The Quiet Kind of Travel

We keep a list, internally, of the holidays our members describe most fondly when they write to us at the end of a stay. It is a curious list. Very few of them involve itineraries.

They involve, instead, afternoons. A specific afternoon, usually. The one where the children fell asleep on the terrace and the adults opened a second bottle of something and nobody felt the need to fill the silence.

We think about this a great deal when we choose our houses. Most of them, it turns out, are simply places where an afternoon of that kind seems plausible. We are not sure this can be engineered. We only try to notice where it already occurs.