The retreat · est. 2019

Not a place you visit. A quiet you take with you.

Eighteen miles west of Olympia, on the Black River, at the edge of Capitol Forest. The last mile is gravel. People drive down from Seattle anyway and the drive is not incidental to what this is.

Stillwater / About Stillwater

The retreat Opened 2019

Six treatment
rooms

Two hot pools
one cold plunge

Six therapists

18 miles west
of Olympia

No seventh room
ever

Why it is out here

Naomi looked at spaces in Olympia for eight months in 2018 and took none of them, because every one of them had a street outside it. A spa on a street spends its whole design budget on shutting the street out: heavy doors, white noise, scent in the air, music over the top.

Out here none of that is necessary. The building has single-glazed windows that open, and what comes through them is the river and the wind in the cedars. That is the entire reason for the eighteen miles, and it is why there is no music anywhere in it.

What the drive is for

Thirty-five minutes from Olympia, ninety from Seattle, and the last mile on gravel at fifteen miles an hour. An inconvenience, and we have thought about whether to apologise for it.

We do not, because the drive is doing something. Arriving somewhere takes time in a way that walking through a door does not, and almost everybody who comes here says a version of the same thing: that they were already different by the time they parked. The gravel mile in particular, where you have to slow down whether you meant to or not.

Six rooms, and no more

The building could take two more. It will not get them.

Six therapists in six rooms means every room is set up in the morning by the person who works in it and turned over by hand between clients. Add rooms and you add a turnover crew, a schedule, a supervisor, and about four minutes of hurry at the end of every treatment. That is the whole business decision and it is why booking runs a week out.

2019Opened on the Black River
at the edge of Capitol Forest

6Treatment rooms,
and there will not be a seventh

0Speakers in the building,
including at the desk

The four things we do not have

Music. Not in the rooms, not in the hall, not at the desk. Spa music is a device for covering the sound of a building, and this building does not need covering.

Scent in the air. Nothing is diffused anywhere. What you smell in a treatment room is the oil on the table for the hour it is on the table, and then it is gone.

A product wall. There are eleven things for sale, on one shelf, behind the desk, and nobody will mention them unless you ask. Members get twenty per cent off them, which is the only reason the shelf is profitable enough to keep.

An upsell at the end. Nobody will ask if you want to add anything, rebook on the spot, or upgrade. If you want to book again, the desk is right there and delighted; the asking is your job, not ours.

What we do have that is unusual

A cold plunge fed from the river, filtered and held between fifty and fifty-five degrees. An open-air mineral pool under the cedars at a hundred and two. A cedar rest room with no light in it at all. And a herb bed out the back that supplies about half of what Eleanor puts in the compress.

None of that is a differentiator in the marketing sense. Just what you build when the site is a river bank rather than a retail unit.

Stillwater Day Spa·8853 Black River Road, Olympia·Est. 2019

Eighteen miles, on purpose.

Book seven days out, arrive thirty minutes early, and take the last mile slowly.

Reserve a treatment Your first visit