Two thousand tech moguls, shamans, CEOs and DJs packed together on a cruise ship for what organisers call “invitation only, one of a kind experiences where super humans make magic”. What could go wrong? That’s the pitch for Summit at Sea, an event billed as a “floating Davos” for millennial technocrats, staged in international waters off Miami. But even if the marketing lingo sometimes threatens to sink under its own weight (“Wherever your gravitational force takes you, our constellation offers wonder”), Summit at Sea captures something about the zeitgeist of what billionaires are looking for now.

They want woo-woo; they want to microdose mushrooms, ketamine and LSD (as championed by the likes of Sergey Brin and Elon Musk), and they most certainly don’t want to die. This issue is about those issues. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel are among the squillionaires bankrolling longevity initiatives—presumably to live long enough to be able to spend all their money. But as Alison Boleyn reports in her first story for Robb Report, even those outré efforts—Thiel is said to receive blood transfusions from people under 25—pale when compared to venture capitalist Bryan Johnson, who reportedly spends $2 million a year on anti-ageing methods. For those of us who can’t afford eternal life, however, the good news is the world is still full of earthly delights.

Take the healthful effects of the Greek island of Tinos or driving the new Rolls-Royce around Ibiza, for example. We also check into an integrated wellness clinic in Thailand and a luxury resort in Spain that focuses on gut health—miso soup and a side of algae, anyone?—and luxuriate in Guerlain’s stunning new day spa outside of Athens. And we spend time with Rory Warnock, a breathwork practitioner and ultra-marathon runner whose tips for curing anxiety and promoting wellbeing are being sought by everyone from CEOs and Olympians to companies like Google and Bupa. And like us, he’s also partial to a well-made negroni. Oh, waiter? Maybe we’ll let the ship sail without us.

Robb Report ANZ’s Issue #38 is now on sale. Pick up your copy of our September issue for an invigorating upgrade for the mind, body and wardrobe.

It is, by any estimation, a meeting of strange bedfellows. Gathered here tonight, at the table of a centi-millionaire venture capitalist living in Venice, California, are Kim and Khloé Kardashian, Kris Jenner and the manfluencer-neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. And the reason this hybrid crew has assembled? Part evangelism, part investment drive, and mostly to discuss how to never, ever die.

The menu that evening—black lentils over drifts of veg with berry-strewn nut pudding—nodded to what the head of the table eats every single day, albeit in separate sittings and all before 11.00 am. Bryan Johnson, who sold Braintree Venmo to PayPal for US$800 million (around $1.2 billion) in 2013, now devotes his life and fortune to winding back his biological age. What he calls his “Don’t Die Dinners” manifest a trend in health and wellbeing where the vision of living to 120, 150 and beyond, has moved from anti-ageing scientists, elite athletes and tech eccentrics to a whole new level of celebrity.

“The two futurist topics everyone is obsessed with right now are artificial intelligence and living forever,” says neuroscientist and futurist Joel Pearson. “Interest in longevity has exploded over the last eight months and that’s because of Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die campaign.”

In March, when doctors injected 300 million young Swedish bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) into Johnson’s knees, hips and shoulders, it was in a clinic in the Bahamian resort owned by Justin Timberlake and Tiger Woods. The 47-year-old—that’s in chronological years; his heart has the biological age of 37—consumes 32 kg of vegetables monthly and more than 100 pills a day, hits bed strictly at 8.30 pm and will repeat the MSC therapy next year so his joints match his already youthful bone mineral density. Other biomarkers show he has the cardiovascular fitness, muscle mass and nighttime erections of a fit 18-year-old. Johnson’s waking hours are devoted to a regimen of therapies and exercises continually recalibrated by a team of more than 30 doctors, with one goal: to slow down the ageing process. Or as Johnson is fond of saying: “Is death no longer inevitable?”

One of Johnson’s July dinner guests, the charismatic Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, has helped propel this notion of extreme longevity. Huberman Lab is Apple Podcasts’ most popular health and fitness show, and the 16th most popular podcast across all categories. His self-optimisation ethos appeals to the acolytes of the show’s manly backer, former UFC fighter Joe Rogan.

“It’s that bro science,” says Pearson, who heads the Future Minds Lab at UNSW and himself adheres to a routine of saunas, kava and red-light therapy to improve sleep. “It’s the young guys in the gym with the ice baths and the hormones and the hunting.” (Because testosterone declines in men starting from their 30s, attempting to boost the hormone through abstinence has become an ideology of a particularly butch patch of anti-agers; getting good-quality protein by shooting your own is another.)

DJ Steve Aoki (46, but biologically 33) has equipped his Las Vegas home with ice plunge tubs, saunas, pulsed electromagnetic field mats, a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and a tea bar . He has “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” tattooed across his neck and says he’s signed up for “the full-body freeze”—the cryopreservation of his body for future revival.

While US-based futurist Dr Divya Chander says this euphoria around stretching longevity has not extended to women—“I think they still feel limited by their biology”—Hailey Bieber has shown that the gender divide might be shifting. On an episode of The Kardashians, the 27-year-old model (biological age unknown) underwent an intravenous infusion of NAD with her friend Kendall Jenner. NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) is a compound in the body that supports cellular process. “I’m going to NAD for the rest of my life and I’m never going to age,” Bieber said on the show. She was visibly joking yet Jennifer Aniston, 55, told the Wall Street Journal last year that she’s also used NAD+ IV drips, and Kourtney Kardashian, 45, calls her liquid form of NAD “the genetic key to longevity”.

The Sydney-based founders of UAre, an app designed to increase longevity, say that in the early years of testing, men and women responded differently to the product. “The conversation with men was more about winning,” says co-founder Marc Pasques. “‘I extended my lifespan by a year by doing more exercise’, or ‘I extended it by two’. Women talked about hanging out with grandkids.” But he goes on to admit that gap in motivation is closing.

UAre has just opened a $1 million seed round and forecasts $10 million in revenue in 2025 and $30 million in 2026. There’s money to be made in extending youth, if not eternal life. Bryan Johnson sells Blueprint basics for US$333 (around $495) a month. The Harvard biologist and author of Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To, David Sinclair (chronologically 55; biologically 42), who controversially advocates for resveratrol—a plant compound found in red wine and grapes—as an anti-aging drug and who says there are no limits to how long we can live, has co-patented a skincare line with Caudalie.

Professional services giant PwC argues that the oft-used estimate of the global market value of longevity therapeutics at around $65 billion by 2030 does not take into account the potential for these to replace conventional therapeutics in healthcare. Australia’s first medical facility to offer personalised longevity programs, Longevity Medicine Institute, opened in Sydney’s Double Bay in July. “People are coordinating their aesthetic care with longevity doctors,” says New York-based celebrity cosmetic dermatologist Dr Paul Jarrod Frank, whose clients include Madonna. “They’re using supplements like NAD, newer peptides and various manipulative efforts to try and look younger and live longer.” 

Similarly Don Saladino, the personal trainer who’s shaped up Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, emphasises age-extending practices in his star clients’ programs as strongly as any aesthetic goals. As Ryan Reynolds readied himself to assume a “tight-as-hell” costume for this year’s Marvel movie Deadpool & Wolverine, Saladino coached the 47-year-old through better sleep practices, walking and increasing dietary fibre. He reframes strength training as not just body-sculpting but as creating “body armour” for later life, to prevent the falls so catastrophic for the elderly.

And Chris Hemsworth, who plays another Marvel superhero Thor, included efforts to stave off the onset of dementia through meditation and exercise alongside Arctic ice plunges in his bid to increase longevity in the TV series Limitless.

The man who was Australia’s deputy chief medical officer during the Covid-19 pandemic questions the lure of many supplements and longevity interventions. As host of the 9Network’s Do you Want To Live Forever series, Dr Nick Coatsworth visits Okinawa, a “blue zone” where an astonishing number of inhabitants live past 100 in good health. There he watches some local elderly dance to hip-hop. “All that biohacking people do, it’s just a waste of time,” he says. “To live longer, you have to spend time with good friends, keep moving and have a good diet.”

Joel Pearson, who stopped taking resveratrol and NMN supplements years ago after research showed mixed results, agrees. “If there’s compelling evidence showing frequent sauna users can get a 40 per cent drop in all-cause mortality, then why would you spend time worrying about a molecule that has very small effect?”

Rory Warnock is not your typical new-age guy. When we meet him, he’s sipping a negroni overlooking the ocean at Casa Amor in Saint-Tropez, dressed in an open-neck shirt, expensive sunglasses and a jaunty Hermès silk scarf tied around his neck; no kombucha teas or healing-crystal necklaces here. His relaxed posture is a far cry from 10 days ago when he was preparing to run a 200 km marathon through the Tian Shan mountain range in remotest Kyrgyzstan. “I carried everything I’d need for six days in the mountains. My pack weighed 10.8 kg on day one, excluding water. And I surprisingly ended up coming third,” he says. 

According to Warnock, this staggering feat of endurance was mainly down to one thing: breathwork.

Proclaimed as an all-natural wonder drug by an ever-growing chorus of scientists, doctors and fitness enthusiasts, breathwork describes the act of inhaling and exhaling in a way that brings an overwhelming, sometimes euphoric, sense of calm and balance to your body. Though it dates back thousands of years—evidence has been found to suggest the practice was adpoted in ancient India, and shamanic cultures in South America, Africa and Australia—modern-day breathwork broadly falls into two different categories.

The first is the mindful breathing that forms an essential part of yoga and meditation: alternate nostril breathing, or box breathing, are taught as simple physiological tools to downregulate the nervous system and move the brain from fight or flight mode. It’s believed these simple methods re-tune brain chemistry, by reducing the amount of noradrenaline to the organ—akin to popping Valium or taking a perfectly safe mini-tranquiliser.

The second is holotropic breathing, which is deep, transformative breathwork. Devotees says it’s more like taking a mushroom trip. Pioneered by Dr Stanislav Grof in the ’70s, it invloves laying on your back in the dark and following a sequence of breathing patterns as you’re guided by a trained facilitator—and is often set to music. It’s claimed that this more intensive work can yield powerful results by connecting to the subconscious, releasing accumulated trauma and accessing inner wisdom.

Nine years ago, Scottish-born Warnock took a risk. He traded working for a successful packaged goods company in London for a career as a breathwork coach in Sydney—long before his passion was an internet buzzword. The move, however, was not necessarily driven by financial motives. “I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression at a pretty young age, like 21 or 22 years,” he says, taking another sip of his negroni. “I was pretty much crying myself to sleep for about three years and I didn’t really understand what was going on.”

Dissatisfied with being prescribed “a little white pill” by his doctor and given a “pat on the back”, Warnock began to look for new ways to heal his condition. “I tried to do everything I could to improve myself in a more holistic way and so I got into running,” he says. “I changed my lifestyle.” 

And more significantly, he discovered breathwork, giving him a new mission in life. “When I first heard about it, I thought ‘breathwork’, that sounds a bit ridiculous. Someone is going to tell me how to breathe in a certain way and it is going to change how I think and feel and ultimately perform day-to-day? But I went along to one session and that one hour changed the direction of my whole life. I was hooked on the feeling. I was hooked on the immediate effects, hooked on feeling joyful, happy, strong, empowered.”

In person, Warnock’s enthusiasm is infectious, but his testimonials are, increasingly, backed up by science. A 2014 study by the Stanford Research Unit found breathing exercises to be effective for treating PTSD in combat veterans; and by 2016, US Navy seals started using breathwork to achieve calm and focus before battle. British neuroscientist Professor Ian Robertson calls it the “the most precise pharmaceutical you could ever give yourself, side-effect free”, while some researchers claim breathing exercises are an effective, low-cost treatment for PTSD, bi-polar, insomnia, and can even help combat grief. 

The general public are buying into the movement, too; according to a report by the Global Wellness Institute, breathwork has experienced a 400 percent uptick in popularity since 2019. And, unsurprisingly, billionaire technology titans, who are always looking for the next big health panacea, are buying in. “It’s all very steeped in Silicon Valley tech culture,” said Jag Gill, a New York-based banker turned tech CEO in a recent interview with The Washington Post. 

Dr Smita Dsilva is an ayurvedic doctor (ayurveda being an ancient Indian alternative medicine) at the RAKxa Integrative Wellness in Bangkok, Thailand, a clinic that received celebrity patronage in July when supermodel  Kate Moss passed through. “Breathing exercises have been used for centuries as a powerful tool to manage stress and anxiety, increase focus, and improve overall wellbeing. In the high-pressure business world, this is a simple yet effective practice, she says. “Giving attention to the breath promotes the purification of both the mind and body, while also raising the energy. It also frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts that promote anxiety… regular practice can release up to 80 percent of the body’s toxins through the breath.”

And breathwork is not just an elixir for various negative mood states. According to Dsilva, the practise can also help with aesthetic issues: “Kapalbhati pranayama is a specific breathing technique in yoga that involves forceful exhalations and passive inhalations, engaging the abdominal muscles throughout the practice. The vigorous breathing and abdominal contractions help reduce bloating and support the removal of toxins, potentially leading to reduced belly bloating and weight loss.”

These findings will not be news to the clients who flock to Rory Warnock’s breathwork school in Sydney’s Bondi suburb. Or to the Olympic athletes, AFL players and CEOs who are huffing and puffing his studio door down on a regular basis. Most likely due to his soft Scottish accent and self-effacing manner, Rory has been adopted by a raft of high-calibre companies, including Google, Amazon, BUPA and Energy Australia, eager to learn how mindful breathing can bring better productivity to the workplace. He’s an ambassador for Apple and Lululemon, and has evolved into a seasoned conference speaker. Warnock’s brave career-change gamble has clearly paid off.

When he’s not teaching the world’s movers and shakers how to harness the power of something that we all do around 20,000 times a day without even thinking, Rory has gotten into the habit of bookending his year with long-distance races; for him, breathwork and ultra-marathon running are intimately linked. But he insists that mental issues can be addressed on a more prosaic level.

“You don’t have to go for a 45-minute yoga class or a run,” he insists. “You can just do a few minutes or even a few seconds of breathwork and you can move from a low state, to a better mood state. And it is exactly the same with anxiety; if you are feeling stressed and overwhelmed, there are breathing exercises you can do in real time to shift how you feel.” Negronis are allowed, too.

Rory Warnock; and discover Warnock’s breath lessons on Spotify.

Rakxa Wellness

Just below the crest of a mountain on Tinos, in Greece’s Cycladic archipelago, sturdy oak trees are bent low to the ground, the near-constant northern wind sculpting their trunks and branches into bizarre, gravity-defying poses. Known as the Meltemi, these winds have occupied an outsize place in the Tinian psyche since antiquity, when a myth arose to explain them: Hercules, angry at Boreas for killing his friend, took revenge on the god of the north wind by killing Boreas’s children on Tinos. The grieving and enraged father, in turn, unleashed his fierce gales to blow on the rocky landscape for all eternity.

Today, the Meltemi make the scorching summer sun bearable and keep the grapes in the vineyards from overheating. They whip up surfable waves at Kolymbithra beach, in an Aegean Sea that is otherwise as placid as a swimming pool, and help deter cruise ships and superyachts from encroaching on this low-key haven where wild goats roam the unspoiled terrain and stray cats patrol the convivial public squares.

The island is increasingly a favourite spot for vacation homes among a creative set of Greeks and other Europeans—Poor Things filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, Greek National Opera artistic director Giorgos Koumendakis, along with fellow artists, architects, musicians and the like—looking to avoid the hubbub of the country’s more popular retreats and drawn to Tinos’s longstanding ties to the art world. For decades, though, most tourists here have been religious pilgrims, arriving by ferry and often crawling uphill from the port on their hands and knees to pray beneath a holy icon of the Virgin Mary inside the Church of Panagia Evangelistria. (The daily trickle of the devoted becomes a flood on August 15, the date celebrated as the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, when Greek Orthodox believe she died and her soul ascended to heaven.) But with the opening in May of Odera, the island’s first five-star resort, plus the growth of the luxury-villa operator Five Star Greece and the launch this year of Hoper, a commercial helicopter service connecting Tinos to Athens in under 45 minutes, the island is poised to become Greece’s new It destination.

Whether Tinians want to claim that title, however, remains an open question. As Maya Tsoclis, a summer resident with deep ties to the area, quips at the expense of a certain overbuilt, hard-partying neighbour island, “What’s the distance between heaven and hell? The distance between Tinos and Mykonos.”

Tinos has always been something of an oddity. For some 500 years, until 1715, it was part of the Venetian Empire, which rewarded Tinians who adopted the Roman Catholic faith with premium land. Today, while up to 90 percent of the country’s population identifies as Greek Orthodox, on the island the figure is only 60 to 65 percent, with the remainder Catholic. The whitewashed villages were historically one or the other, though intermarriage has come to modern-day Tinos.

Built high in the mountains—to guard against pirates—the villages connect via ostensibly two-lane switchback roads that at points are so harrowingly narrow, they feel more like glorified bike paths. Architectural artifacts dot the hillsides: hundreds of charmingly decorated dovecotes, where locals raised rock pigeons for food and rich fertiliser, even exporting the latter; abandoned windmills that once powered a lucrative grain-milling industry; and more than a thousand tiny white chapels, each constructed by a family as a shrine to a loved one. Low dry-stone walls built to terrace the mountains for agriculture still stand, one possible reason the renowned 20th-century philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, who lived on Tinos, dubbed it “the handmade island”.

The other explanation: Tinos’s abundant marble quarries, which have fed a centuries-old network of skilled carvers and inspired countless artists. Stroll through the village of Pyrgos and observe the door frames, balconies, even an elegant bus shelter fashioned from marble; or step into the house where the venerated sculptor Yannoulis Chalepas was held a virtual prisoner in the early 1900s by his mother, who thwarted her son’s artmaking until her death, blaming it for his shaky mental health. Since 1955, the nearby Preparatory and Professional School of Fine Arts has instructed new generations of sculptors from throughout Greece and beyond—and drawn more artists to Tinos in the process—and the hilltop Museum of Marble Crafts offers a fascinating look at how the stone is excavated and carved. (Amateur sculptors take note: a figure’s face should always be chiseled from the side that pointed toward the sun.)

Maya Tsoclis is sitting on the terrace of her 19th-century stone house in the tiny mountain village of Koumaros, sipping water infused with lemons from the trees in her garden. She has been coming to Tinos for nearly 40 years, ever since her father, the celebrated artist Costas Tsoclis, decided Hydra had begun to resemble an Athenian suburb. “We were looking for something rougher,” recalls Maya, herself a household name in Greece thanks to her long-running series of television travel documentaries, noting that Tinos felt dreamlike—almost medieval—by comparison. There was an authenticity to the place; people still worked with their hands.

The Tsoclis family found a house in the village of Kampos and became enmeshed in the fabric of the island. In 2011, the Costas Tsoclis Museum opened in a former school in the village, and this Northern Hemisphere summer it inaugurated a new wing, which connects to the original building via a modern amphitheatre. At 94, the compact and silver-haired Costas still works in his museum studio every day during his seasonal sojourns from Athens, painting six or seven hours to take advantage of the optimal light. “Unfortunately, I always consider creation an obligation,” he says.

When I visit him, a grid of hot-pink abstract paintings covers the wall, just some of what will be a monumental installation of 90 panels in Athens come September. “In these artworks, my theme is the miracle of technology and the danger and fear of technology,” he explains, sitting in the shade of a vine-covered trellis, where museum visitors are often happily surprised to find him. “There’s a huge space within this technology, which although I use, I don’t understand. So it would be inconsistent for everything I do to be understood. It should also be incomprehensible.”

When the Tsoclises acquired the Koumaros villa in 2006, Maya learned that her family had a poignant connection to it: in 1950, her father was a poor, young art student in Athens who had fallen in love, but the young woman’s disapproving parents spirited her away to an Ursuline convent on Tinos. Costas sold his possessions to buy a ferry ticket, then made his way to a monastery, where, pretending to be her cousin, he inquired after his lost love. The monks told him she’d gone to the nuns’ summer residence. Unable to find it in the rugged topography, he returned to Athens and never saw or heard from her again. This villa, it turned out, was the Ursulines’ summer retreat. “One of the reasons he bought the place is because this woman was here,” Maya says, as the church bells peal next door. (A subsequent search for any record of the woman turned up nothing.)

Maya, who is also a former fashion designer, renovated the house meticulously, preserving unique architectural details such as the rocks that protrude through the walls of the lower level. She built an amphitheatre, where she now hosts a month-long arts festival every August, converted a traditional dovecote into a small guesthouse, and added a sauna and pool. The six hectares are adorned with her father’s artworks and fragranced by hot-pink bougainvillea. Now she has decided to lease the property, on a very limited basis, through Five Star Greece—though she clearly has mixed feelings about tourism on the island.

“All Greeks know Tinos because of the pilgrimage. We forget now, but Tinos is the pilgrimage. It’s the soul of Tinos,” says Maya, who is not religious herself. “The Virgin Mary saved Tinos,” she adds, explaining that travellers who wanted to party were turned off by the ritual (and, perhaps, the lack of an airport or yacht berths) and flocked to Mykonos instead. By the time developers realised Tinos’s potential, “people were a little bit wiser. Tinos doesn’t have the superyachts; we have the thinkers. The problem now is that because Mykonos was so overwhelmed with tourism—and bad tourism—a new word that’s used is the “Mykonisation” of Tinos. This is what we’re trying to avoid.”

In 2012, she and her partner, Alexandros Kouris, started Nissos Brewery to help the island develop revenue streams beyond tourism. Its high-end potables have since won awards in beer strongholds Germany and Belgium, and the powerhouse Carlsberg Group recently bought a minority stake. US expansion is in the works. In addition to the craft brewery located in the main town, known as Chora, Nissos keeps a cellar beneath a former Catholic monastery on the outskirts of a village near the villa, where the couple have been experimenting with ageing beer like wine (the result is curiously akin to Cognac) and host candlelight tastings for friends and family.

The beer business was a bold choice on an island known for its wine. T-oinos, one of the leading wineries, has made a name for itself in the 21st century by producing a certified-organic lineup featuring Assyrtiko grapes grown in sandy soil shot through with granite and Mavrotragano grapes planted in shist and clay. The vineyards are some 450 m above sea level, where oregano, lavender, thyme and fennel grow wild and where the lower temperatures and the Meltemi combine to keep the grapes cool—preserving their acidity and freshness—and dry during the day, preventing disease.

Under the direction of big-name master vigneron Stéphane Derenoncourt, T-Oinos ages the wines in stainless steel, glass, amphorae and wood barrels—and sometimes a combination—producing about 20,000 bottles annually with an all-Tinian crew. About half the output goes to other islands in the Cyclades, including Mykonos, where purveyors often refer to it as the “local wine” because the island has no vineyards of its own. That designation has led more than a few bewildered tourists to book tastings at T-Oinos only to find out when they can’t locate the vineyard that they’re on the wrong island.

T-Oinos’s Clos Stegasta reds and whites complement a thriving gastronomic scene that evokes the ancient Greek seafaring tradition of philoxenia, the custom that you should be generously hospitable to guests, in part to ensure similar treatment when you travel. Tinian meals tend to be languorous affairs, with an abundance of dishes served on exquisitely crafted ceramics and shared around the table. There are Athenian imports, such as Svoura, known for its simple but well-executed menu, including addictive zucchini chips and fresh pasta. Diners park on the outskirts of the village of Komi—even a motorcycle would have trouble maneuvering down some of the stone paths—and stroll to a lively piazza, where the tables are set beneath a grand, leafy maple tree. There are also homegrown innovators, including San to Alati, Thalassaki and Marathia, the last of which Marinos Souranis opened in Chora more than 20 years ago as a taverna focused on local ingredients and old recipes. He has since increasingly delved into experimental dishes—think shrimp carpaccio with strawberry sorbet—and techniques, particularly in the realm of fish maturation.

“In the beginning, it was very primitive,” Souranis recalls on a warm evening, as the Aegean laps the beach across the road. Now, having built a research lab with a maturation chamber under his house, he consults with restaurants globally. The aim is to harness the process of decomposition, changing the fish’s collagen into sugars over days or weeks, akin to how beefsteaks are aged. The results are intriguing: tuna that bears a salty, chewy resemblance to prosciutto; amberjack soft enough to spread.

Souranis has also fostered the foraging trend on Tinos, collecting and preserving mushrooms for the menu’s hearty risotto, for example, during the winter months, when Marathia is closed. “We’re open eight months, but we work 12 months,” he says.

Tinos’s appetite for invention may have played a role in luring Dimitris Skarmoutsos, arguably Greece’s most famous chef. Skarmoutsos, whose Delta restaurant in Athens was the nation’s first to earn two Michelin stars, is the executive chef behind Eos at Odera, which offers a sophisticated take on Mediterranean cuisine.

From the approach on a rocky dirt road, Odera has a low profile that discreetly hews to the landscape, then hugs the steep hillside behind as it descends toward the private beach, giving each of the 77 guest rooms a magnificent view of the azure Aegean below. From the sunbeds and sofas on the private patios, wild goats can be seen scampering up the slopes that frame the resort in whimsical juxtaposition with Odera’s contemporary-chic style, which comes courtesy of Studio Bonarchi in Athens. The design feels carefully considered to blend in with the Tinian aesthetic: an abundant use of stone and marble; high stone-walled passageways that evoke the towns’ labyrinths. Granted, the facades aren’t painted white with brightly contrasting doors and shutters, the way they are in the villages, but the neutral palette harmonises with the arid landscape and is arguably less obtrusive than a stark-white luxury compound far from a settlement would be.

Other new construction, primarily in the form of private homes, is also attempting to meld with the cliffs and terraced mountains. Martha Giannakopoulou, an Athens-based architect who has been spending summers on Tinos with her musician husband for 11 years, is designing three homes on the island: one for a Greek family, the others for two Brits creating a compound together. The family house is being built from Tinian stone and will be “half hidden within the hill”, she says.

Giannakopoulou notes that the local government is determined to keep growth under control by strictly limiting the size and location of new dwellings, aiming to encourage development within village boundaries rather than allowing random villas to mar the countryside. “The construction has blown up quite a bit [in recent years],” she says. “The capacity of the island is not high: there’s a lack of water and electricity. And that’s one of the problems Mykonos has been having—the infrastructure is very weak. Very often in August, 10 or 15 days go by and you have minimum access to water.”

To be sure, in a place that thirsts for fresh water, ask locals about newcomers (whether individuals or hotels) and the first thing you’ll likely hear is a swipe at all the swimming pools, along with a rhetorical question: “Why do they need pools? We’re surrounded by the Aegean.”

At Odera, 24 rooms and suites have private infinity pools that jut toward the sea, and another 30 have shared ones. The resort accesses the water via a borehole and treats it with salt electrolysis, a natural disinfectant method that reduces the need for chemical chlorination. Other sustainability efforts include using biologically treated wastewater to irrigate its landscaping, geothermal energy for heating and cooling, and rock excavated on-site for wall cladding, dry-stone walls and gravel.

Maya Tsoclis, for one, understands Tinos’s appeal to those seeking a refuge, noting that no other island has so many beautiful villages. “It’s an open-air museum,” she says, adding that the pertinent development question is, “How far can you go without destroying what is unique?”

After all, she and her family chose Tinos, too. “We felt very at home here, as if there was an affinity,” she explains. “Sometimes it’s not just aesthetics. There’s something in a place that tells you that it can be right—for some reason you don’t know.”

Her father is of the same mind. His sculpture of Saint George slaying the dragon is installed in the courtyard of his museum, easily leading a visitor to assume that the creature’s scaly, undulating tail was intended to mirror the rough, rolling mountains in the distance. But Costas insists his physical surroundings impact only his body and mind, not the literal look of his art. “I get a lot of energy from Tinos—that’s why I’m here,” he says. “I’ve lived in different parts of the world, and I didn’t have a certain homeland that I carried with me. When I came here, this miracle made me creative. It’s as simple as that.”

Read Next: The Secret Cyclades

About 138 km from Tinos as the crow flies sits another nearly untouched Cycladic island, the tiny Folegandros, which draws roughly 50,000 visitors annually, compared to the more than two million who flock to nearby Santorini. Officially, it has a population of about 700. “Maybe counting the donkeys,” says our skeptical driver. Now it also has a new five-star resort, Gundari, meaning “rocky place”.

The first phase of 25 bioclimatically designed guest suites, each with a private solar-heated pool, rests atop a cliff overhanging the Aegean. The plushest have room-size showers fitted with twin showerheads. Gundari also has an infinity pool long enough for actual swimming. Two new private three- and four-bedroom villas recently opened, and Australian owner Ricardo Larriera tells Robb Report that phase two will be built into the cliff below, with a projected opening date of 2026. Lefteris Lazarou, Greece’s first chef to earn a Michelin star, is behind the restaurant, Orizon, which serves dishes such as pesto calamari, quinoa salad with prosciutto, and deconstructed lemon-meringue pie beneath the stars in a courtyard enclosed by high stone walls.

Moor your yacht in the harbour, helicopter in from another island or Athens, or book Gundari’s boat for a transfer. Once on Folegandros, explore it via the resort’s fleet of e-bikes, charter a vessel to go snorkelling (some of the best beaches aren’t reachable by car), visit the clifftop town—where the ancient fortress that defended against pirates still stands—or hike up the steep, zigzagging path to the church and satisfy your step count for the day.

The Athenian Art Boom

Feel free to ditch the sunbed: artistic talent awaits in the capital.

While Tinos has turned out more than its share of artists and is a favourite destination of many others, Athens remains Greece’s contemporary-art epicenter—and is increasingly capturing international attention.

One weekend this past June, Jeff Koons and Maurizio Cattelan joined a cadre of art-world denizens for the annual festivities of influential collector Dakis Joannou’s Deste Foundation. The city is also home to Dimitris Daskalopoulos, who in 2022 gifted 100 key works jointly to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Guggenheim in New York. The Dolli, the dripping-with-chic boutique hotel that bowed last year, even has a Calder mobile in the gym.

Mega gallery Gagosian opened in 2020, and this past May, Michael Werner Gallery made its Athenian debut in an elegant apartment steps from the Museum of Cycladic Art—which, in striking juxtaposition to its priceless antiquities, currently has a Cindy Sherman show on view. “Athens has something now, you just feel it,” says Werner partner Gordon VeneKlasen.

What may be most telling for art’s long-term prospects in the capital: emerging artists are moving there for the cheap rent, and project spaces have been popping up in grittier neighborhoods—typically a harbinger of a creative flowering.

Welsh artist Neal Rock bought a building to use for an artist residency and exhibitions. An inaugural group show opened in July. “It’s Athens, with this amazing history, the Acropolis,” says Rock, a self-described Grecophile. “It feels like a place where people are making work because they want to make work.”

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