Seven Years to Get It Right
The Geist family — Trevor with parents Lance and Robin — bought the Burro Avenue building in 2019 and spent seven years gutting and rebuilding it to a single standard: theirs. "We wanted it exactly the way that we wanted," Trevor Geist told the Cloudcroft Reader, "and we weren't going to let time frame or anything else get in the way of this place being exactly what our vision was."
The result is a Gilded Age hotel in the heart of the village: Tiffany-style lighting, crystal pendants, and gas-lamp fixtures set against dark wood and steel, furnished with antiques hunted from roughly 150 shops across New Mexico, West Texas, southern Colorado, and Arizona. The check-in desk came from a bank in Lincoln, NM; the hallway railing is genuine railroad iron — a nod to the rail town Cloudcroft was born as. Behind the period surfaces the building is new where it counts: fresh plumbing, clean drywall, and quiet mini-split climate control in every room.
