This 27-Year-Old Left a Promising Architecture Career to Revamp Her Family’s Struggling Hotel Business

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. A miner by trade, Papa Lance acquired the property in 1993 after he gave up his career mining silver and took over the inn from owner Sam Brooks.The Brooks Hotel is a historic fixture in downtown Wallace, and Nelson remembers her childhood summers spent listening to her grandfather develop relationships with the people who visited the inn year after year.

Running the hotel was an all-hands-on-deck operation, with Nelson jumping in to wait tables from age 8, staffing the front desk as a young teen and cleaning rooms when needed.Nelson was always aware that they were just barely making ends meet, and that Papa Lance heavily relied on the summer festivals to bring in visitors who would stay at the hotel.While Nelson never planned to go into the hospitality business herself, the summers she spent ingrained in the day-to-day workings of the property prompted her to choose to study architecture. “When I wasn’t waiting tables or… learning about all these customers, I was exploring this building,” Nelson explains. “There’s 10,000 square feet of unfinished space upstairs, and I got to run around there and in the basement and see how all of our systems were exposed or how this open-frame space could be one day.”Shortly after Nelson arrived at the University of Idaho, she learned that Papa Lance had suddenly fallen ill with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and died.

Not in a position to take over the property themselves, she and her mother Rachel Stanley decided to pass the property on to some cousins who were interested in running it.Three years later in August 2019, Nelson graduated from college and started her architecture career in Boise.