Family’s Dream ‘Barn’ Cost $32M to Build, Now Asks $19.5M

If a barn and a mansion had a child, it would be this property.

“The Barn” is a 20,000-square-foot mansion on 20 acres of farmland about 45 minutes south of Salt Lake City. Sitting in Utah’s largest private grove of sequoia trees, the house looks out over a pond and has views of snow-capped mountains.

And if the natural wonder isn’t enough, there’s a movie theater crafted and decorated by experts from Disney Studios, a “little red schoolhouse,” a “storybook treehouse,” and a 3.5-acre motocross track with a bike maintenance shop, according to the listing, which bills it as “one family’s dream to create a place where memories could be made to last a lifetime.”

The owner “could have built anything he wanted, but he wanted to create a home that had a sense of belonging to the area, so he bought farmland and built a barn-like structure in the farmland,” Sotheby’s International Realty agent Kerry Oman tells Yahoo Real Estate.

The place is in Orem, a booming outer-ring suburb of Salt Lake whose growth is owed partly to numerous multilevel marketing firms headquartered there. According to property records, the owner of The Barn is the CEO of one such firm: Kerry Asay co-founded Morinda Inc., perhaps best known for selling Tahitian noni juice.

The owners built The Barn 12 years ago as a kind of weekend escape from the more manageably sized home nearby where they live. The Barn is one of those massive mansions that is more playhouse than home. “They wanted a place where everybody could gather, a meeting spot to have fun with the kids and grandkids,” Oman says.

The nine-bedroom, 20-bathroom house is stuffed with family-friendly activities: The motocross track comes with a shop to store and work on the bikes. You can take a boat out on the pond and catch some bass stocked there. If the kids want to play school, they don’t even have to use their imaginations to create a classroom; there’s a little one-room schoolhouse right there on the property.

The house is gated off and tucked away in groves of trees, so it’s barely visible from the road. It’s also self-reliant, with a back-up generator and private water and irrigation system.

“People drive by and look through the massive trees and they know something is back there, but there’s definitely never been pictures of it,” Oman says. “This is the first look.”

It’s also thought to be the largest residence in the state with a timber frame, which is what gives it that rustic look and wide open rooms with dramatic vaulted ceilings. The rustic interiors are punctuated with massive stone fireplaces (”they really are as big as I have ever seen in any home,” Oman says).

The whole thing cost Asay more than $32 million to build, Oman says, which  the $19.5 million asking price won’t even come close to covering. But so it goes with highly customized mega-mansions.

Oman says he is marketing it to family buyers as well as corporations looking to come in and host seminars and retreats.

The property has been “all over social media in Utah,” he says. “A friend of my daughter texted it to her last night and said, ‘Oh, this is my dream house.’”