Dolores – This home in the San Juan Mountains is 22 miles up a winding mountain road that dead-ends in winter.
In the summer, the road goes on much longer than the pavement.
Few neighbors live here after the snow flies. At least the one that does – Dunton Hot Springs – is a good one.
Dunton is a ghost-town-turned-resort that carries the legend of being a place where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid once carved their names into the town bar. It was “a proper mining town,” explains Bella Pollen, a British novelist who, with husband David Macmillan, built this home-away-
from-home in the hills between Cortez and Telluride.
“The lore of the West still lives” here, Pollen says. “There’s a lot of unclaimed territory, and in a shrinking world, that’s a very romantic idea.”
Pollen, 45, is a former fashion designer who lived in New York City until she was a teenager. As a young woman, she settled in London once her business blossomed, thanks to a nod from Princess Diana.
She speaks with a British accent but has cultivated an easygoing style that seems at home in the denim-clad American West. Pollen discovered her inner pioneer roughly 15 years ago during a coast-to-coast road trip. “I’d never done the whole drive-across-America thing,” she says.
An acquaintance abroad introduced the then-aspiring novelist to a friend with “a house in the Rockies.” She intended to stop at his Ridgway enclave for a day. She ended up being there for three weeks.
Later, Pollen brought her husband to Colorado to stay in that same house during their honeymoon. Exploring together, the couple found the collection of old cabins that was then Dunton Hot Springs.
“It was fall, and everything was gold,” Pollen says with a glance at the snow-capped mountain view through a 13-foot window in the great room of her Colorado home. “We came over that mountain road and ended up here: one of the most beautiful places we’d ever seen.”
Pollen and Macmillan vacationed at Dunton for another five years. They brought their children to hike, fish, camp and soak in gurgling natural pools – all things that kids rarely do in England. When the chance arose to buy land across the road, “we did it over the phone,” Pollen says.
Macmillan is a longtime publisher, and a thinking man. He conceived plans for their “dream house” based on a famous English building with perfectly square rooms. “You stand in there, and it feels absolutely right,” Macmillan says.
He wanted the house to emulate an old barn, so he finished it with plain, unadorned fixtures including barn lamps, barn-like doors and simple iron hardware. “We had a very finite budget so everything had to be plain, plain, plain,” Macmillan says. “Convexly, that’s our taste.”
It was seven years ago when Pollen packed up the two youngest of her four children – Finn, now 11, and Mabel, now 8 – to oversee the final construction phase of her mountain house. Her fourth novel, “Midnight Cactus,” was born during that stay.
The story follows a woman in need of escape from middle-class boredom, who relocates with her children from London to a remote Western town. She promptly becomes embroiled in the West’s cultural contradictions and evolving demographics.
“The idea was to have someone so outside her comfort zone,” Pollen says. “A woman on her own, with two small children … Transport my whole situation here with the ghost town, and the building of this house, and all the great stories and stuff that happened to us, to the (Mexican) border,” and you have “Midnight Cactus,” Pollen says.
In real life, the footprint for the house was dug out from a hill overlooking Dunton Hot Springs. The construction crew was primarily Mexican and Navajo. Pollen’s son, Finn, went to the same school as some of their children.
“Those are my children” in the book,” she says. “All of the experiences we had, breaking down, power cuts, small vomits in the house, being snowed in. All that happened in the months we were here.”
Heavy, oversized antiques and vintage furniture now fill the otherwise plain rooms of the “barn.” Black and white celebrity portraits, several of which are signed, collectible movie posters, and traditional English artwork compose its eclectic decorating mix.
The home’s great room is dominated by a 13-foot-long, tufted leather sofa. The couple rescued this old piece from a London watering hole called The Irish Club.
An Italian tapestry roughly 300 years old and revealing only its brightest blue and red dyes occupies the wall above that grand couch.
“I bought it because it’s almost gone,” Macmillan says of the tattered woven image of a queen paying homage to her king. “That’s why I love it.”
Most of the barn’s furnishings have the same rough- hewn yet classic aesthetic, like a pair of worn, 1950s calf-hide chairs in the master bedroom, or the brass bed in one of the guest rooms that was Pollen’s “first bed in my first flat ever.”
Every mirror in the barn came from a local thrift shop. “They’re all half-chipped, but we love them,” Pollen says.
This also is a place where the author indulges her love of fabrics and textiles. A framed Moroccan dowry towel greets visitors to one bedroom. It hangs opposite a flattened and framed python skin.
Hides blanket the floors. Curtains and valances are made from salvaged blankets and vintage upholstery.
Mabel Macmillan describes the size of her city house in London’s Notting Hill Gate by tumbling across the red-carpeted basement floor of her Colorado playroom. “It ends about here!” she says, halfway through a somersault.
Kitsch now gives the barn- home its charm, from an army of rubber duckies in the master bathroom to the shell, geode and crystal collections that dot most of its rooms. So it’s hard not to wonder whether some of this stuff made its way across the ocean because Bella Pollen and David Macmillan ran out of space at home in London.
Home writer Elana Ashanti Jefferson can be reached at 303-954-1957 or ejefferson@denverpost.com.
