Mulholland to Marfa: How a Couple Destined for Hollywood Found Home in West Texas

By Barrett White

Marfa is a liminal space.

It’s undeniable—the dusty roads, the streets that are somehow simultaneously vibrant and silent, and of course the infamous Marfa Mystery Lights. The small West Texas town exists on a plane that isn’t quite here nor there; a spot in the nether between Central Texas and the adobe settlements of New Mexico. If a film were to be made of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast and Marfa were chosen as the filming location, no one would be surprised.

Perhaps that’s what drew Clark Childers and Adam Walton, owners of The Lincoln, a long- and short-term lodging community, to Marfa to begin with.

Childers, a Hollywood screenwriter, had been to Marfa prior to the couple’s big move. Before meeting Walton, Childers spent time in the Texas desert for the Marfa Film Festival in 2013 before he returned to Los Angeles where he “swiped right” on Walton, an actor. While crossing the country on a road trip from the Gulf Coast to LA, Childers convinced Walton to spend the night in Marfa. “I have more of a backstory with Marfa than Adam,” says Childers as he meets with me over Zoom. “I imported him.”

The backstory goes, while Childers was at Sundance Film Festival promoting a Texas-based film he’d written, he met Robin Lambaria, director of the Marfa Film Festival. Lambaria was in search of a festival coordinator. Childers himself was in search of a change of pace from Los Angeles. “I’d driven through Marfa exactly once,” Childers says. “I literally slept in my car in the courthouse square—almost in front of where our building is today—back in 2011.”

At the time, the Marfa Film Festival was heralded as one of the top small film festivals in the country. Enticed by adventure, Childers arrived in Marfa in an Airstream trailer. His work on the film festival would keep him and the Airstream in the small town for a year—just long enough for Marfa’s spell to be cast. “I had no intentions of living here full time,” Childers says. 

He was back in Los Angeles by September 2013, crafting scripts and building worlds on paper for Hollywood. Childers, a native of South Texas, and Walton, from New Hampshire, met in Los Angeles on Tinder. The pair began dating in February 2014. “I was baking and acting at the time,” says Walton. “Once we met, we were kind of attached. We just never stopped seeing each other.”

Marfa would beckon once more, though: After nearly two years of dating, Childers began work on a television series filming in New Orleans. The pair drove to Louisiana, stopping in Marfa along the way. “I was like, ‘What’s this little town?’” Walton says. “It was cute, but I didn’t really get it.”

Walton returned to Los Angeles after dropping Childers off in New Orleans. After eight months apart due to Childers’ filming schedule, Walton flew back to New Orleans to meet Childers so the two of them could drive back to Los Angeles together.

Along the way, they again stopped in Marfa—to adopt a cat. “Very domestic,” jokes Walton.

While in town, they toured a derelict property near the courthouse, which dated back to the 19th century. Per The Lincoln: “The commune-style property originally functioned as a stable yard for the Presidio County Courthouse in the 1890s. Sometime in the 1920s, a central residence was built in the yard, and the surrounding structures were gradually converted into casitas. The property operated as apartments for almost a century, taking on numerous owners and remodels, and ultimately fell into disrepair.”

“I had walked the property and I loved it,” says Childers of his first impression of the property. “It had wonderful bones. It reminded me a lot of the courtyard properties in Southern California, very traditional. But it was way too expensive and in horrible shape.”

While touring the property during their cat-adoption stop en route to Los Angeles, they noticed the property was under contract—surprising, considering the amount of time it had been on the market. What was more surprising to Childers was the new price tag, which had decreased by half. “The landowner really wanted to unload it,” Childers says.

When you see something on the market that you really love, it only makes you want it more. Under the impression that someone was purchasing the property anyway, Childers joked to Walton that they ought to submit a backup offer. “As an actor and a writer, I felt like this property could bring stability to our lives,” Childers says. 

The couple put in the offer and left Marfa in the rearview on their way back to the Hollywood hills. Five days later, the first offer fell through and they were next in line for the old Marfa property—and they had a decision to make. “I thought about it for a few days and was like, ‘I just can’t even think about doing this,’” says Walton. “But then I thought, ‘What do I have to lose?’”

The decision to close on the property brought forth only more questions, mainly what were they going to do with the property? “We had a lot of ideas,” says Walton. “But no strict game plan.”

“The place looked like Chernobyl,” jokes Childers.

Walking the grounds, the first decision made was that all spaces would be functional for either long-term or short-term use. Features such as a private bathroom, kitchen, and living space would be standard in each unit.

Childers had remodeled his Los Angeles apartment himself. Walton had participated in his father’s home remodel as a child. Armed with minimal experience, the pair got to work, handling all of The Lincoln’s design themselves.

Marfa officially had its eyes on Childers and Walton. The whole town, they say, had looked at the property at one time or another while it had been on the market and regarded it as a lost cause. One real estate agent told the couple, “Four people tried working on it before you. You were the ones who did it; the ones who pulled it off.”

Through Childers’ and Walton’s hard work and grit, The Lincoln was born. Named for its address, 105 West Lincoln Street, the lodging community fits right in with the desert-chic aesthetic of Marfa. Flanked by adobe residences, adorned with desert flowers, and tousled by an ever-silent breeze, The Lincoln welcomes guests for both short- and long-term stays, per the couple’s original game plan. The former stable house and apartment homes now comprise a compound of 16 lodgings of various sizes (one of which is a refurbished former underground bomb shelter, speaking of Marfa’s liminal attributes). There is also the newly christened 123-year-old Mary Todd House, the largest accommodation on property slated to open for booking in August 2020.

Childers and Walton are no longer the new kids on the block, either. Since moving to Marfa, Childers has become the Democratic County Chair of Presidio County, running elections for the Marfa area. “That’s my giving back to the community,” says Childers.

“This town is such a politically and socially motivated place,” adds Walton. “Because we’re so small and because we all know each other, people are generally very aware of what’s happening. People here go to City Council meetings. It’s hard not to be active here.”

The couple also remains active in Hollywood. Childers and Walton continue to work as a screenwriter and actor, respectively. “The amazing thing about Marfa is that I’d been in LA since 2003 trying to be a screenwriter working on television, for film, for agents, but I’ve actually had more progress on my career here in Marfa from a distance,” says Childers, referring to his work under director Joey Soloway, when Childers worked alongside producers for I Love Dick, starring Kevin Bacon, which filmed in Marfa the year after the couple moved there. “Adam’s had progress on his career from here, too,” he continues, referring to Walton’s on-screen appearance on the same show.

“I got my SAG card here in Marfa,” Walton says. “It was silly. We left LA, and LA came to us?”

After a year-long engagement and a courthouse wedding in Los Angeles, the pair made it official for friends and family at The Lincoln in Marfa on July 4, 2019. “We knew everyone would have a weekend off for the holiday to travel to Marfa,” Walton says. The wedding was both big and small—The Lincoln served as the venue, while a local band from Alpine, the next town over, performed. The whole town of Marfa was invited to the wedding. While the couple intended the wedding to be more like a celebration of wedded bliss, friends and family urged them to “renew their vows” on the spot. “We did an impromptu vow renewal with the same friend who’d officiated in LA,” Childers says.

The Childers-Walton wedding highlighted an important part of Marfa: The acceptance and love present in this small desert town in West Texas. “When same-sex marriage was legalized in 2015, volunteers lit the courthouse in a rainbow, even,” Childers adds.

In 2021, Childers and Walton add, Marfa may even see its first official Marfa Pride. Plans for the inaugural event are in the developing stages and “sponsorships out of [Texas’ larger cities] could help get Marfa Pride off the ground.” Stay tuned for Spectrum South’s coverage of the event, should it come to fruition.

Officially Marfa locals now, I couldn’t help but ask them about one of Marfa’s many claims to fame: What do they think about the Marfa Mystery Lights, anyway?

“I believe that they are something,” Childers says. “I’ve seen them in multiple places other than the Mystery Lights Viewing Center. I’ve seen them in places where there are no highways. They are not headlights.”

“I’m a skeptical person and I am not a spiritual person,” Walton says. “I don’t know what they are. I was taken out one night where I saw them move in ways that really freaked me out.”

“I love the mystery,” Childers continues. “I have absolutely no idea what it is. But I have a fantasy about it: I’ve read that some people call Marfa a ‘thin place,’ where the barrier between this dimension and another dimension is thin. I like to imagine that those lights are alternate versions of ourselves, looking out at our lights here in this dimension saying, ‘What the hell is that?’”