UK wellness tourism will double in size between 2022 and 2030. We're mid-curve, haven't hit peak sauna yet, and almost every new property coming to market is speccing one in. Which means the sauna itself is no longer the differentiator. The question is what comes next.

The industry has been very loyal to a minimalist pan-Asian aesthetic for the better part of twenty years. It kind of got stuck in Madonna's Buddhism phase. Kelly Hoppen optimised it. Spencer Fung evolved it beautifully for Daylesford. But it never really escaped what I like to call the gong-breath look: bamboo, diffusers, singing bowls, the faint suggestion of a Japanese forest you have never visited and never will. Soho House broke the mould with Cowshed, which had genuine wit and used real farm buildings well. The original at Babington House is still really lovely. But Cowshed was twenty years ago.

The design challenge now is quite specific. There are extraordinary bathing and wellness traditions all over the world. The hammam. The Japanese sentō. Nordic cold immersion. What makes each of them work is that they exist in a tradition and in a place. You cannot lift the form and drop it somewhere else and expect it to carry the same weight. The gong-breath look tried exactly that and eventually ran out of road.

So the proposition I keep coming back to is this: wellness rooted in the land you are actually standing on. Not as a marketing concept. As a design brief.

On the West Coast of Scotland, that means kelp baths and salt water plunges and birch branches, all of it sitting inside a Norse and Viking elemental tradition that is genuinely from here. Condé Nast Traveller named Viking Wellness the top travel trend for 2026. The signal is there. What's slower to arrive is the design response: experiences that feel like they are reaching back into the actual history of a specific piece of ground, rather than borrowing someone else's.

I really rate Ormaig, a small West Coast business who make a beautiful kelp bath soak with foraged kelp harvested according to biodynamic rituals. That one product contains more sense of place than most full spa menus in the country. And small independents are genuinely better placed to do this than large groups. The material is right there. For anyone creating a place to stay, big or small, there is a bounty of material to create entry points for people to actually feel somewhere. What is nearby, or on your land, or even in the myth and folklore of the place, that could ground a new guided ritual or a seasonal gathering for your guests?

There's a whole literary seam running parallel to this that hasn't been properly mined yet. In my local Waterstones there is now a whole table given over to the genre – Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie, etc etc. These bibles of the British Isles are essentially design briefs waiting to be turned into real experiences, guided walks, and seasonal gatherings.

I keep returning to a childhood reference point that probably explains why this interests me so much – Roald Dahl’s memoir, Boy. He describes his mother, recently widowed, taking her five children to her native Norway every summer. Six weeks, a small dinghy, cold water, the same simple family-run hotel every year. The whole family, sometimes with an old aunt or an extra teenager in tow. It looked like the most exciting and perfect of summers.

I am a little obsessed with the imagery of the Lilloey private island concept hotel by Norwegian group Lindenberg. It reminds me so much of Dahl’s childhood summers. They have bought an island, restored the most characterful and illustration-like house, and built small wellness destinations around it, repurposing a military lookout as a cold plunge.

Functionally, what Lindenberg are doing is probably more about storytelling than selling rooms. But it is an interesting signal from a group with real scale behind it.

At Borradill we have begun to think about what this means in practice – what the Viking wellness stories could look like brought to life for our guests, and what the next generation of West Coast seasonal wellness rituals might actually be. The landscape does most of the work. The design question is how to build real experiences around it.

Sketches to follow. Watch this space…