Slowness has been quietly unfolding since the creation in 2016 of La Granja Ibiza. The transformation of a dormant agricultural plot into a working farmstead devoted to discourse around food set the stage for a new kind of hospitality concept. We began to assemble a community of designers, farmers, writers, artists, artisans and architects whose work engages with slowness toward a resetting of values in hospitality and beyond.
Cultivating arts, crops and inner gardens, we build and nourish locally rooted places that offer a deeper, more conscious form of hospitality—not a “pit stop” away from the hectic pace of daily life but a continuous journey of reconnection, of learning to live in harmony with nature, our community and ourselves. Drawing on the insights of the slow movement, adaptive reuse, and regenerative agriculture, we take a localized, conscientious approach to every element in the creation of integrated aesthetic environments designed to enrich wellbeing and model a more sustainable future.
We draw inspiration from idealistic collectives of the past, like the 1920s experimental Catskills retreat Yama Farms or the legendary avant-garde incubator Black Mountain College, which looked to traditional cultures and crafts as they dreamed up wildly innovative new forms. To be slow is not merely to decrease the pace of life. It’s about taking the time to reconsider our actions and think more deeply and responsibly about how we live. Slowness, in the words of the Netherlands-based Slow Research Lab, signifies “an expanded terrain of individual and collective potential that brings balance to the pace at which we encounter the world.”
We yearn for an older, slower way of moving through the world. Yet we look toward the future, to new sustainable technologies and design methods, to novel ideas and audacious dreams. We want to be outdoors, to nourish ourselves on what Thoreau called “the tonic of wildness,” and to live evermore in the moment so that we can inhabit an existence that is “more elastic, more starry, more immortal.” Or, in the words of Rachel Carson, the mother of the green movement:
“One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, ‘What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?’”