Conde Nast Traveller UK

I DISCOVERED THE HEIGHT of travel chic at the age of eight: drinking virgin piña coladas in a fluorescent green swimsuit at the swim-up bar of the Taj Fort Aguada Resort and Spa in Goa. The blue of the pool, the pink cocktail umbrellas and the pineapple slices floating in too-sweet canned coconut milk live vividly in my mind. Another memory: being five years old in Gulmarg, Kashmir, and seeing snow for the first time. We had snowball fights and made snow-women with long, blond hair of yellow wool. We played bingo by the fire, a group of two dozen family and friends. There are fancier hotels amid the powdery slopes of Gulmarg now, but the lounge of Hotel Highlands Park remains thickly carpeted with a wood-burning stove in the centre.…

LAUREN LAVERNE Culture Hopper, p50 “When I first went to America I was 19, in a band and had never been on a plane before. Suddenly we were playing the Troubadour in LA and going dancing with Courtney Love. We travelled across the country, all the way to Lucky Cheng’s club in NYC, and saw the drag queens I’d heard Lou Reed sing about.” Lauren is a presenter and DJ SAM DALRYMPLE Baltistan, p104 “Last year, I corkscrewed over the Patkai Hills, which separate India from Myanmar, to Chabimura: a river canyon deep in the jungle, where sheer cliffs are carved with images of Hindu mythology. It was just us and our guides, watching the sun set over a bonfire.” Sam’s first book, about the five partitions of India, is out next year LINA…

Whether with anime-palette hairstyles or mind-bendingly creative layering, there’s nowhere else on the planet where people dress quite like they do in Tokyo. “We love challenging, exploring and experimenting with our style in Japan,” says Maiko Shibukawa, a Tokyo-based stylist and director of The Four-Eyed, one of the city’s edgiest boutiques. She believes that Japan’s knack for punchily kooky sartorial expression emanated, paradoxically, from a national lack of self-esteem: “That’s why our fashion is so strong. It’s a way we can channel that negativity and be more confident in ourselves.” However, in spite of its vibrant reputation, word on the street has been that Tokyo’s stylish spirit had taken a hit in recent years. Along with aggressive redevelopment (starting with the closing of Harajuku’s famous hokoten “pedestrian paradise” back in…

On the Mornington Peninsula, a little over an hour southeast of central Melbourne, curving concrete structures blend almost organically into a hillside of coastal heath dotted with butter-yellow heads of billy button, where dragonflies flit between native violets and silver grasses. This is the striking Alba Thermal Springs & Spa, where 31 geothermal pools have been built into the landscape. There are salt flotation baths, herb-infused waters and shell-like architectural forms with exotic acoustics, as well as a full-service spa and locavore restaurant. Australia may never have had a hot-springs culture to rival Japan’s or Germany’s (no Baden-Badens here), but Alba is part of the ambitious new Great Victorian Bathing Trail that takes inspiration from the likes of Colorado’s Historic Hot Springs Loop and New Zealand’s Thermal Explorer Highway. It…

ARRIVALS HOTELS EN VOGUE From Christian Louboutin’s Vermelho boutique in Melides to Jasper Conran’s revival of Yves Saint Laurent’s old Villa Mabrouka in Tangier and Chopard reopening Paris’s Hôtel de Vendôme as 1 Place Vendôme, the fashion hotel is back for spring/summer 2023. CAVIAR BUMPS In New York, “caviar bumps” have become a thing. At places such as Temple Bar in NoHo and Greenwich Village’s Tokyo Record Bar, the roe can be spread directly onto the back of customers’ hands to be licked off in a salty-sensual slurp. SEXUAL HEALING Top hotel brands are getting involved in the rise of sexual wellness. Following the likes of sexologist Bibi Brzozka’s Pause and Feel retreats at the St Regis Punta Mita Resort in Mexico, holistic physician Nicola Finley will lead a women’s intimate wellbeing programme at the Six…

It was Anouska Hempel who ushered in the vogue for Stygian interiors when she opened Blakes in London in 1978. She filled the place with exotic objets and dusky, sensuous fabrics. Lights were low, mirrors mistily foxed. The mood? Loucheness verging on debauchery. “I was trying to create a certain background,” she explains. “A magical background for romance. And divorce.” It would be difficult to overstate the impact of the Hempel aesthetic, and several notable openings, both recent and upcoming, attest to its enduring influence. Suave, sombre maximalism prevails at Maison Proust, new in Paris’s 3rd arrondissement and heavy on dark printed wallpaper. Its designer, Jacques Garcia, is one of the few to have created a signature inky look with anything like the verve of Hempel, who styled the more…