Boulder County

Gunbarrel houses were not built with a porch to decorate

Most of Gunbarrel went up in the nineteen seventies and eighties, and the front of a house from that era is a concrete pad, a walk and a garage door. We arrive with whole uncarved pumpkins and build at ground level, working with what is there.

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A Colorado porch pumpkin display running the length of a front walk near Gunbarrel.

There is no porch, so the ground does the work

The ranches, split levels and two stories through Heatherwood, Gunbarrel Green and the surrounding filings mostly have a shallow recessed entry, a slab, maybe one step, and no railing to build against. That rules out the vertical arrangement that works on an older porch. What works instead is a ground level composition, one mass to the hinge side of the door where it does not foul the swing, a run along the walk, and a bale to give the whole thing a horizon line so it does not read as a flat scatter. Those recessed entries are a genuine advantage in bad weather, because the fruit sits out of the worst of it. They are also darker, so we push the pale varieties forward where they catch light and keep the deep orange at the back.

Nothing upwind of you but open ground

Gunbarrel sits out on the flat east of Boulder with open space and farmland on several sides, so it takes both the downslope wind off the mountains and the straight run across open ground that central Boulder is partly sheltered from. The subdivision trees have matured enough to help, and a street with big ash and maple is noticeably calmer than the newer or more exposed filings out at the edges. We look at which of those you are on. On a sheltered street we can build taller and looser. On an exposed corner lot we drop the height, weight the windward side and stake the bales, and we accept that the slightly lower composition is the one still standing in the last week of October.

A cul-de-sac audience is the same twenty households all season

The street pattern here is curving and full of cul de sacs, which means almost nobody drives past your house who does not live on it. Your display is seen by the same twenty or so households, repeatedly, for ten weeks. That argues for something composed rather than loud, because a display you look at every morning on the way to the car wants to be pleasant rather than shouty. It also means it gets noticed. Children on the same street register a porch that changed overnight, and Gunbarrel is full of them. We build early in the season at a lot of these houses, mid August or the first days of September, so the display is part of the street for the whole autumn rather than a late arrival.

Access here is the easiest in the county

Practically, Gunbarrel is a straightforward place to work. Streets are wide, there is nearly always driveway or curb space directly outside, setbacks are generous and there are very few steps to negotiate. That means we can lay a whole Fairy Tale build out flat before placing a single pumpkin, which produces a better composition than working piecemeal on a narrow city porch. It also means the bigger packages genuinely fit. Fifty to sixty pumpkins would overwhelm a small cottage frontage and looks correct spread across a Gunbarrel entry, walk and driveway edge. You do not need to be home, move a car or clear anything. If there is a dog with the run of the front yard, or a gate that stays shut, tell us at booking.

Questions from Gunbarrel

How big does it need to be to read from the end of the street?

On a curving Gunbarrel street you are mostly seen from thirty or forty feet, not from a long distance, so this is not a size arms race. Full is the size that holds a standard frontage here. Little works if the entry is small or you want it concentrated tight to the door.

Do we need to be home when you build?

No. Most Gunbarrel builds happen with nobody in. We need access to the front of the house and somewhere legal to stop, both of which are easy here. Let us know about gates, dogs, or an irrigation line you would rather we did not stake into, and we work around it.

What happens to it all at the end of October?

It stays yours. We do not come back to collect or remove anything, so the pumpkins, bales and mums are yours to keep, to compost, or to leave out into November if you like the look. Plenty of Gunbarrel households clear the fruit and keep the bales for winter planting.