Under the Eaves Inn

Under the Eaves Inn is the 1931 Herbert and Lillian Christensen House on Zion Park Boulevard in Springdale — the first Springdale building ever listed on the National Register of Historic Places, per stgeorgeutah.com’s 2020 coverage of the listing. The cottage is small, storybook-shaped, and the eaves-style top suite gives the property its name. The current innkeepers, Joe Pitti and Mark Chambers, run the inn as a husband-and-husband operation, hosting roughly 3,000 guests a year through a property that has been on the boulevard since before Springdale was the tourism town it became.

A 1931 Cottage on the National Register

The Christensen House predates almost all of the modern Springdale lodging stock. When Herbert and Lillian Christensen built the cottage in 1931, the canyon road into Zion was a different drive, the town was a fraction of its current size, and the kinds of resort-scale properties that now anchor the south end of the boulevard didn’t exist. The National Register listing — the first in Springdale — was the formal recognition of how rare the building had become. The “Wicked Wanda” who opened the home as a B&B in the early 1980s gave the property its commercial identity; the Pitti-Chambers operation has continued and refined that identity.

Three Thousand Guests a Year

The 3,000-guest annual volume is the kind of throughput that puts Under the Eaves squarely in the micro-hospitality category — a small enough operation that the innkeepers know every guest, large enough that the property functions as a full-time business. The two suites and the home’s single dining room run differently from the corporate hotel formats at the south end of Zion Park Boulevard, and the guest demographic skews toward travelers who are looking for a particular kind of historic-home stay rather than a chain-quality room. Pitti and Chambers’ tenure has stabilized that identity.

Under the Eaves in the 435