The Glass Castle

01 · Our Story

A Castle Borrowed From a Book

There is a common assumption people make when they hear the name. That a place called The Glass Castle must belong to people who think of themselves as royalty. The truth sits at the opposite end of that assumption, and it is far more interesting.

The name comes from a memoir. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is the true story of a childhood built on brilliant, broken promises. Her father spent years sketching plans for a magnificent glass castle he swore he would one day build for his family. He never did. The castle stayed on paper, a dream forever suspended in the sky, while the family lived through hardship on the ground below.

When we read that book earlier in our lives, it did not read like someone else’s story. It read like a mirror. We knew what it was to grow up around glass castles that were always being designed and never being finished. We knew the ache of watching dreams stay dreams. And somewhere in those pages, a quiet decision took root. One day, when the chance came, we would not sketch the castle. We would build it.

In 2020, that chance arrived. We were given the privilege of acquiring a beautiful piece of heaven in the mountains of Sir Lowry’s Pass. A plot of earth beneath the Hottentots Holland range, with pine forests at its back and the ocean glinting in the distance. On it stood a very old farmhouse, tired and close to the end of its life. We came within a breath of demolishing it completely. Instead, we chose to honour it. We kept parts of the original structure and folded them into the new build, and the original doors of that old house now stand in our fairy garden, where our daughters play beneath them. A home that once held another family’s story now holds the doorway into ours. Nothing was erased. Everything was carried forward.

And so we did what the book taught us not to leave undone. Before a single foundation was poured, we planted 150 olive trees, a promise to the land that we were here to grow something, not just to build something. Today those trees give us our own organic Glass Castle Olive Oil. In 2021, the year our first daughter was born, we planted the Syrah vineyard block. Five years later, in 2026, we brought in its very first harvest and named it after her, the Azaylea Lee. In 2022, the year our second daughter arrived, we planted the Sauvignon Blanc that carries her name, the Milla Skye. Then we poured the foundations. We raised the roofs. The Glass Castle came down out of the sky and stood, finally, on solid ground, with a daughter’s vintage ripening on either side of it.

Brianna Wiest writes that the mountain is not the obstacle in front of you. The mountain is you. Building this home taught us the truth of that. Every delay, every doubt, every moment we wanted to shrink the dream back down to something safer, the real construction happening was internal. The house is simply the evidence of that inner work made visible.

Books are the greatest mentors on earth, especially for those of us who never had access to mentors in person. A single book, read at the right moment, can change the course of an entire life. It can shift your perspective, redraw your future, and hand you permission you did not know you were waiting for. The Glass Castle did that for us. It closed the chapter of our upbringing with grace, and it opened the one we live in now.

That new chapter is called AutoHive. It is AutoHive, a company built on connection and networks, using artificial intelligence in an ethical way to help businesses scale without ever replacing the most valuable asset any company will ever hold, its people. We build technology that creates new opportunities and new stories for the generations coming after us. Because dreaming up glass castles in the sky is not the failure. It is the beginning. The failure is only in never breaking ground. The magic lives inside every single person on earth. Our home stands as proof of what happens when you finally decide to build it.