On the quiet return of the good life

People are beginning to tire of cities.

Not literally — the great metropolises will endure. But the gilded urban hotel, however accomplished, increasingly fails to deliver what the discerning traveller now seeks.

Which is, in a phrase, contact with something real.

For nearly three decades I have worked in and around the world’s grandest hotels. The most striking shift I detect in this present moment is not in the architecture, nor in the price. It is in the quality of restlessness one finds in the guest. The cynosure is moving — slowly, and then all at once.

What people are turning toward is land. Real land. Pristine lakes that hold the morning whole. Rolling hills that fold one into the next without commentary. Valleys that meander as valleys ought to — unhurriedly, on their own ancient business. Country that exists, gloriously, without reference to us.

When His Majesty wrote to Sir David Attenborough on his hundredth birthday, what struck me was not the warmth of the address but the quiet conviction beneath it: that our relationship with the natural world is the relationship that, in the end, matters most. The land, properly attended to, returns to us something the city cannot.

I think of Amangani above Jackson Hole — for my money, among the most extraordinary places on earth. It does not impose. It defers. The Tetons are the protagonist; the building is merely the seat from which one watches them be themselves. This is the model. Not the imposition of luxury upon a landscape, but the landscape itself rendered habitable for a few nights, with restraint and reverence.

What the modern guest increasingly desires — though they may not always have the language for it — is to milk a cow without irony. To watch butter form in a churn. To gather eggs still warm from the straw, to water lettuces in the early light with nothing on the agenda for an hour save the watering of the lettuces.

To lie in a hammock, in short, and do absolutely nothing while a valley does its slow work below.

I think too of The Good Life — that quietly subversive seventies series in which Tom and Barbara renounced Surbiton’s polite desperation for chickens, a goat called Geraldine, and a garden of runner beans. What was once played for comedy now reads as prophecy. They were ahead of the curve by half a century.

The next great chapter of consequential hospitality will not be written in cities. It will be written in valleys, on ridges, beside lakes that have never seen a jet ski — in the careful, patient work of helping a piece of land speak, and inviting the guest, at last, to listen.

Beatus ille, as Horace had it. The hammock awaits.

A longer piece to follow.