How a Couple’s Trip to Mykonos Made Me Reconsider My Definition of Luxury

Luxurious implies some thing various to all people. For some, it’s about unbridled extra for others, it is basically acquiring time to chill out. For some, it’s about how the meat you are eating was raised, and for other individuals, it is a 16-mile hike by yourself up a snowy mountain. I am a person who has been obsessed with luxurious for a lengthy time—with pursuing it and attaining it—yet I’m not sure why. It‘s probable something about increasing up lousy, staying advised (rightly) no typically, and becoming obsessed with reading Vogue. (Desires seriously do appear genuine ladies!) Nevertheless, regardless of this life-long lookup for luxury, it was only on a new journey to Mykonos that I realized I’d been imagining luxury as a little something you could achieve, one thing you could grasp. But I’d been improper.

In fact, I didn’t assume to have this realization on a Greek island I’d under no circumstances genuinely supposed to check out. Not for the reason that Mykonos is not completely breathtaking, irrespective of whether you are swimming in the glittering waters of the Aegean Sea, or getting in the absurdly picturesque location of Mykonos City. In real truth, Mykonos has, in my mind’s eye, normally been a place exactly where I imagined muscular gay gentlemen and wealthy females likely to occasion devoid of consequence. In which people today go to be viewed. That’s fine: I am homosexual, and I idolize loaded gals in some (probably problematic) way, but I much favor all-evening dinners with pals on tables that start off with pristine tablecloths and close lined in cigarette ash and purple wine stains. I choose a sunrise swim at a nudist seaside, or a rowdy boat journey exactly where we all get way too drunk and tumble asleep and wake up to bizarre and unconventional melt away traces. If I’m on holiday I want to be on holiday getaway. 

At the conclude of last summertime, I traveled to Mykonos for the first time with my spouse, where we’d been invited to keep at the Santa Marina Vacation resort with the London-dependent skincare brand 111Skin, which recently partnered with the lodge for a manufacturer-new spa notion. We hadn’t been in a position to manage a honeymoon, so when we ended up requested, we assumed it could be the ideal way to choose some time out in what is regarded as one particular of the most lavish and secluded resorts Mykonos has to offer. These pursuits we experienced lined up—dinner at the resort’s Buddha-Bar outpost enjoyable on its non-public beach front a private boat out to the island of Delos, the next most light-emitting put in the globe in accordance to a community tour guide—weren’t our standard getaway pursuits. But we leaned in, building an effort not to get worried if we felt a very little out of location equally on the island extra commonly, and staying at a hotel with such an incredible—and amazingly superior-end—reputation.