On Fullness

It is August, and I am writing about holidays rather than having one. The French, as is their right, have gone on vacances.

In these two words, holiday and vacances, lie two ancient ideas of time off. The French term descends from the Latin vacare: 'to be empty', free from work. Whereas holiday, from the Old English hāligdæg, meaning the 'holy day', describes a sacred day of festival. (The French reserved fête for festivals). The connotations of vacances and holiday have faded, but the two poles, vacant and full, remain an interesting lens on how we rest and revive.

Wellness tourism (the nepo baby of two trillion-dollar parents: travel and wellness) has, unsurprisingly, flourished quickly. It has gone from niche to the centre, from being an amenity to a central reason to travel. It is expected that a new hotel will boast a sophisticated, carefully constructed wellness offer.

But most hotels follow a remarkably similar blueprint: the spa. A space with some of the sanctity of the church, the hush of a library and the serenity of nature, all filtered through minimalist design.

The luxury frontier of wellness has overwhelmingly been a cult of absence: vacare perfected. The longevity clinic as destination subtracts sugar, alcohol, screens, promising years off your biological age. The silent retreat is emptied of conversation and stimulation. Barefoot luxury strips away to reconnect with the essential.

It is a reaction to modern societies in which we consume too much of the wrong things. The industry sells time away, detached from the ills and stresses of daily life. Absence as restoration.

In all this, has wellness forgotten what it means to be alive?

Blandness and emptiness too often win over complexity. Global ubiquity has created monoculture. It seems obvious that wellness needs to embrace life. Have optimisation, asceticism and minimalism starved wellness of vital nourishment and creativity? The very thing it claims to know.

The festive revival

A return to the word holiday offers us an alternative path. A celebration of life, sociable and joyful. Feast not famine!

The festive pole is communal, plural, effervescent and it's on the rise.

It directs us towards specificity and complexity, storied interactions with people and place. Humans like complexity. We're naturally curious, clever and easily bored. A sense of place helps us to feel we belong.

At Hôtel du Couvent in Nice, the resident herbalist gives guests personalised advice, bespoke remedies and teas that use herbs from the garden, reminiscent of how the nuns might have done so centuries ago on this site. One Saturday morning each month, the Cour des Orangers hosts a farmers' market of passionate local producers who come to share their love of the land and quality products for guests and locals alike.

In Mexico, the temazcal, an ancient sweat-lodge ceremony, is a ritual shared by the whole group. At Chablé in the Yucatán, a shaman leads it, the heat rising from volcanic stones dipped in medicinal tea. On the Riviera Maya, it can end with a run into the sea.

Communal dining, bonfires to gather around, seasonal festivities. All have a richness that is genuinely nourishing. They invite new interactions and spontaneity.

In Uruguay, Francis Mallmann revived the ghost town of Garzón around a kitchen that cooks only with fire, and people drive across the country for its long lunches. At The Newt in Somerset, the orchard wassail, named for an old toast to good health, ends in supper, cyder, cannon-fire and live music. And in the vineyards of Château Smith Haut Lafitte outside Bordeaux, Les Sources de Caudalie built its spa on the French Paradox: grape-seed treatments and a natural hot spring by day, wine tastings and a Michelin-starred dinner by night.

The community sauna

It would be remiss not to call upon the sauna as a prime example of sociable wellbeing. Sauna culture, long valued in Finland, is now a hot ticket for travellers. Public saunas on harbours, riverbanks, even office buildings, are attracting locals and visitors. At the other end of the scale, Estelle Manor in Oxfordshire has built Eynsham Baths deep in its woodland: a 3,000-square-metre Roman-inspired bathhouse with a vast tepidarium hall, five pools, contrast-bathing rituals and, crucially, a bar.

More people I know are seeking out lidos, swimming and run clubs when in a new city. Even the cold has become company. The Bluetits began in 2014 with Sian Richardson whooping her way through a Pembrokeshire winter, and now count around 120,000 members worldwide. Wellness is a cultural, rooted and sometimes noisy ritual. Historically, that's what bathing always was: the Roman bath, hammams, sentō, banya. The stark, overly serious, solitary hotel spa is a historical outlier.

Reinventing for aliveness

If wellness exists to care for life, its spaces need to be full of it: alive with people, place and character. This is the kind of offer we're interested in designing at Here. We want to replace the sameness of spas with ideas that are rooted, social and restorative.

So perhaps it's ok that I'm still at my desk. The French can keep their vacances. I'll see you at the lido.