Robb Read: The Next Dimension
For pioneering furniture designers, 3-D printing is a portal to the future.
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Audrey Large was never too keen on making things by hand. As a master’s candidate at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands in 2017, she and the other students were pushed into metal or wood workshops, but her preferred method was to create designs on a computer. The catch was how to turn these digital drawings into physical objects; 3-D printing bridged the gap. Instead of meticulously tufting a rug or moulding a porcelain jar as she’d tried to do in the past, Large found she could simply hit “print” for her virtual object to become reality. But the technology didn’t impress her much at first. “I felt it was kind of ugly,” she says of the outcomes. “Not as seducing as the shapes I had in my computer.”
Even so, the promise of circumventing the artisanal aspect of the creation process was too great, so she kept at it. Trial and error became an important part of her work: Large would intentionally run designs through the printer that were structurally unsound to test the device’s limits. When she got stuck, she consulted YouTube and online forums. The final bowls and vases she developed look like they’ve been ripped straight from the colourful digital realms
of Tron or Ready Player One.
“There’s no painting, there’s no coating on the object,” she says. “I like that it’s coming out of the computer, out of the machine. I take it out and I don’t touch it so that it’s closest to the file.”
In recent years, 3-D printing, perhaps dismissed as just a method for creating prototypes or a way for college kids to make plastic bric-à-brac for their friends, has been adopted by a slew of serious designers. They’ve used the machines to produce chairs, tables, vases and even whole wall panels, cementing their spot in a niche-but-growing manufacturing space that shipped 2.1 million printers globally in 2020. It’s a quantum leap forward from when 3-D printers were invented in the mid-’80s, yet the technology is still raw. Despite that, the industry was celebrated last year during the early days of the pandemic, when a group of architects from all over the world used their printers to churn out thousands of face shields for front-line healthcare workers.
The most interesting work, though, is happening at the opposite end of the spectrum from such mass production, by designers who value the machine as a tool that’s capable of forging incredibly complex designs, some that would be otherwise impossible to realise. The apex of this movement is in Europe, particularly Italy, Denmark and the Netherlands, where a rich history of furniture design relied heavily on the handmade. A 3-D printer offers a fresh take on these practices,
or, for some, a way to rebel against them.
Spanish firm Nagami makes a point of only creating furniture that takes full advantage of 3-D printing’s unique capabilities. Like Large, cofounder Manuel Jiménez García began experimenting with digital fabrication while studying for his master’s degree at the Architectural Association in London, before moving on to large-scale 3-D printing. But this was 2009, and there was much less research on the subject. “We were trying to get the concept of 3-D printing that you’re probably used to, which is encapsulated into a desktop-sized box, and take it out of that box and build larger pieces,” he says. Eventually, he bought a bigger machine: a 2.4-metre-tall robotic arm that’s often used in automotive manufacturing. The new tech allowed Nagami to make complex furniture on a grander scale, including the Voxel chair—a seat with an intricate structure that, at first glance, resembles the chaos of tangled computer wires. It was a proof of concept, demonstrating that a design sketched on a computer and manufactured by robots can be even more remarkable than one patiently drawn by human hand.
It’s a much faster process too. Voxel can be 3-D-printed in a few days using one continuous line of plastic filament that’s about 2.4 kilometres long. “It’s literally depositing material particle by particle,” says Jiménez. “That’s something that by hand you couldn’t do, or else you would need to be the most special person on the planet.” Nagami’s ambitions have attracted big-name collaborators like Zaha Hadid Architects. The late architect’s namesake firm drew upon Jiménez’s expertise and hardware to create the Rise chair. The piece features a seamless blue-to-light-green colour gradient, which, like the inner workings of Voxel, is easy to input into a computer but difficult to execute manually.
That’s not to say printing designers want to do away with made-by-hand craftsmanship entirely. Many, like Mathias Bengtsson, consider the tech to be just the first step in a long, fastidious process. “I don’t want to do 3-D printing for the sake of it,” says the Dane, best known for the Spun chaise lounge, which resembles a giant Slinky and is in the Museum of Modern Art New York’s permanent collection. “I want to take it far away from the 3-D printing, and I need to know there’s always hands on it before and after the process, stuff being cast or hand-polished or sanded by craftsmen, artisans. Maybe it’s a reflection that I’m of the generation that was born just before computers came out, so I’m trained to do everything by hand.”
He’s not kidding. Bengtsson couldn’t afford a 3-D printer when he was a student in the late ’90s. Instead, he made a tracing tool to outline shapes on pieces of cardboard, cut them out and stacked them in homage to the S-shaped Panton chair, an iconic modernist design. His DIY construction emulated 3-D printers’ method of adding one layer of filament—usually plastic—on top of the other. Nowadays Bengtsson’s process is a bit more sophisticated. His Cellular chair is 3-D-printed as one big piece of porous epoxy resin; one version is then cast in bronze. Like many of his designs, Cellular, which resembles a metallic hunk of volcanic rock, is one that’s possible only by marrying new technology with old philosophies and techniques: the printer creates the complex pattern, and the artisan gives it a carefully applied finish. Bengtsson’s Growth series takes a similar approach. The twisty, vine-like silhouettes of each chair and table are based on an artificial-intelligence computer program that simulates a seed taking root and growing into a mature plant. The stem’s digitised pattern is then 3-D-printed and cast in different metals, giving the finished product a distinctly organic look; one could easily be forgiven for mistaking the shiny seat for a sculpture. “When there’s a dialogue with the machine, the machine also leaves a little bit of a fingerprint,” he says. “I’m not looking for perfection.”
Bengtsson isn’t the only one combining 3-D printing with AI systems. Synthesis, a design firm in New York, created a program that can generate tens of thousands of different wall-panel patterns, from rigidly geometric versions to ones that look like sound waves. Clients can choose their favourite iterations from a video of the wide-ranging selection. “Each exploration is lifetimes of a designer’s time. That’s not an exaggeration,” says John Meyer, Synthesis’s founder. “I mean, we spent years on the first patterns of these panels. Every vacation I went on, every street I walked down, I did pattern study and exploration. It took me years to come up with 10 to 15 really nice patterns that people tend to like.” Almost all of Synthesis’s wall panels are 3-D-printed in plastic. The firm’s expertise with the technology extends to furnishings, including the cantilevered Karv table and the spherical Santorini fire pit, which can also be made in concrete. All can be customised and cast in various colours.
These sorts of tweaks are easy with 3-D printing, but one aspect that remains difficult—and to some degree unexplored—is the use of different materials. Many still associate the medium with plastic, but a handful of artisans are slowly chipping away at that mould. “I was a bit disappointed because I came from an art school, from design school,” says Dutch designer Olivier van Herpt of his first impressions of 3-D printing. “The physical value of what came out, you were just waiting hours and hours and still ending up with a plastic piece.” Instead, he wanted to print with clay. It took van Herpt about eight years to build his own custom printer that could produce ceramic vessels. His invention can even be paused in the middle of printing, allowing him to shape aspects of the clay by hand before it’s complete. An interesting confluence of man and machine, sure, but why not just throw some vessels on a pottery wheel as ceramists have done for millennia?
As with Jiménez, for van Herpt it has to do with 3-D printing’s specialised capabilities. The technology is very precise, so it can perfectly render extremely detailed patterns, such as the tiny ridges of his new limited-edition white porcelain vase. He also used the printer to put a fresh spin on delftware, the traditional Dutch school of ceramics with a striking blue-and-white colour palette. Van Herpt added cobalt oxide to white clay and then loaded it into the printer; the resulting vases have a gradient that’s achievable only via the combination of bespoke machinery and hands-on craftsmanship.
A more common (and perhaps less time-consuming) medium of experimentation is wood, which has recently been championed by Yves Béhar, a versatile designer whose extensive résumé includes the ever-popular Sayl office chair and PayPal’s no-frills logo. His Vine series of a bowl, a basket, a tray and a vase is manufactured with a composite made of cast-off lumber. Béhar completed the digital sketches and started producing the pieces in about four weeks, a testament to the breakneck speed at which digital manufacturing can operate. But one of the biggest perks of Vine is environmental. “Every particle that I’ve used or that falls off the printer can be built with again,” he says. “So there’s literally no waste.”
In fact, 3-D printing has long been heralded as a cleaner, greener means of production. It’s sometimes referred to as “additive manufacturing” because it adds material in order to create a final product, so you pretty much use what you need. In theory, it’s a less wasteful alternative to traditional, more subtractive methods, which instead take one big piece of wood, say, and cut away the excess. But 3-D printing isn’t quite as pure as has been made out. Polylactic acid (PLA) is the industry’s bioplastic of choice and is considered an eco-friendlier alternative because it’s usually made of corn starch rather than petroleum. But “eco-friendlier” is a relative term. “There are some real concerns about PLA,” says Sherry Handel, executive director of the Additive Manufacturer Green Trade Association. “It’s great in a lot of ways, because it’s plant-based and because it biodegrades. But it has to be decomposed under high temperatures—not in a landfill, but in an industrial compost situation.”
There’s also an issue of supply chain. PLA will contaminate other plastics during the recycling process, so it can’t just be thrown into the trash with water bottles and yogurt cups. Instead, it has to be sent separately to specialised waste-management facilities, which are in much shorter supply. In summary, better than a single-use plastic, but not great.
Issues with waste are compounded by the fact that 3-D-printed furniture can be perfected only by ongoing experimentation. Failed builds are a necessary part of the development process, as they allow designers to test the limits of what the machine can achieve. “It was years of it not coming out the way we were hoping,” says Meyer. “It’s trial and error, mostly error. That’s what got us here.” Synthesis uses PLA and is careful to separate the castoffs from run-of-the-mill plastics so they can be recycled properly, as do others, but not everyone is so conscientious. Another solution is to break down plastic waste on-site and incorporate it into new designs, a process that’s time-consuming.
“People have to buy an additional machine, and then you have to do the quality control because you’ve got to know if you’re going to be able to use the materials,” says Handel. “It’s another extra step. A lot of companies just want to focus on what they’re doing. You want someone else to deal with that part.” In 2019, Filamentive, a PLA manufacturer based in the UK, estimated that 10 per cent of 3-D prints made in the UK end up in the rubbish heap. Considering the number of machines and their output, about 279,000 kilograms of plastic were wasted. And that’s in just one small corner of the world.
These issues stand a good chance of being solved as artisans continue to experiment with the burgeoning technology. And 3-D printing also has the potential to help achieve another environmental goal: reducing the carbon footprint associated with long-haul shipping. Proponents hope that, as more printing labs pop up around the world, designers will simply email files to faraway facilities to be manufactured. That way, oversized chairs and sofas could be created locally, not shipped on freighters overseas or driven distances cross-country.
Such ambitions, like many problems and limitations in the 3-D-printing space, depend entirely on research and innovation. It’s an imperfect system, at least for now, but for its devotees, there’s little alternative—3-D printing is the future. “Design has to be mind-blowing,” says Jiménez. “Otherwise it’s not worth it.”
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How the Most Rare and Valuable Watches Are Traded Among Elite Collectors
Some of the world’s most interesting watches spend decades being traded privately before we learn about them.
Before social media became the lingua franca of the watch world, there were forums. And on those forums, collectors—especially collectors of vintage Rolex—often traded timepieces amongst each other.
The advent of Instagram in the early 2010s, coupled with the explosion in interest in vintage timepieces, drew attention to this corner of the watch world, and with that attention came increased competition for the finest examples. In the case of six- and seven-figure watches, high-end dealers, like James Lamdin, founder and vice president of vintage and pre-owned watches at Analog:Shift, became trusted intermediaries, negotiating sales for pieces not once or twice but often multiple times as they made the rounds of the collector community.
“There are watches out there that may not be massively rare by reference, but are by example,” Lamdin tells Robb Report. “Tropical patina, ghosted bezel, or celebrity provenance—it’s that watch. When those watches go into a collection, usually it’s with the implicit understanding that they’re valuable and people will want them from you and will make you a profit when you sell them.”
The best dealers have built relationships with collectors around the world and often have first right of refusal when those pieces come back to market. But even still, the most coveted models can still slip through their fingers.
Eric Wind, of Wind Vintage in Palm Beach, Fla., has lost and found some of the world’s most storied watches. In 2015, when he was vice president, senior specialist at Christie’s in New York, Wind came across a “super rare” 1957 Audemars Piguet Ref. 5516 perpetual calendar that had languished in rural Florida until the nephew of the original owner consigned it to Christie’s. The first perpetual calendar wristwatch to feature a leap-year indicator, the piece was one of just nine made by Audemars Piguet in the 1950s. Wind considers it “the one in the best condition.”
He showed it to one of Christie’s better-known clients, Patrick Getreid, owner of the OAK Collection, who purchased it in 2015 for $545,000. In 2023, Getreid consigned it to Christie’s in Hong Kong. That’s when Wind decided to give the piece another shot.
“I had registered to bid on it but at the last minute, I got cold feet,” Wind continues. “It was starting kind of high compared with what Getreide had paid for it. I was bidding remotely from Florida, but when no one else is bidding, you’re kind of wondering if you’re a genius or a fool. Is there something everyone else knows that I don’t? The question was about market value. The watch ended up passing and I purchased it via private sale—or private treaty, as it’s known—after the sale. I had two clients who really wanted it. I offered it to both, but one was more ready to pull the trigger and he got it. It never saw the light of day.” That Audemars Piguet perpetual calendar, Wind says, “remains one of my top five watches on the planet.”
As he reflected on the piece’s winding journey, Wind considered his own role in its comings and goings. “It was fun to be part of the lifecycle of that watch, from when it was discovered in rural Florida and consigned to Christie’s, and then sold to a great collector, who sold it again,” he says. “I imagine it will come back to me at some point. I don’t know if it will be two years from now or 40 years.”
Another grail watch that Wind helped shepherd to a client was an exceptional Paul Newman Rolex Daytona Panda reference 2623 with a full set and a tropical dial that was sold by a small Swedish auction house just under a decade ago. “Another dealer got it,” Wind explains. “I was still at Christie’s, and I fell in love with the watch. This dealer who had it for a year then sold it to an Italian dealer, who then sold it to a collector in Asia. I was tracking the watch on Instagram and saw the collector post it. By that time, I had become a dealer.
“I made an offer to the collector to purchase it on behalf of my client,” he adds. “It had been owned by a Swedish boat captain and had been given to him by the family he worked for, the equivalent of the Rockefellers in Sweden. We had to arrange shipment to the U.S. by Malca-Amit armored transport. Whenever these high-value watches move around, you have to deal with armored shipments, customs, proper transportation, and a lot of paperwork. It takes some time but it’s well worth it.”
Both the AP perpetual calendar and Daytona were original and unpolished—“the kind of watches I look for,” Wind says. “It’s funny how watches circle around. Within the high-end watch world, we’re not talking about thousands and thousands of watches. We’re talking about a relatively small amount of great watches.”
Eric Ku, a high-end vintage dealer in Northern California, certainly knows the drill.
About 15 years ago, he was offered a first-of-its-kind 1996 Rolex Cosmograph Daytona “Rainbow” reference 16599 in white gold on a leather strap.
“I’ve been hunting jeweled Rolexes for a really long time, before it was a cool thing,” Ku, cofounder of the online auction site Loupe This, says. “The watch first surfaced to me around 15 years ago. It was offered to me by a dealer in the Middle East and was coming from, allegedly, a member of a royal family. At the time, the pricing was completely different than it is today. After going back and forth, I offered $130,500 and the seller wanted $136,462. I lost the watch. I was gutted. I’d been stalking the watch. But at the time, relative to the market, it didn’t make sense for me. It was a really tough time, might have been around the financial crisis. I felt confident it would come back to me, but it didn’t.
“Then, in 2012, Rolex introduced its new rainbow Daytona,” Ku says. “I had no doubt about the authenticity of the watch I’d lost out on, but seeing the new rainbow Daytona completely validated me and erased any scintilla of a doubt that I had about the watch. Fast forward a couple years: The watch was offered to me again privately, by a different person in the Middle East at a significant multiple of the original offering—let’s say in the mid six-figures. I bought it.”
In 2017, Ku sold the watch to an important collector based overseas, “a person of very high taste and connoisseurship who appreciated the rarity of that watch,” he says. The collector, by Ku’s reckoning, also appreciated the story of its journey. “Dealers and old collectors always like trading war stories,” he says. “What’s the one thing that got away and then it came back? The collector got sold on the story.”
Now, the watch is coming back to market on Nov. 8 at Phillips Geneva, where it’s being offered in a sale dedicated to neo-vintage timepieces (Reloaded: The Rebirth of Mechanical Watchmaking 1980-1999) and is estimated to fetch in excess of $5.93 million.
“It’s probably the sexiest watch of the season,” Ku says.
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Champagne Bollinger Just Released a Limited-Edition, James Bond–Inspired Bubbly
The Champagne Bollinger 007 Goldfinger Limited Edition comes with its own carrying case and glasses.
When it comes to drinks, James Bond may be best associated with a martini—shaken, not stirred, of course. But the secret agent has been known to enjoy a glass or two of bubbly as well.
Champagne Bollinger has long been the Champagne of choice for Bond, and now the house is honouring that relationship with a special-edition bottle that commemorates the 60th anniversary of Goldfinger.
Whether you’re a Bond fan or a Champagne connoisseur, the $5,950 Champagne Bollinger 007 Goldfinger Limited Edition package is meant to appeal to both sensibilities.
The star of the show is the Champagne, of course: Here, Champagne Bollinger is offering a 2007 vintage Magnum, made from hand-picked grapes and aged 17 years in the house’s cellars. Spicy aromas on the nose are contrasted with notes of fruit, brioche, and honey. The Champagne has been packaged in a bespoke Globe-Trotter Air Cabin Case and comes with four Champagne Bollinger 007 glasses in which to enjoy the bubbly. Limited to just 200 individually numbered pieces, it’s a true collector’s item.
Champagne Bollinger has enjoyed a lengthy relationship with the James Bond franchise, dating back to when Roger Moore popped the first bottle in 1973’s Live and Let Die. Since then, the two have become almost inseparable, and Champagne Bollinger is proudly being served at the very first official James Bond bar, which just opened in London. If you can’t snag the limited-edition set for yourself, you can at least imbibe in a glass of the good stuff at the 007 at Burlington Arcade.
That bar and the special Champagne Bollinger package are all part of the festivities celebrating 1964’s Goldfinger. The film and Bond’s ensuing legacy have established him as one of the biggest (fictional) names in the luxury world, with his love of expensive watches, fast cars, and fine spirits.
While it’s unlikely that many of us can channel the special agent when it comes to his escapades and hijinks, we should delight in the fact that we can embrace our inner Bond by sidling up to the 007 bar or throwing back a glass of the Champagne Bollinger 007 Goldfinger Limited Edition. It’s exactly how our favorite M16 agent would want us to honour him.
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Golden Touch
Discretion is the better part of glamour at the glittering Maybourne Beverly Hills.
Los Angeles does not want for star wattage, but for years now, the city’s hotel scene has been a little lacklustre. So news that the beloved Montage hotel has been completely redone under the Maybourne brand (the British powerhouse that operates Claridge’s, The Connaught, and Berkeley Hotels in London, and the recently opened Maybourne Riviera on the Côte d’Azur) should come as a boon to Australians looking for a new Tinseltown bolthole.
Situated within Beverly Hills’ famous Golden Triangle, just north of Wilshire Boulevard and Four Season’s Beverly Wilshire, and one block from the world-renowned luxury retailers, restaurants and celeb-spotting of Rodeo Drive, The Maybourne Beverly Hills offers a chic retreat from the designer flexing at its doorstep; a rare escape in the heart of this storied enclave that flies under the radar like a cap-wearing celeb dodging the paparazzi.
Set amid the manicured, Mediterranean-style Beverly Cañon Gardens plaza, which unfolds from the hotel’s west entrance, the new incarnation of Montage Beverly Hills (55 suites and 20 private residences, each with a balcony or patio with a courtyard or city view) still evokes the grand estates of Old Hollywood while feeling like you’re in a European mainstay.
Revealing a restrained new guestroom and suite design by Bryan O’Sullivan, a blue-chip art collection and some of the most solicitous staff in town, the Maybourne speaks in a laid-back Californian accent but still holds true to the luxury touchpoints of five-star service for which one of the world’s most exclusive neighbourhoods—and hotel brands—is known.
“It’s reassuringly British when it comes to service—it’s a culture of yes,” says Linden Pride, the Australian restaurant and bar owner behind the award-winning Caffe Dante in New York and Bobbie’s, the new speakeasy opening this month below Neil Perry’s new Song Bird restaurant in Sydney’s Double Bay (page 40). Pride should know; he lived at the Maybourne for almost a year while he and his partner, Nathalie Hudson, set up Dante, the stunning new restaurant and bar on the hotel’s ninth-floor rooftop. “Looking out from the roof onto lemon and olive trees, it’s easy to forget that you’re in Southern California, not Europe.”
Opened last year, Dante has quickly become one of the hottest reservations in town, luring in celebrities from Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin to the entire Real Madrid soccer team. Like its sister outposts in New York (besides the Greenwich Village original, a West Village location opened in 2020), the focus here is on non-threatening antipasti and aperitivi in a produce-driven menu of fresh familiar stalwarts, with the addition of wood-fired dishes from a giant pizza oven at the heart of the room. Just as it does in New York, a negroni cart does the rounds, and each afternoon is welcomed with a martini happy hour.
It’s all fittingly Cali-chill. The only drama in the place is a striking ceiling fresco by Los Angeles artist Abel Macias, which dominates the 146-seat room. “Nathalie and I had just been to Europe when we decided to open up here,” Pride recalls, “and the Sistine Chapel blew us away. When we saw the domed ceiling in this room it was a no-brainer.”
Dante joins a string of newcomers in the area, including New York transplants Café Boulud, Marea and Cipriani. Don’t look now, but with arrivals like the Maybourne and Dante, one of the world’s stuffiest cities—yes, Beverly Hills is its own 14.8 km² metropolis—might just be entering a new golden age.
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Hibiki 40 Year Old Resets the Bar for One of Whisky’s Most Exalted Names
The legendary blender reasserts itself in the industry’s uppermost pantheon with its oldest and rarest blended release ever.
Over the last decade, whiskies from Suntory’s famed Hibiki stable have gone from a top-shelf staple to the new byword for luxury in the increasingly rarefied world of Japanese whisky. As stocks of its famed age statement blends drew ever lower, the air of exclusivity around the distillery grew and grew – something that has stuck around even as the brand’s new flagship blend, Harmony, became more readily available once more.
It’s becoming clearer, however, that Hibiki still has a few exceptional tricks up its sleeves. Twenty-one and 30-year-old age statement whiskies have released in the past few years to critical acclaim, confirming that Suntory still has some particularly rarefied output yet to unveil. Now, in the brand’s boldest move yet, a 40-year-old blend is set to hit the market in extremely limited quantities, taking Hibiki’s already lofty benchmarks of rarity and lineage to new heights.
As with Hibiki’s other blends, Suntory’s Chief Blender, Shinji Fukuyo, has spent years perfecting a blend that brings some of Japan’s oldest and finest spirits into perfect harmony – achieving a smoothness and complexity that takes the brand’s hallmark qualities to a new plane. Single malts from Yamazaki, Hakushu, and Chita all feature, having been individually aged for four decades to form a true expression of the place they were made, before making their way into the final blend.
Truly a multi-generational blend, Hibiki 40 Year Old is designed not just as an expression of the skills and expertise passed down through generations of individual distillers, but that of Fukuyo’s forebears, legendary Suntory blenders Shingo and Shinjiro Torii.
The result is a final liquid rich with sweet fresh fruit, light citrus zest, and spice, supported by a luxurious undercurrent of acacia honey and dried fruit. Each crystal bottle is adorned with a mother-of-pearl inlay and decorated with a handcrafted label from Japanese washi artist Eriko Horiki.
While age statement single malts in the four- and five-decade category have become increasingly the vogue in recent years, never before has a blended whisky been attempted with such old stock—a unique challenge for its maker.
“Behind the elegance and bloom that is typical of Hibiki, there is a sense of subduedness,
like that of an old temple, and a wabi-sabi patina due to the long aging process,” says Fukuyo. “I would like people to enjoy the pure and pure aroma that has been sharpened over the years; the tranquility of old temples and storehouses and the nostalgic warm feeling that accompanies them.”
Limited to just 400 bottles, Hibiki 40 Year Old will release on October 4th, with bottles retailing at $75,000.
Australian fans of the brand will have the unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the Hibiki 40 Year Old experience, including a taste of the exalted liquid, at an exclusive event at Clare Smyth’s Oncore on October 24th, 2025. Tickets are available for $1,800 per person.
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White Lotus-ing? How Hit Films and TV Shows Are Inspiring Elite Travelers to ‘Set-Jet’ Across the Globe
It’s not just The White Lotus. Prestige TV and blockbuster films set in far-flung destinations are driving bookings like never before.
“As seen on TV” may have lowbrow connotations, but the recent glut of award-winning shows and films set in alluring, far-flung locations is causing an unprecedented run on the world’s best hotels. Call it set-jetting: planning your vacation around a destination featured in a popular series or movie. And while romantic suites and beloved characters have gotten people on planes since the golden age of film, what has changed is how central beautiful venues have become to plots.
“The way that The White Lotus used the destination to tell the story was really unique,” says Misty Belles, an executive at the global travel-adviser network Virtuoso. It also made its settings—the Four Seasons resorts in Maui and Taormina, Sicily—nigh un-bookable. And it’s hardly the only example: “Paris wasn’t hurting for eyes, but Emily in Paris showed the city in a more playful way,” Belles notes. “And people weren’t exactly flocking to Richmond before Ted Lasso.”
Giulia Parmigiani/Netflix
The trend is so strong that a property doesn’t even need to be connected to a show to benefit from its boom. Henley Vazquez, cofounder of the New York–based travel agency Fora, points to Bridgerton’s impact on English estate hotels.
“Heckfield Place [used to be] a hard sell,” she says of the five-star Georgian mansion in Hampshire. “Now, people are dying to go there. It wasn’t featured in Bridgerton, but it’s just that kind of place.”
Others insist on the real deal. Jennifer Schwartz, managing director of Authentic Explorations, works with one family to build trips based on the Game of Thrones universe.
HBO
“They went out of their way in Portugal” to visit Monsanto, the setting for Dragonstone in House of the Dragon, she notes. “It’s definitely a criterion on which they choose where they want to vacation.”
For travelers who want more than simply to follow in their favorite character’s footsteps, London’s Black Tomato takes things several steps further. Since 2023, it has planned high-octane itineraries based on the James Bond franchise and works with the films’ producers, Eon Productions, to make you feel like an MI6 agent. (Some trips even offer lessons with Daniel Craig’s stunt double, Lee Morrison.)
The 007 success has inspired more such trips. “We’ve just recently launched itineraries inspired by Yellowstone and Ripley, focusing on Montana and Wyoming and Italy, respectively,” says cofounder Tom Marchant.
Netflix
Still, it’s important to remember that sharp camerawork—and editing—accounts for a lot of the on-screen magic. Schwartz, of Authentic Explorations, notes that “the White Lotus hotel” in Sicily is “not super accessible, but it’s filmed as if the beach is right there.” In reality, the shore club from the show’s second season is 133 miles away. “People go to the place and they’re like, ‘You have to get in a car to go to the beach? What do you mean?’ ”
So where shouldn’t you go? Netflix’s The Perfect Couple will likely send hordes to Nantucket next summer, and The White Lotus’s third season, set on the Thai island Koh Samui, has already caused a local spike—and it’s not even on the air yet.
Bookings of Virtuoso’s properties in the region are up 38 percent since the show was announced. Luckily, Belles says, the effect doesn’t linger. “We typically see a good two-year impact on a set-jetting destination.”
