Homage to Patagonia
It’s been immortalised in literature and on film—join us as we follow Che Guevara’s footsteps and tackle a rugged Andean passage from Argentina to Chile.
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There’s a point near the start of Che Guevara’s classic travelogue The Motorcycle Diaries when the young Marxist revolutionary crosses from his native Argentina into the unknown wilderness of Chilean Patagonia. “What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier?” he asks as he embarks on a nine-month quest to check the pulse of South America. “Each moment seems split in two; melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.”
This scene, set in the remote Andes in 1952, gets limited page time in Guevara’s scrappy coming-of-age memoir, which his family released posthumously in 1992. Yet in the Walter Salles film of the same name, which came out in 2004, it’s the moment that really propels the narrative into action. Guevara (played by Gael García Bernal), who was a medical student at the time, and his companion, biochemist Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), sail across a fjord-like lake, then travel onward into Chile, their motorcycle dwarfed by granite peaks as they navigate snowy roads.
I remember watching The Motorcycle Diaries 20 years ago on an art-house screen in Washington, D.C., and being struck by those images; the frosty Patagonian forests were so different from what I’d imagined South America to look like. The colour of that lake—teal and radiant, like liquid peacock feathers—lingered in my mind. I moved to Chile 10 years later but let another decade slip away before I decided to cross those same Andes myself.
Until recently, it wasn’t practical for American tourists to follow Guevara’s path by starting in Argentina; they were better off going in reverse, beginning in Chile and crossing into Argentina, then back again. Now it’s possible to streamline the journey by flying into Bariloche, Argentina, traversing the Andes by land and water—the way Guevara did—then flying to the Chilean capital of Santiago via El Tepual Airport. Not only is the transport smoother, allowing more time in the northern Patagonian wilderness, but there are also now several alluring hotels in the newly tony towns on either end.
I fly to Argentina on the first day of the austral fall. The jet is packed with Brazilians in parkas, eager for the snow their own country largely lacks. Yet, when we land at Bariloche’s small airfield on the northwestern edge of the Patagonian steppe, we find butterscotch plains, scrubby hillocks, and aggressive sunbeams. It’s not until about an hour later, when I arrive at my hotel, Villa Beluno, that I enter the leafier, loftier Patagonia of popular imagination.
Ranging from 936 square feet to more than 1,700, the 13 suites of Villa Beluno, the first true luxury hotel to open here since 1940, overlook Nahuel Huapi National Park and its namesake lake west of downtown Bariloche. Not far away is South America’s largest ski resort, Catedral Alta; squint a bit and this could be Switzerland. Bariloche’s earliest European settlers—many of whom were Swiss—even imported their fondness for chocolate, fondue, and chalet-style architecture.
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Cristina Lopez, the chef-owner of Villa Beluno, says that Bariloche, like many global mountain towns, boomed during the pandemic, swelling by about 35,000 people to 160,000. The new arrivals, mostly from Buenos Aires, brought with them traffic and housing problems but also art galleries and ambitious culinary projects, including the new tasting-menu restaurant Quetro, which seats 12 guests around an open kitchen. Add in more than two dozen craft breweries—many, including Cerveza Patagonia, with sweeping lakefront terraces—and it can be tempting to plant roots. But I didn’t come to Patagonia to stay still.
Guevara made his journey on a Norton 500 motorcycle; opting for a more active adventure, I will do several stages by e-bike. But first, before I hop in the saddle, I need to cross to the far side of Lake Nahuel Huapi.
Was it destiny that led Nahuel the boy to make Nahuel the park his life’s work? He thinks so. Nahuel Alonso’s mother, Patricia Barnadas, named him for the park sight unseen, brought him here on vacation when he was 5, and two months later traded their home on Ibiza, for the sinewy island of Victoria, at the heart of Lake Nahuel Huapi. Today, Alonso is the founder of Esencia Travel, a B-Corp–certified tour operator. Esencia has charted my path across the border, which will deviate slightly from Guevara’s in order to avoid the more populated tourist route that has sprouted since the revolutionary’s era.
“I love bringing people back to the place where I grew up because it’s like I’m returning to my kingdom to play,” Alonso says, noting that the name he shares with this park means “puma” in the Indigenous Mapudungun language (and was a rather unconventional choice for a kid born in Spain).
Alonso spent his formative years on Victoria Island, in the mint-green home of the park ranger who became his stepdad, roaming the vast Nahuel Huapi like an aspirant Robinson Crusoe. He crafted his first sailboat at age 7 and started hunting for dinners soon after. There was no school, so Barnadas started one for him. Six other kids attended when they weren’t fishing, hiking, or biking.
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Alonso still enjoys the latter, so together we cycle over to his old school. Dirt paths cut through a dense forest of coigue trees, where the world’s largest woodpeckers tap their scarlet heads. High-touch clients including Richard Gere, Gisele Bündchen, and the Obama family have joined Alonso for trips here; when Al Gore passed through Victoria
One of Esencia’s roaming chefs, Pedro Martinet, prepares a lunch of cured deer, pickled trout, and Patagonian Pinot when we arrive at a nearby beach, Bahía Totora. We dine barefoot at a table placed in ankle-deep water. It’s the third day of autumn, but summer still clings to the land. The glaciers of Monte Tronador shimmer under sunbeams in the western sky as teenagers splash in the frigid meltwaters of the neighbouring bay. Guevara, after swimming in the same locale, wrote that it felt as if “fingers of ice were gripping me all over my body,” but the modern-day teens seem to enjoy it just fine. Island in 2013, Alonso helped him plant a coigue next to the school. “I grew up in a park-ranger family,” he explains. “So, for me, it’s been a life process to be a host.”
Leaving Victoria Island, I skip the sardine-packed crowds of the bus-and-boat tour across Puerto Blest and instead roll my e-bike onto Alonso’s 48-foot power catamaran for the first leg across Nahuel Huapi. The lake is shaped a bit like an octopus, and our destination, Villa La Angostura, is about an hour’s ride down one of its northern tentacles.
We dock at sunset at Hotel Las Balsas, a Relais & Châteaux property with a distinctive twilight-blue facade. The hotel’s main building is wood-clad, cozy, and a bit creaky, warmed by a central hearth and blanketed in the darkly expressionist art of Argentine painter Alfredo Prior. I opt instead for one of Las Balsas’s new villas, opened earlier this year, so I can sleep suspended amid the forest in a modernist glass cube.
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Cerro Bayo, another peak with a ski resort, carves an angular silhouette along the horizon when I awake the following morning. Below it, the diminutive town of La Angostura has an everyman air that belies the wealth of its residents, like an Argentine Jackson Hole. On the same bay as Las Balsas sits the home of former president of Argentina Mauricio Macri. Queen Máxima of the Netherlands frequently vacations at the Cumelén Country Club, a gated community one bay to the east whose multimillionaire residents pull the levers of the Argentine economy. Guevara would surely spin in his grave.
The next day, to save—and a whole lot of uphill pedalling—I swap two wheels for four to cross into Chile. Barnadas, Alonso’s mom, takes the driver’s seat for the three-hour car journey, which begins with a trip up to the border post at 4,300 feet, skirting the disaster zone of one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the 21st century. Barnadas says that when Chile’s Cordón Caulle fissure blew in 2011, she first thought that the ash blanketing her lawn in Bariloche was snow. “It took us months to clean up the mess,” she says. As we depart Argentina, reminders of that eruption are all around us, including forests burnt to sticks and dunes of steel-grey ash.
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Barnadas passes me a gourd of the herbal drink yerba maté, and we wind onward, down the far side of the Andes. It’s clear almost immediately that the air in Chile is wetter, thicker, cloudier. The forests, too, take on Lord of the Rings qualities, draped in fungi and mosses. “It’s wild to me how, in just a few kilometers, crossing what is really just a theoretical line, you actually feel like you’re in another country,” says Barnadas, her long silver hair flapping out the window.
We reach flat terrain near Llanquihue, a lake so vast it resembles an inland sea. Perfectly conical volcanic peaks, dusted in snow, rise like sentries across the horizon. I part ways with Barnadas at the cow town of Las Cascadas, linking up with Chile’s longest bike path—56 miles in total—for a ride around the lake’s edge, to Hotel Awa.
This all-inclusive adventure lodge, my final stop, appears from the outside like a cold concrete brutalist building, but the 25 rooms all welcome in light and nature with floor-to-ceiling windows that frame the Osorno Volcano. “Reinforced concrete allows for large openings that can bring the outside in,” explains architect and owner Mauricio Fuentes, who built Awa on the site of his family’s vacation home. “It’s a very rationalist architecture because the building had to be a link between shelter and landscape, so that the lake and volcano are the protagonists.”
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Fuentes covered the interiors in cypress and native alerce wood, adding warmth to balance the concrete. Rooms also have fireplaces, handsome furnishings, and fluffy Mapuche blankets, on top of which poems by Pablo Neruda arrive each night along with chocolates.
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The hotel lies east of the resort town Puerto Varas, which was settled in the 19th century by Germans. These early immigrants shingled their homes with alerce wood, giving the downtown its storybook aesthetic. Like Bariloche, Puerto Varas boomed during the pandemic with remote white-collar workers fleeing the capital. They’ve since opened cultural centres including the Centro de Arte Molino Machmar, which features art exhibitions, theatre performances, and a cinema, plus Chilean wine bars such as La Vinoteca, all while driving real-estate prices to some of the highest in the Southern Cone.
“When I was little, Puerto Varas was so small that people from Santiago had no idea where I was from,” recalls Awa’s commercial manager, Susan Espinosa, who grew up speaking German at home. “During the pandemic, everyone from the capital bought land here and settled along the lake. In that first year alone, 1,000 lots were sold. So now everyone knows of Puerto Varas.”
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It’s a rare bluebird day when I awake the next morning, so I meet with guide Jorge Gomez to plot a trip up the Calbuco Volcano. It last erupted in 2015 and speaks to the more volatile nature of these Chilean Andes. An hour later, we’re off on foot, following an old lava flow for 10 miles as it carves a black scar through the temperate rainforests.
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Gomez is a bespectacled human textbook who literally wears a feather in his cap. As we walk, he lets loose a barrage of facts—mostly about his favorite tree, the alerce, which is indigenous to this region alone (hence its other moniker, Patagonian cypress). Recent studies have found that alerces have such astounding longevity that one just north of here may be 5,486 years old, which would make it the oldest living tree on Earth.
We dip in and out of dense forests before reaching a lookout at the base of Calbuco. Gazing at its non-conical summit—it bows in the middle, cradling a patch of fresh snow—only fuels my desire to get closer to that other volcano, Osorno, which has loomed large outside my window since I arrived. So, the next morning, Gomez and I pedal e-bikes to Vicente Pérez Rosales National Park, where the weather is characteristically ominous. Within the hour there are showers and strong gales. When we arrive at the volcano’s base, Gomez says that, for safety reasons, we shouldn’t venture higher than its relatively low-altitude “red crater,” one of about a dozen cavities that pockmark its slopes.
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The path rises skyward through a lunar landscape of slate-gray scree, with no vegetation in sight. When we reach the crater, all we can make out are the iron-laced rocks beneath our boots, which look like petrified pomegranates. “We should be viewing the summit of Osorno,” Gomez says, pointing through the mist to the northern sky. “And over there,” he adds, pointing east, “would be Tronador.” It’s the same mountain I saw back at Victoria Island, its glaciers gleaming in the Argentine sun.
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Down below, along the shores of Lake Todos los Santos, we let the howling winds dry our clothes. This very spot, it turns out, is where Guevara first rolled his motorcycle into Chile. The narrow channel is still teal-coloured and radiant, and it’s as cloudy and ominous as it was on that movie screen 20 years ago.
Todos los Santos can’t look much different today than it did when Guevara passed through back in 1952. In the end, I suppose that’s the beauty of northern Patagonia. Yes, the small villages on either side of the border have grown into posh resort towns, but the Andean in-between remains as it has always been: raw, feral, and unpredictable.
“Perhaps one day, tired of circling the world, I’ll return to Argentina and settle in the Andean lakes,” wrote Guevara of his “profound longing” to come back to this region. “Only the Amazon jungle,” he said, “called out to that sedentary part [of me] as strongly as did this place.” Of course, his yearning for a simpler life in these mountains was not to be, as any history book will explain. Yet to travel here is to understand how easy it is to become enchanted by such a dream.
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Home is Where the Art Is
Six standout Australian galleries to know now.
Australia’s gallery scene is booming. More galleries than ever before are going on the road to participate in art fairs in scene that is rapidly maturing. Meet the passionate local owners from around Australia who are energising the creative milieu with the abstract, the edgy, the Indigenous and the generally astounding.
Hugo Michell Gallery
The district may not roll off the artistic tongue like Paris’s Montmartre or London’s Shoreditch, and yet the prim hedges of Adelaide’s Beulah Park suburb provide cover to a stealth powerhouse of the Australian contemporary art movement, tucked away in a charming, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it converted Victorian workers’ cottage. Since 2008, the Hugo Michell Gallery has unflappably carried the torch for established and emerging acts with equal fidelity, across a broad sweep of mediums from photography to printmaking, textile to ceramic. “We try not to get caught up in the hype and handle each artist we represent with the nuance required for promoting their work,” says Michell, currently counting 28 artists on his books. One notable on this year’s busy docket is Melbourne-based Richard Lewer, a social realist—already snapped up by the National Galleries of Australia and Victoria, no less—who for a month from April 10th will probe the uneasy relationship between crime, sport and religion. While comfortable in the skin of his homely suburban bolthole, Michell is not averse to braving the rigours of the Australian art fair circuit (“They’re a bit of a circus, but who doesn’t love a circus?) and often undertakes house visits to acquaint himself with the whims of new customers. “One of the things that gives me the most joy is building a collection for a client,” he says. “We have worked with for 16 years, tailoring and sourcing works for them.” More proof that you don’t need a headline location to generate the biggest stories.
hugomichellgallery.com
Cassandra Bird Gallery
The art sphere often challenges the myth that married partners should not become gallerists—see Iwan and Manuela Wirth of Hauser & Wirth fame, among other examples. And so it is that Cassandra Bird and husband Fabian Jentsch are rapidly cementing a reputation as one the Australian art scene’s supercouples with their 2023-acquired Potts Point space, an expansive four-level heritage terrace fizzing with congeniality, making visitors feel like they have popped to a friend’s (expertly curated) home for elevenses. Which is no great shock: the property doubles as the duo’s own home. Bird brings a wealth of experience, and a hefty contacts book, thanks to long, respected stints in the Big Apple and Berlin, and nine years at Sydney’s RoslynOxley9 Gallery; Jentsch, meanwhile, is an experienced artist, exhibition maker and set designer. “We try to enthuse people, get them excited as we are about those we work with,” says Bird. Meander across the property’s wooden floorboards—perhaps diverting for a chat in the communal courtyard that doubles as a social hub and ideas-exchange forum—and you will enter the realm of Perth-born graphic painter Jedda Daisy-Culley, who has a hallway and wall dedicated to her work; venture upstairs and deep dive into locally based experimental photographer Laura Moore; head into the basement and peruse the collective works the Tennant Creek Brio, out of Warumungu Country in the Northern Territory. All 24 of the gallery’s artists unite under the theme of timelessness. “We are into investigating quality and showing transformational and breakout work from artists,” says Jentsch. “The work we choose must have something that is strong value for us.” Here’s to the sanctity of marriage.
D’lan Contemporary
It speaks volumes for the international reach of Indigenous art that D’lan Contemporary opened an outpost in New York long before expanding the gallery beyond its Melbourne roots to set up shop in Sydney. Then again, founder and director D’lan Davidson is not afraid of expanding his frontiers as a means of hawking Australia’s most vital cultural outpourings; in 2016, he left the Sotheby’s Australia auction house, where he was ensconced as head of aboriginal art, to launch D’lan Contemporary as the go-to gallery for secondary market First Nations art; and he recently travelled to Maastricht in the Netherlands for the prestigious European Fine Arts Foundation Art Fair, promoting a series of Western Arnhem bark paintings and works by Paddy Bedford, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Rover Thomas and other. Closer to home, Davidson has surrounded himself with a team brimming with the requisite Indigenous art smarts, including chief curator and gallery director Luke Scholes. From May 8th-July 4th, the Significant exhibition, a mainstay of the Melbourne gallery for the past ten years, will show across all three of D’lan Contemporary’s locations. “Our exhibitions and all our advocacy work seek to further support and develop the burgeoning global interest in Australian First Nations art and artists,” says Scholes. As if further proof were needed of its commitment, the gallery donates 30 percent of its profit back to artists and their communities. Bravo.
N.Smith Gallery
Enter Nick Smith’s compact office and you notice how the walls are studded by the artworks of those he represents; this is a man, you feel, who has a more intimate connection to his stable than the average gallery chief—an instinct confirmed upon discovering that he has invested his entire life savings into the Surry Hills space. When we meet, Smith’s whiteboard is teeming with collaborative projects, hinting heavily at the kind of edgy, thought-provoking artists that his outfit—comprised of five full-time staff—is renowned for nurturing. “It’s constant, but amazing,” says Smith in his typically reserved manner, more studious scientist than reengage gallerist. “I wanted to contribute to culture in my own way.” The gallery’s current ascension allays any empathetic fears of impending financial doom. This past February, Smith—who cut his teeth at Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane and Sydney’s Sullivan+Strumpf—collaborated with the Australian High Commission in India to represent Darrell Sibosado at India Art Fair ’25, and throughout the year will be partnering with the Sydney chapter of Soho House to host a series of private viewings and artist studio visits. Even so, he now splits his time equally between private and public projects, often mentoring artists at all stages of their creative journeys. “It’s that forward momentum. It’s that feeling of progressions and going somewhere that I love,” says Smith. Indeed, the only way is up.
Palas
It is hard—nay, almost impossible—to imagine Palas founders Tania Doropoulos and Matt Glenn frantically trying to scoop up whoever is flavour of the month on Sydney’s perennially shifting art circuit. Here are young gallery partners prone to a slower, more considered approach, instead recruiting a tight roster of internationally famed artists, and choosing to nurture relationships that have been years, sometime decades, in the making. Case in point: video performance maestro Shaun Gladwell, who represented Australia at the 2007 Venice Biennale (a 20-year affiliate), and Melbourne-based artist and noise-musician Marco Fusinato (15 years), who also flew the artistic green and gold at the same festival in 2022. Add to that list Canadian multi-media artist Tamara Henderson and Irish sculptor Eva Rothschild, currently working out of London, and it is clear Palas have a formidable roll call to lean on. “We’re investing a huge amount of time into their processes as art makers,” says Doropoulos. “And I think by extension, we’ve got really good working relationships with other galleries throughout the world.” For its founders, the Palas gallery—which opened in Sydney’s resolutely hipster Waterloo suburb just over a year ago with a silkscreen painting medley by the aforementioned Fusinato—is somewhat of a flag-planting endeavour on home soil: both earned a certain amount of their stripes overseas—Doropoulos as former artistic director of Frieze London and Frieze Studios, and Glenn at Sadie Coles HQ, also in the British capital. Australian art disciples will no doubt be praying for a long domestic residency.
Coma
If Sotiris Sotiriou’s consciously balanced ensemble of black Saint Laurent suit, single gold chain and flash of bare chest are anything to go by, the Coma gallery founder wields a sharp eye—a handy attribute to have when your career depends on identifying aesthetic clout, what hits and what doesn’t. From humble beginnings in 2016 in a subterranean road space next to Elvis Pizza on Sydney’s New South Head Road, his enterprise gradually flowered, first to East Sydney, then Chippendale, before fully blooming at his current space in up-and-coming Marrickville, in what was once a coffee factory. The predominantly light-industrial area has witnessed around half a dozen new gallery debuts in recent years, and Coma’s door-fling, filled as it was with hip young Inner West couples sourcing bold, ambitious art for their homes and offices, suggests Sotiriou has timed his arrival to perfection. February’s opening exhibition was hosted by Australian (but Santa Fe based) figurative painter Justin Williams, whose approach riffs on the folkloric traditions of Russian and Polish art, rich with symbolism and psychological details; this work forms a striking counterpoint to the abstract expressionism of other Sotiriou recruits, such as Zara June Williams and her partner Jack Lanagan Dunbar. The Coma head honcho, who had a spell selling to wealthy clients at Nanda Hobbs, says that private clients now make up most of his customer base. This year, as he prepares to attend three international art fairs, he estimates his artistic head count to increase by 30 percent. He can, no doubt, also point you in the direction of a fine tailor.
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Car of the Year
Always an unmissable highlight of the automotive calendar, Robb Report ANZ’s annual motoring awards set a new benchmark among glorious Gold Coast tarmac.
Over two unforgettable days, our motoring sages and VIP guests embarked on an exhilarating journey from Surfers Paradise to Brisbane and back again—traversing an irresistible selection of terrain in our exotic rides, from deserted rainforest-lined b-roads to testing mountain switchbacks with dizzying—sometimes heart-in-mouth—views over the southern Queensland peninsula. And as befitting an event starring the crème de la crème of auto marques, we did so while savouring the best in luxury and gastronomy—capped off with an extraordinary superyacht experience at Sanctuary Cove.
The ten contenders for the Car of the Year were not the only dream machines on show. The first day’s adventure kicked off at the Langham Hotel and included a midday pit stop at the glorious Beechmont Estate, where our fleet of drivers were greeted by a stunning array of vintage cars exhibited in a concours d’elegance-style display.
The sumptuous feast for the eyes on offer at Beechmont, a quaint country village located between the Lamington Plateau and Tamborine Mountain, was followed by a meal for the ages prepared by executive chefs Chris and Alex Norman at the property’s hatted restaurant, The Paddock.
Then, itching to remount our steeds, it was time to hit the road again, with our drivers—all sporting Onitsuka Tiger’s new driving shoes—hightailing it to Brisbane and The Calile Hotel, a property which has been scooping accolades like Jay Leno collects supercars.
After some much needed relaxation by the pool, that evening the drivers and press were joined by local luminaries in the hotel’s private dining room. Over an extravagant banquet they got to compare notes on marvels of engineering and design that they’d had the chance to pilot all day. They were also treated to a showcase of spectacular Jacob & Co. timepieces and Hardy Brothers jewellery and an elegant sufficiency of 40-year Glenfiddich whiskey served in gold cups worth $60,000 a pop. It made for animated discussions and more than a little impromptu shopping.
And did we mention the luxury yacht experience? After a full itinerary of adventures on the road, the day ended with an invigorating late-afternoon of luxuriating aboard two new Riviera Yacht releases—the 6800 Sport Yacht and the 585 SUV—where our intrepid drivers and assorted press got to literally and figuratively take their hands off the wheel and make a case for their car of the year. As the forthcoming pages attest, they were more than spoiled for choice. But who would take centre stage on the winners’ podium?
OVERALL WINNER
BEST SPORTS CAR
BEST LUXURY HYBRID
BEST PERFORMANCE SUPERCAR
BEST ROADSTER
BEST CAR DESIGN
BEST ELECTRIC PERFORMANCE CAR
BEST SUV
Cruise along to robbreport.com.au/events for more supercars and luxury motoring.
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Cool as Ice
Mercedes-Benz’s CEO Ola Källenius is expert at racing a nearly four-tonne truck across a frozen lake. Can he steer the marque’s EV-focused future as adeptly?
Ola Källenius is standing in a cold, bare workshop just south of the Arctic Circle in his native Sweden. A heavily disguised prototype of the new electric G-Class SUV—not yet launched when we meet—has just returned from high-speed, low-grip testing on tracks cut into the frozen lakes nearby and is being hoisted into the air on a hydraulic lift for inspection. As it drips meltwater onto the concrete floor, Källenius, CEO of the Mercedes-Benz Group, eats his lunch (today, a premade sandwich and a carton of juice) and speaks in fluent German to the mostly Austrian engineers who spend months in this bleak locale ensuring that the company’s new models can cope with the types of conditions in which vanishingly few customers will ever actually drive. They discuss the truck’s handling on ice and the progress of its test program. Källenius compliments them on the car’s dynamics—how stable it remained even at speed, how safe he felt driving it—and asks them how long they’re here.
“There are some harsh realities to this job, and to the car industry,” he tells me later. “But this is what I love doing: spending time with our designers, or driving with you on an ice-lake in Sweden, or talking to these engineers. I wanted to congratulate them on what they’ve achieved. We get to enjoy a nice couple of days here, but they’re here for a long time.”
At 193 cm, Källenius might tower over most of them physically, but there’s nothing in his demeanor that hints at the disparity in their corporate statuses. Nor is this the kind of place you’d expect to find the head of one of the world’s great luxury brands: a man paid roughly $22 million last year to lead the 166,000 employees of a company valued at around $75 billion, whose founder, Carl Benz, invented the motor car and whose genuinely iconic logo has graced the nose of everything from popemobiles and Lewis Hamilton’s Formula 1 racer to the most expensive automobile ever sold at auction. In a recent report, investment analysts Bernstein described Mercedes-Benz under Källenius’s reign as a “four-wheeled cash-generation machine”.
Courtesy of Mercedes-Benz
But the celebrated car marques are not like luxury brands that make watches or couture or accessories or Champagne. Look beyond the alluring badge and bodywork for a moment: the objects Mercedes-Benz and its rivals produce are insanely complex, ever-changing and hugely capital-intensive—and must succeed in an utterly cutthroat market. Their impact on the environment and the economy has always made them perennial hot-button issues politically. But the electrification of the automobile has put these companies in the geopolitical crosshairs like never before, as governments swap tariffs and risk a global trade war to ensure that they keep their respective shares of the car industry, even as it undergoes an unprecedented transformation.
And of course, the cars need to be remade, too. Add the impact of electrification to Källenius’s own manifesto for Mercedes-Benz, and this storied marque is likely to change more in the next decade than it did in the previous 138 years. “It’s a once-in-a-century transformation,” he says. “We are reinventing our original invention.”
So who is the guy steering Mercedes through this tumult? What’s his plan? And what cars will he give us? Källenius has sat for plenty of interviews in his five years as CEO (his second five-year term is set to conclude in 2029), but this is the first time that he has offered anything more. Robb Report was invited to spend the weekend with him in Arjeplog, the tiny northern-Swedish town whose population swells fourfold each winter as the global car industry descends to test its secret new models on the area’s frozen lakes. Spy photographers abound, but to reduce the chance of its future lineup being scooped, Mercedes rents its own private expanse of sheet ice from a local landowner. I watch Källenius as he test-drives the electric G at his empire’s oddest and most northerly outpost, meets local staff and records social-media footage. He drives some other, more secret new electric AMGs that I am definitely not allowed to see, whose debuts are much further off and which, when not on the ice, remain hidden beneath their heavy covers outside the workshop.
Courtesy of Mercedes-Benz
Källenius has a reputation for being fearsomely intelligent, rational and efficient, but also not the type of hyper-alpha asshole who too often comes to lead a carmaker. Over the weekend, I see that sharpness not just in the logic of his answers, but in the nuance of the English prose, as perfect as his German, in which he delivers them.
I’m not sure I’d want those piercing blue eyes and that high-wattage intellect turned on me in a meeting if I didn’t have my numbers straight, but his non-asshole character dominates. It comes through in the easy egalitarianism he displays with the engineers in the workshop, or how he notices and thanks waitstaff, or the way he’s enjoying a casual dinner and a beer with a long table of employees of all stripes when I first arrive at the unglamorous Silverhatten hotel where he’s staying—a glorified bunkhouse for the United Nations of engineers and test-drivers who flock here. This is clearly a leader who sees the obligations of his office as clearly as its privileges: an attitude underpinned by a natural Nordic modesty and reserve.
Courtesy of Mercedes-Benz
“I guess your personality is something that forms in younger years, and I’m not sure you can fundamentally change it,” he tells me over coffee one morning. “There is a Swedish core in the way I act, and maybe most Swedes are not kick-the-door-down types. I believe this should be true for anybody who is at Mercedes or has the privilege to lead Mercedes: We are custodians of that star for a brief moment. It’s my job to hand it over safe and in better condition. The person is not the brand.”
Perhaps not, but the brand will look very different by the time this person is done with it in 2029. And you can add loyalty to that list of his qualities: Källenius has never worked anywhere else, having joined Mercedes-Benz in 1993 straight out of the Stockholm School of Economics, where he founded an American football team called the Traders, for which he was captain of the offense. True to form, he studied tapes of the Chicago Bears and New England Patriots in order to write the team playbooks. At Mercedes, he was a finance guy at first; an early posting took him to Alabama, to help set up the Mercedes factory in Tuscaloosa, where he became—and remains—a Crimson Tide fan.
In 2003, at the age of just 34, he was put in charge of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren supercar project; two years later, he was given control of Mercedes-Benz High Performance Powertrains, the firm’s in-house Formula 1 engine-maker. After a year as vice president and CEO of Mercedes-Benz US International back in Tuscaloosa, he was recalled to Germany in 2010 to become vice president and managing director of AMG, Mercedes’s high-performance road-car division. Then came two board positions to prove his breadth of ability—sales and marketing, followed by research and development—before he ascended to the top job in 2019 at the age of 50.
The electric G-Class we’re about to drive together (now officially if awkwardly named the “G580 with EQ Technology”) is a neat encapsulation of many of the things Källenius has tried to do at Mercedes. First, it’s an EV, which fits his initial plan to make everything electric—“where market conditions allow”—by 2030. Second, it’s expensive, with a starting price in the US of $161,500 (around $257,000, though likely to cost more in Australia). Another critical if controversial part of his manifesto is to shift Mercedes upmarket; he spun off the truck business early and is currently in the process of dropping high-volume, low-margin models including the A- and B-Classes. And lastly, he wants new models to still feel like Mercedes vehicles, even if the design that underpins them is radically different from what came before. And the G-Wagen—with its gloriously anachronistic overengineering that you can feel and hear every time you clunk a door shut—epitomises the Mercedes ethos whether the vehicle is gas or electric.
Other new Mercedes EVs go much further in their innovation, gaining greater advantage from their electric drivetrains given that they were designed as EVs from the outset. They use Mercedes’s new MB.OS operating system with built-in AI and receive fresh design cues inside and out—not least the mad, vast, almost full-width hyperscreen user interface—rather than the same upright, rectilinear lines first sketched out to suit the needs of farmers and soldiers when the G-Class was introduced 45 years ago.
But as shorthand for old Merc meeting new, the electric G is perfect, and it’s pleasing to be driven in it by the CEO on whose watch it was conceived and executed. “Yes, this is an electric G,” he says as he drifts it across the glassy frozen lake, “but it’s 100 percent G. The most important box for any G-Class to tick is the Schöckl mountain in Austria, to earn that Schöckl-proven plaque they all have. I did five trips up and down it in the electric G in the autumn, and not only can it do the Schöckl, I felt it could do the Schöckl best of all.”
His stints at AMG, in Formula 1, and with McLaren have turned this “spreadsheet guy” into a skilled driver, though most Swedes seem to have the ability to safely slide a car on ice coded into their DNA. Even with the G sideways at around 110 km/h, a plume of snow and ice billowing high behind it, Källenius has enough spare mental-processing capacity to adjust the screen settings while telling a funny story about the very first time an electric G even crossed his mind.
He was at the Detroit Auto Show in 2018, when the company was first showing the revised G-Class. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to the unveiling and asked Källenius’s predecessor, Dieter Zetsche, if an electric version was in the cards. “Dr. Zetsche said, ‘Yes, of course,’ Källenius recalls. “I was head of R & D at the time, and one of my colleagues turned to me and said, ‘Do we even have an electric G in the plan?’ I said that I guessed we did now.”
Those less keen on electric cars than Arnie and Ola might be pleased by the fact that the ambition to be battery-only by 2030 has fizzled fast. Mercedes now predicts that EVs and plug-in hybrids will account for only half of its sales by the late 2020s, and the company is refreshing its range of gas engines to keep them relevant and selling deep into the 2030s. This is a systemic issue and no reflection on Mercedes products; Källenius has always averred “where market conditions allow”, and market conditions currently don’t. But the retreat is still slightly awkward.
Courtesy of Mercedes-Benz
“The early adopter phase is over,” he tells me. “Now we need to convince every customer. I think it would be a mistake to say, ‘Okay, electric is growing a bit slower, let’s sit back, wait, and not do anything.’ Because if you put product into the market that is so convincing that most customers go, ‘Yeah, maybe I didn’t have iPhone 1, but iPhone 4 looks pretty good,’ you can get very quick, even exponential growth. And if you were the one that said, ‘I’m not going to set sail here; let’s wait and see what the weather does,’ all the other boats would be out on the ocean, and you’d miss the race.”
But if buyers are going to be sold on EVs by the technology rather than by brand power, what does Mercedes’ 138 years of history count for? With customers attracted to new EV marques that are able to innovate unconstrained by precedent—and one of those brands having a market cap 7.5 times that of Mercedes, despite selling a few hundred thousand fewer cars per year—does heritage become a liability rather than an asset?
“We also do unconventional things,” Källenius insists. “With blow-your-mind–type features like the crazy hyperscreen in the EQS and the EQE, a lot of people are looking at Mercedes who perhaps didn’t look before. We are one of the biggest automotive sponsors in e-sports. Formula 1 is off the charts; 53 percent of F1 fans are between 15 and 35, and 37 percent are women. When we do crazy things like the G-Class collaborations with Moncler or the late Virgil Abloh, you go beyond the traditional auto crowd to one that buys from other luxury brands. My test is if one of my kids sends me a picture and goes, like, ‘Dad, what is this?’ I got their attention.”
I wonder how the former finance guy now handles running one of the world’s great luxury brands and to whom he looks for inspiration. He acknowledges that he meets with Bernard Arnault at LVMH and Jean- Frédéric Dufour at Rolex but is coy about the nature of their discussions.
“We also reach out to people in other luxury businesses to understand how they think,” Källenius notes. “I had the good fortune to meet Brunello Cucinelli, and he invited me down to Solomeo, the hamlet which he has helped to restore. It’s one of the most beautiful villages I’ve ever seen. I learned a lot about fabrics, quality, stealth luxury, sometimes not emphasising the brand so much. A fine gentleman like that has a very clear understanding of what luxury means in his business. We brought some secret new-vehicle designs to show him and to get his input.”
Courtesy of Mercedes-Benz
“Maybe you can’t compare a high-intensity, high-engineering, high-capital-investment good like a car to a piece of clothing,” he adds. “They are different businesses. But good chefs eat in each other’s restaurants even though they have a totally different style of cooking, just to see what the others are doing. But when you go back into your kitchen, you’re still the chef, and you put together the recipe.”
I sense a slight frustration from the hyperrational Swede—perhaps that he believes he has gotten the recipe right but has to wait a bit longer for diners’ tastes to catch up. In many cases, judged on any objective criteria, the new Mercedes EVs will be the best cars the company has ever made, including the electric G. The customers, though, are as busy trying to get their heads around this brave new world as the automotive CEOs are.
“This is definitely the most transformative decade since the inception of the company,” Källenius agrees. “But we’ve always done this. The Swabian engineers who founded Mercedes didn’t look at the horseshoe and think, ‘How do we make this lighter to make the horse run faster?’ They wanted to get the horse out of the equation and do something new. That attitude hasn’t changed. We’ve always looked through the windscreen, not in the mirror.”
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14/04/2025
By Mark Ellwood
14/04/2025
Men at Play
Two restless entrepreneurs build a Belizean island paradise especially for those “aha! moments”.
Though he’s supposed to be in what he calls his “play years” now, Knoxville-based real-estate entrepreneur Steve Hall still finds himself working on vacation. After a trip to Belize, he got the itch to build something new and started meeting with developers. Hall hit it off with David Keener, CEO and owner of Vision Properties, and together they acquired an isolated tract on Placencia Caye, a private island just five minutes by boat from the mainland.
After two and a half years of work, they’ve recently started welcoming guests to Prana Maya, a secluded, wellness-focused retreat that enjoys expansive views of the Caribbean Sea, the island’s lagoon and the Maya Mountains. “We designed everything to inspire people,” Hall says of the property. “Every aspect of the resort is intentional. Every service we offer is designed to create that ‘aha! moment’ that will rock someone’s world.”
The property includes seven three- and four-bedroom villas featuring locally carved wooden doors. The breezy, secluded structures are sited to prioritise views of the water, and each has its own plunge pool. Rooms at the Inn—a collection of 10 airy, light-filled suites—face the ocean. Each guest has an assigned butler, and every bed at the resort is fitted with a custom grounding mat, designed to replicate a connection with nature; some studies suggest they promote mental and physical well-being.
Belize’s tropical landscape is the catalyst for getting outdoors. Its unique saltwater flats give sport-fishing aficionados a bucket-list opportunity: catching what the International Game Fishing Association calls the Grand Slam—permit, tarpon and bonefish—all in one day. So Hall and Keener recruited High Adventure Company, a global outfitter with 30 years of guiding expertise, to take guests on exclusive angling excursions. The resort will also offer cave-tubing, jungle-trekking, zip-lining and diving trips.
Courtesy of Prana Maya
If you’re in search of less rugged activities, head to the spa and wellness centre. The design team placed it on prime real estate: the Inn’s top floor, which has 360-degree water views and 5 m ceilings. Here, you’ll find a yoga studio, five private treatment rooms and a sound-therapy space. You can also enjoy Prana Maya’s private beach, the only sandy stretch on the island that isn’t shared with another property.
At The Grill, the open-air restaurant, executive chef Liesel Kirste cooks with indigenous ingredients—many sourced from the resort’s four-hectare farm. The menu includes elevated fare such as locally caught lobster, grilled and served over fresh pasta. Even components of more casual dishes are made from scratch: at the Island Club—with its outdoor kitchen, lawn games and forthcoming palapa-shaded pickleball court—the ketchup and mayonnaise are made in-house. That gives the culinary team the flexibility to design a bespoke menu, upon request, to suit your nutritional needs.
Ultimately, Prana Maya is the expression of a million small details (down to the reef-safe spa products, curated by a Belizean supplier) and the location’s natural majesty. “When you get out to the island site, see the spectacular views of the Caribbean, turn another direction and see the beauty of the Maya Mountains, it is such an awesome and almost overwhelming feeling,” Hall says. One he is determined to share with everyone who visits.
Top image: Benedict Kim/Courtesy of Prana Maya
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How to Use Your Dress Watch to Nail Casual Style This Autumn
The dress watch is back and more laid-back than ever. Here’s how to rock your Cartier and Piaget pieces with casual looks
After the seemingly never-ending hype around steel sports watches, dress watches have been making a comeback. But it’s not just the average 42 mm dress watch that’s sparking interest (although, those too, are in the running), but also funky vintage diamond-accented timepieces or small-sized, almost feminine pieces are trending. Recently, actor Paul Mescal was spotted on the red carpet of the Annual Academy Museum Gala wearing a Cartier Tank Mini with his tux, while sports legend Dwyane Wade wore a 28 mm diamond Tiffany & Co. Eternity watch with his black tie ensemble to the same event. While these guys were wearing dress watches in their intended setting, here we show you how to make a dress watch work for casual weekend wear too.
Try dabbling in unexpected pairings like an army green Ghiaia safari jacket with a vintage Chopard Happy Diamonds timepiece or Breguet Classique Ref. 7147 (the ultimate dressy timekeeper) with a Louis Vuitton sweatsuit and a Brioni overcoat. Anything goes these days and the more unexpected the timepiece, the stronger the statement. It’s good news all around—for your wardrobe and your investments in the vault.
Above: Blancpain 39.7 mm Villeret Ultraplate in 18-karat red gold, $69,675; Tod’s faux-shearling and denim jacket, $5,6859; Tom Ford cashmere and silk turtleneck, $2,535.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY MATALLINA. WATCH EDITOR, PAIGE REDDINGER. FASHION DIRECTOR, ALEX BADIA. STYLE EDITOR, NAOMI ROUGEAU.
Jaeger-LeCoultre 40 mm Reverso One Duetto Jewellery in 18-karat pink gold and diamonds, $79,560. Right: Chopard 32 mm vintage Happy Diamonds in 18-karat white gold and diamonds, $19,930, analogshift.com; Ghiaia cotton safari jacket, $1,426; Eton cotton T-shirt, 358; Hermès denim trousers, $1,674.
Audemars Piguet 34 mm vintage automatic ultrathin watch in 18-karat white gold and diamonds, $9,300, classicwatchny.com. Right: Cartier 41.4 mm Tortue in platinum, $35,600, limited to 200; Gabriela Hearst hand-knit cashmere sweater, $2,500; Officine Générale cotton-poplin shirt, $315.
Breguet 40 mm Classique Ref. 7147 in 18-karat white gold, $37,468; Brioni wool and cashmere overcoat, $12,233, and silk knit crewneck sweater, $2,224; Louis Vuitton wool track pants, $2,120, and wool hooded jacket, $5,002. Right: Patek Philippe 39 mm Calatrava Ref. 6119R-001 in 18-karat rose gold, $52,791.
Piaget 45 mm Andy Warhol in 18-karat rose gold, $69,198. Right: Rolex 29 mm vintage King Midas Ref. 4342 in 18-karat yellow gold, $28,301, classicwatchny.com; Brunello Cucinelli denim shirt, $1,586; Tom Ford cotton chinos, $1,259; Berluti leather belt, $1,132.
Model: Arthur Sales
Grooming: Amanda Wilson
Senior market editor and casting: Luis Campuzano
Photo director: Irene Opezzo
Photo assistant: Alejandro Suarez
Prop stylist: Elizabeth Derwin
