A LITTLE ABOUT US
your hosts
We’re Ashley and Ross Griffith, a husband-and-wife team who have built our lives - and our marriage - around hospitality, creativity, and connection.
We met in 2012 while working at the Grand Teton Lodge Company in Grand Teton National Park, where we learned how meaningful it can be to help people experience extraordinary places.
Ten years of marriage later, we’re still partners in every sense: Ross has a big-picture, long-range mindset, and Ashley brings the details to life.
Washington’s Olympic Peninsula has always held a special place in our hearts, and when we discovered this incredible place, it felt like coming home. We imagine it as a place where couples and families can gather in the beauty of the rainforest - celebrating love, sharing meals, and waking up surrounded by moss, trees, and light.
Together, we’ve owned and managed long-term rentals and an Airbnb, and Ashley has planned over 225 weddings and events through her business, Grit City Weddings + Events. We understand both the business and the heart of hospitality: balancing guest experience with careful stewardship of the land.
sprezzatura
(Italian term pronounced sprāt-tsä-ˈtü-rä)
a kind of effortless grace,
the art of making something difficult look easy
It’s a philosophy we return to often, and one that shapes how we host.
Behind the scenes, every detail is intentional so your time here can remain unhurried, calm, and fully your own.
Greenstone is located on traditional Quileute tribal land.
Using the rivers much like a highway system, they relied on the lower Beaver Creek area for gathering reeds for basket making, as well as hunting and fishing.
The Quileute share a legend that a formation of white rocks at nearby Beaver Prairie are the bones of a massive whale, dropped by the mighty Thunderbird after growing tired of flying the carcass from the sea to his mountain home. “It’s not worth it,” Thunderbird is said to have declared.
Greenstone is in Beaver, WA but also technically Sappho, an unincorporated community in Clallam County, WA.
Sappho - named after the ancient Greek poetess by Martin Van Buren Lamoreux, who settled in the area and created the townsite in 1895 - was for most of its history, a Bloedel-Donovan Lumber Company town. At its peak, it was home to around three thousand residents.
The main house at Greenstone was built in 1916 as their local office. The town later burned down, and the post office closed in the early 1970s.
Built more than a century ago as the Olympic Peninsula headquarters of the Clallam Lumber Company, our main house carries the name “Westlands.”
Christened by its first resident, Theodore "Teddy" Rixon, a surveyor area historians call "the Pathfinder in the Wilderness.” Originally from England, Teddy mapped the Peninsula for the U.S. Department of the Interior and various lumber companies in the early 20th century – you can still find some of his forestry maps of the Peninsula online.
According to local lore, Teddy emerged from the woods one day onto the property and beheld a local woman chopping wood as part of her morning chores for the lumber company. Her name was Caroline, and Teddy was quite taken with her beauty. They eventually married and when the lumber company moved its headquarters around 1920, the Rixons bought the homestead and stayed, styling the property Westlands.
Their daughter, Bunny, had the idea to build cabins on the property and rent them to tourists and sportsmen. The Rixon name still marks the road today, and there are still Rixons in Clallam County.
Decades later, the house found a second life in Twilight lore. Twilight guidebooks identify Westlands as the inspiration for the Cullen family home. When Stephenie Meyer visited Forks in 2004, researching the first book, Westlands was up for sale, and it’s speculated that she would have seen pictures of the house posted in the window of the local real estate agent’s office. Here’s the description in the book, and we are sure you will agree that this perfectly describes the house:
“The trees held their protecting shadow right up to the walls of the house that rose among them, making obsolete the deep porch that wrapped around the first story. The house was timeless, graceful, and probably a hundred years old. It was painted a soft, faded white, three stories tall, rectangular and well proportioned. The windows and doors were either part of the original structure or a perfect restoration…I could hear the river close by, hidden in the obscurity of the forest….[Edward’s window] looked down on the winding Sol Duc River, across the untouched forest to the Olympic Mountain range.”
So while Westlands does not appear in the Twilight films, it is the best match for both the “hoa hoa hoa” setting and location described by Meyer.
The Greenstone Bridge, our moss-covered bridge over Beaver Creek, is a remnant of the old Highway 9, which preceded Highway 101.
The bridge itself was built in 1933 and, rather uniquely, bears a geological survey marker embedded in its north side railing. The remains of the old logging rail line, including some rails and a few piers of a trestle, are hidden on Beaver Hill on the far side of the bridge.
There have been several owners of the “Westlands” since the Rixon family, each contributing to the preservation of its character the special sense of place.
We are honored to be part of that lineage and look forward to sharing it with you.
A Glimpse into history
the Rixons
A HUGE THANK YOU TO OUR
FOUNDING INVESTORS
for believing in our vision
Micah and Isaac Hilton
Eric and Leigh Anne Lynch
Greg Griffith
Tracy Oltman
Lindsay and Drew Kneeland
LeighBeth Merrick
Connor Vincent