MANTI—How was one family able to buy a 5,000-square-foot bed-and- breakfast inn that had gone out of business and restore it as a single-family residence in nine months?
“Literally, it was divine intervention that we were able to purchase it when we did and have the money to restore it,” says Tari Van Tassell, owner of what was the Manti House Inn at 400 North and Main Street. “Everything just fell into place.”
One thing that helped, she says, is that her husband, Bryan, has owned a roofing company based in Utah County, 4Bs Roofing, for 25 years.
“He knows people in all the trades,” she says. “All the contractors were unbelievable,” she says.
The Van Tassells have five children. Two older sons, Bryson and Brandyn are married. A daughter Bailey lives in Cedar City and plans to be married soon. Two other daughters, Sonny, 16, and Mercy, 9, are living with their parents in the Manti House.
The family had lived in the Covered Bridge Canyon area of Spanish Fork Canyon for 21 years, then in Mapleton for six years. But Mapleton started growing rapidly. They longed for a quiet, rural community.
The family had some history with the Manti House Inn. Their two oldest sons had been married in the Manti LDS Temple. They held luncheons for both sons at the Manti House Inn.
Tari has an antique and interior decorating business. As a decorator, she has focused on historic homes. So she understood the significance of the Manti House Inn, originally built in the 1800s to house workers building the Manti Temple and now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
“You round the bend” coming into Manti “and it’s one of the first things you see,” she says. “We decided we were going to take it on, make it beautiful and keep it for Manti.”
Not that she didn’t have misgivings when she looked at the building in-depth. “I didn’t know if it was in me to do this,” she says. “(Visions of ) the dollar signs floated in front of me.” But she and her husband decided, “Let’s just do it.”
The Van Tassells took possession of the house in November, 2021 and started working full tilt after Christmas.
The first step was mechanical upgrades. They installed three furnaces, three air conditioning units, a water heater, all new electrical breaker boxes and extensive new plumbing.
Then the dove into the house itself. With a few small exceptions, they didn’t disturb any of the walls “because every wall tells a story of the Manti House,” Tari says.
A couple of the initial jobs inside the house were pulling up worn carpet and clearing equipment out of what had been a commercial kitchen when the building had been a B&B.
“All of the wood floors we took down to the original color, which is a light pine, and just clear coated over them,” she says.
They turned the commercial kitchen into a kitchen and pantry. In the pantry as well as in some second-floor rooms, they were able to expose parts of the exterior stone walls.
What had been a guest dining room in the B&B became the Van Tassell’s living room and dining room. And just off the living room, they added a family room. That’s where Tari hung historic photos of the various owners of the Manti House Inn, photos that former- ly hung along the main hallway of the B&B.
“Anything I could preserve, I kept,” Tari says.
The Manti House Inn had seven guest rooms, each with its own bathroom, all on the second floor. The Van Tassells turned one guest suite into Sonny’s bedroom and bathroom and another into a bedroom, bathroom and study room for Mercy.
They converted another of the suites into a guest room for their married children when they visit, one into a playroom for grandchildren and combined two of them into a master bedroom suite. They also put in a laundry room and converted a couple of bathrooms they didn’t need into closets or storage areas.
With all of the space assigned, one of the biggest jobs was painting and texturing. “It was huge,” Tari says. “Wallpaper had to come down, texturing had to go up. There was so much caulking and repair of walls.” Painters were on site for nine weeks.
One of the trademarks of the Manti House Inn was the huge gazebo in the back yard. That’s where the inn staged many guest events. The Van Tassells painted the exterior walls of the gazebo the same color as the outside of the house and made the structure an outdoor living area.
As the house was being restored, passersby noticed workers re-grouting the oolite stone on the exterior, which made the individual stones stand out. “It’s not all done,” Tari says. “Next year, we’ll finish the rest of it.”
Then the Van Tassells built a three-vehicle garage in the style of a 19th Century barn on the west end of the property. They even put in a home gym in part of the garage. They re-seeded the lawn and put up white vinyl fence. The result is a property oozing with authenticity and charm.
One of the early workerson the project was Clay Gee, the Van Tassell’s neighbor and friend from Mapleton and an electrician. He drove in from Utah County every work day for eight weeks. Then, unexpectedly, about a week after he finished, he died of pancreatic cancer he hadn’t known he had. It was as if the Manti House had been his final calling in life.
Tari says that incident, along with “small little tender mercies all the way helped us know we made the right decision” in moving from Utah County to Sanpete County, and buying and restoring the historic inn.
