We have been asked more than once: the sort of lodges you recommend — their rooms look as if they hold nothing at all. A bed, a low table, one very large window. What makes them the finest?
Our answer usually begins with a question of our own: think back to the last time you stayed in a fully equipped hotel — how much of it did you actually use? That capsule coffee machine, that menu of six kinds of pillow, the fourteen drinks in the minibar? Most ‘abundance’ is merely stock that was never touched.
‘Emptiness’ is another matter. Emptiness is not omission; it is being spared the trouble. Everything absent from the room was thought through once and then taken away: no television, because the mountain outside the window is the better channel; no elaborate panel of switches, because the light warms of its own accord as the sun goes down; no manuals or standing cards on the desk, because anything that needs explaining should never appear before you.
Only once the space is left blank does attention have somewhere to settle. You begin to notice the smell of the wooden floor at three in the afternoon, to notice that the sound of the bath filling has been deliberately turned down, to notice that the window facing the bed is framed in proportions like a picture frame — because it was designed as one.
So the full answer to that question is this: the room is not empty of everything; it has simply spent the ‘much’ where you cannot see it, and left the ‘little’ where you can.
The end of luxury is not to possess more; it is to be disturbed less.