We’ve stayed in a lot of places. Tents on ridgelines, historic inns, grand hotels, and every category of AirBnB in between — the kind of experiences that teach you quickly what actually matters when you walk through a door. Cleanliness matters. Communication matters. The little things that tell you someone genuinely cared before you arrived — those matter most of all.
The Private Suite in Hillsboro checks every single one of those boxes. And then it goes ahead and offers you an incredible pizza experience.
Hosts Who Get It Right
The standard against which we measure great AirBnB hosts has for a long time been set by Robert and Linda of Iona Stables and Inn — people who understand intuitively that hosting is about making someone feel genuinely welcome, not just housed. The kind of hosts who communicate clearly before you arrive, anticipate your needs without hovering, and leave you feeling like a valued guest rather than a booking number.
Scott and Kim are cut from exactly that cloth.
From the first message exchanged through AirBnB right after we booked to the moment we checked out, communication was effortless. Questions answered promptly.
Arrival information clear and complete. Especially considering it’s just enough off the beaten path that it could be a challenge, but not with them.
And when we got there, the property reflected exactly the care and attention their communication had suggested. There was no gap between the promise and the reality — which, if you’ve stayed in enough places, you know is rarer than it should be.
The Suite Itself
The accommodations are an entire one bedroom suite — separate entrance, separated from the rest of the house, full kitchen and living area, private deck.
It is nicely furnished and thoroughly clean — two things that sound like minimum standards but in practice are not always delivered together. The furnishings have been chosen with an eye for comfort and aesthetics without crossing into fussy or overdone. Everything feels intentional. The kind of space you settle into immediately, dropping your bags and feeling like you can actually exhale.
For those who’ve read our piece Before You Book — Check the Bathroom — and if you haven’t, you should — the bathroom here is exactly what the pictures show. No surprises. No gaps between listing and reality. Clean, well-maintained, properly appointed. It sounds like it shouldn’t be worth mentioning, but given our accumulated experiences across multiple continents, a bathroom that matches its listing photos is genuinely something to celebrate.
And for those who travel with devices — which at this point is everyone — Scott and Kim have provided charging stations throughout the suite. We’ll be covering this topic in depth in an upcoming article, The Art of the Charge, but the short version is this: hosts who think about device charging are hosts who understand how modern travel actually works. They provided us one station on each side of the bed.
It’s a small thing. It’s also not a small thing.
The Pizza Experience
Here is where the Hillsboro Private Suite separates itself entirely from a standard AirBnB stay, and here is what we want everyone to know about before they book.
For a nominal amount, Scott and Kim offer a pizza experience that is, simply put, one of the most delightful things we’ve encountered in this category of travel.
It starts with the dough. You knead it, gently stretch it, toss it if you dare, after which you carefully spread it out on the wooden pizza peel on top of carefully sprinkled flour.
Then the red sauce and the cheese. Finally comes the moment that every pizza lover secretly wants — the full run of toppings, your choices, your combinations, your instincts. The whole thing is yours to build. When you sign up ahead of time, Scott and Kim query you to find out what you like, so they can have all the ingredients there and ready for when you start building your pie.
It doesn’t hurt that the fire is mesmorizing…
The package includes a bottle of wine, which arrived at exactly the right time in the pizza-building process, and a homemade dessert — in our case, a raspberry pie that we are still thinking about, complete with ice cream. It was the kind of pie that makes you quiet for a minute after the first bite, the way genuinely good food does when it catches you off guard.
The whole experience — the making, the baking, the eating, the wine, the pie — turned what would have been a pleasant dinner into a full evening memory. It’s the kind of addition that transforms a nice AirBnB stay into a story worth telling.
Like Iona where we’ve talked to Robert and Linda for hours, we were offered the option of having a private dinner or sharing the experience with Scott and Kim. Being who we are, we opted for the later and had a delightful conversation for several hours.
Why It Works
The Hillsboro Private Suite works because Scott and Kim understand something that the best hosts always understand: the details are the experience.
Clean accommodations are the floor. Good communication is the floor. An entire unit (especially the bathroom) that looks like its pictures is the floor.
What lifts a stay above those basics is the evidence of genuine thought — the charging stations, the pizza evening, the homemade pie, the sense that someone sat down and asked what would make a guest feel genuinely cared for, or perhaps they reached within themselves and gathered all their collective experience to set the place up.
No matter, they went ahead and did it.
The answer, it turns out, is: all of the above.
If you’re looking for a stay in Hillsboro, search for the Private Suite on AirBnB. Book it. And when you do — sign up for the pizza. It’s worth every dollar.
Journey Moore Often, because the best accommodations don’t just give you a place to sleep — they give you experiences that keep you awake.
Add comment