the southwest. There they would sit in fringed buckskin easy chairs, gazing at fireplaces framed with Hopi sand paintings while puffing on cigars and retelling adventure yarns.

Many of these hotels were the triumph of Mary Colter, who as a child was moved to hear of the Sioux defeat at Little Big Horn. She resolved to keep the native heritage alive in buildings that she would design. Never mind that women couldn’t become architects then—she trained herself.

Designed to look and feel like a traditional Mexican hacienda, La Posada welcomes visitors into a spacious hallway with ochre-and-white adobe walls. Overhead soar turquoise-coloured beams, stencilled with design motifs of nearby First Nations tribes. On the wall hangs a striking Blessed Virgin in an elaborate handmade tinwork frame. But as you turn the corner into the sitting area, strange cast-iron rabbits with elongated El Greco necks and bodies hold ashtrays on outstretched paws. On the wall is a contemporary painting of two women singing operatically into what seems to be the teeth of a hurricane.

“You’re in the home of Don Alphonso de los Pajaros, who liked to collect modern art as well as antiques,” says Alan Affeldt, the San Franciscan who saved La Posada. He explains that Don Alphonso didn’t really exist. Mary Colter invented him and his family to help imagine an old hacienda that somehow survived into modern times.

After the hotel was placed under National Trust protection in 1994, Affeldt bought it and began a massive restoration. His wife, artist Tina Mion, offered her own paintings for the walls, and made stained glass images of the hotel’s patron saints. Her brother, a master carpenter, moved his family to Winslow for two years to restore La Posada’s woodwork.

Each room is decorated with beds and tables made in Santa Fe style, with antique pieces where possible. The bookshelves are stocked with old volumes, and each room is named for a celebrity who once stayed there. We stayed in the Jimmy Doolittle, just down the hall from the Fred Astaire.

Waking up to pancakes with prickly pear syrup in the Turquoise Room, and gazing thoughtfully at the train tracks just outside the door, makes it hard to leave.

Prices start at US$89.

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