A two-room inn wrapped around a Japanese garden on Manzanita's beach, with an outdoor cedar bath and a private organic breakfast, on Oregon's north coast.
- A Japanese garden of stone lanterns, moss and a Kannon statue, built around a 1981 house on Manzanita's beach
- An outdoor cedar soaking bath for two, filled fresh for every booking, with kimono and towel provided
- Two rooms only — the roughly 800-square-foot Hiroshige Suite and the smaller Zen Room — each with a private bath
- An organic breakfast of local farm eggs, served privately and adapted to most diets, from vegan to gluten-free
- A minute's walk from Manzanita's seven miles of open beach, and ten minutes from Oswald West State Park
Zen Garden Bed & Breakfast sits halfway down Manzanita's beach, on Oregon's north coast, in a 1981 house built around a Japanese garden instead of a lawn. There are two rooms only, and the whole property runs on that arithmetic: quiet, small, and deliberate.
Stone lanterns, moss and a resident Kannon statue fill the grounds between the rooms, and at its centre is an outdoor cedar tub, filled with hot water ahead of every booking, kimono and towel provided. Breakfast is organic, and it comes to you rather than to a shared dining room. The Pacific is roughly a minute's walk from the front gate.
The rooms
The Hiroshige Suite, the larger of the two, runs to about 800 square feet and has its own door onto the garden, a sitting room set apart from the bed, and a private bath with a deep tub. The room is named for Utagawa Hiroshige, the Japanese printmaker whose woodblock scenes of the Tōkaidō road, worked in rain and snow, remain some of the most reproduced images to come out of Japan. Breakfast here is brought to the sitting room rather than a dining hall.
The Zen Room is smaller and plainer — a queen bed, a private bath, and a place at the Bistro, the small breakfast counter that faces Nehalem Bay State Park. Both rooms hold a queen bed and two guests; neither allows children, pets or smoking, inside the house or anywhere in the garden.
The setting
Manzanita is a small town on Oregon's north coast, around two hours west of Portland, strung along seven miles of open, walkable sand between Neahkahnie Mountain and the Nehalem jetty. The beach stays largely uncrowded even in the warmer months, and the town itself amounts to only a few walkable blocks, with a bookshop, a bakery, and a small run of unhurried restaurants, all close enough to reach on foot from the inn.
Nehalem Bay State Park is next door: a sand spit wrapped around a calm bay, with an estuary for paddling and a flat loop for cycling. Ten minutes north, a trail through old-growth rainforest in Oswald West State Park ends at Short Sand Beach, a sheltered cove well known for its surf and tide pools, and the trail up Neahkahnie Mountain itself, a round trip of under three miles, climbs to overlooks more than 1,600 feet above the surf. About twenty minutes further north again, Haystack Rock rises 235 feet from the tideline off Cannon Beach, one of the more photographed formations on the Oregon coast.
Who it suits
This suits a couple after a quiet weekend on the coast more than a family or a group — the inn is adults-only, takes no pets, and keeps to two rooms so neither ever feels crowded by the other. A two-night minimum applies year-round. It rewards guests happy with a walkable beach town and a slow morning rather than a full-service hotel with a restaurant, a bar and a lift; the closest thing to a common room is the Bistro counter where the Zen Room's breakfast is served. Anyone wanting nightlife or a long list of resort amenities should look elsewhere on the coast.
Good to know
Two guest rooms in total — the Hiroshige Suite and the Zen Room, each with a private bath. A two-night minimum applies. Book direct with the property; Zen Garden does not list availability anywhere else.
Zen Garden Bed & Breakfast
Amorielli takes no bookings and no commissions. You book direct with the property — the people who run it set the dates and the rate.
