The Cliff House at Pikes Peak, the oldest hotel in Colorado, has a new owner.

The Manitou Springs hotel was first known as The Inn when it opened in 1874. Among recent owners was California real estate developer Jim Morley, who bought the property in 1981. The hotel was shut down and sat vacant for several years after a fire, but Morley poured more than $10 million into the property, reopening it in 1999. Eight years later, the Gal-Tex Hotel Corp. purchased the property and poured more money into the property.

Now, Mark Wyant, a hotelier from Dallas known for renovating and restoring historic hotels in Texas, Key West, Fla., and New Orleans, is the new owner. He bought the hotel in early February for $4 million from Gal-Tex, doing business as Colorado Landmark Hotels, according to records from the El Paso County Assessors Office and the Colorado Secretary of State.

In 2021, Wyant purchased and restored a 114-year-old Galveston, Texas, resort, now called the Grand Galvez. Now he’s turning his attention to The Cliff House at Pikes Peak.

Wyant’s approach with the Cliff House will be similar to the one he took in Galveston: Learn, understand and respect the history of the more than 150-year-old hotel, he said.

“The first thing you have to do is you have to learn the history,” he said. “A lot of times people come in to modernize things, and modernization is nice when it comes to new sinks and faucets, toilets and bathtubs. … It’s not so nice when you start tearing down the main character of a property just because it looks old, which we never do.”

Changes coming include landscaping work, a fresh coat of exterior paint, refreshed and updated rooms and a new bar.

The hotel’s “celebrity suites,” named for the various famous and historical figures like Thomas Edison and Teddy Roosevelt who stayed at the hotel, will remain in place, Wyant said.

Since 2001, the hotel and its restaurants have earned the prestigious four- diamond award from the travel group AAA. The hotel won’t lose this luxurious identity, Wyant said.

Caroll Hildebrand, the hotel’s general manager, said the changes coming to Cliff House will be “gorgeous” and “huge.”

“They definitely want to preserve as much history as possible,” he said of Wyant and his team. “Maybe not going back to the 1800s, but more of the Cliff House back in the late ’20s… More of a Gatsby feel to it.”

The Cliff House first caught Wyant’s attention roughly 20 years ago. But at that time, various factors conspired to prevent him from purchasing it. In the years since, Wyant said he “kind of forgot about it” as he focused on other projects – until now.

There are few “grand dame”-type hotels left, he said.  

“I’ve always been kind of partial to restoration and bringing these things back and breathing new life into some of these older structures,” he said. “It’s just more enjoyable for me and more fulfilling to do something like that than (to) build 10 Hampton Inns.”

Wyant said he works to bring historic hotel properties back to their “glory days” as much as possible.

At Cliff House, there is a largely unused spot near the main lobby that is in dire need of some “energy,” he said. He intends to transform it into a bar, with renderings showing a space with display cases for Western artifacts and red velvet covering almost every seat.

Wyant said the hotel will remain open as renovations progress. Staff at the hotel said those renovations may take as long as 18 months. The renovations will happen one floor at a time, though some areas may need to be closed off as they progress.

The room count may also increase, Wyant said. There is space where one or two more rooms could be added, but he has not yet decided whether to add them. Wyant is not interested in reviving the Cliff House West project of 2009, which sought to add about 80 rooms to the hotel’s count of 55.

If he were to build a major addition, it would be slightly smaller at 20 to 30 rooms, he said. The Wheeler House, a separate apartment building located at 36 Park Ave., was included with his purchase. He plans to renovate it as well and use it as employee housing, he said.

And as the project moves forward, Wyant asks the community to hold off on judgment until his work is done.

“I’m not making radical changes,” he said. “Whenever the new guys come in, there’s always apprehension of ‘what is he going to do to the property?’ And I understand that.

“I think everybody is going to really like what we do,” he said.