Good Things Come in Small Packages

I remember my mum – who barely reaches the top of my ribcage – always saying that good things come in small packages. Growing up, I thought it was a sweet but frivolous saying. With age though, I’ve come to appreciate the depth of the sentiment and its relevance to most aspects of life – friendships, where quality is infinitely more important than quantity; babies, who have brought more joy to my life than I could ever have fathomed; and the quiet pleasure that comes with a slow and grounded existence.  

The same can be said for travel. There is a kind of freedom in boutique hotels that larger properties can never hope to offer; a freedom that is almost imperceptible until you arrive and feel the pace and personality of the property itself, the way it allows the world to move around it without ever asking you to fit a schedule or a mold.

I clearly remember my honeymoon in Croatia, in a place that may have seemed modest to anyone else, tucked within a sleepy village where the streets smelled faintly of sun-warmed stone and olive trees, and where the hotel itself felt more like a home than a property, and yet contained within it entire worlds of possibility. The owner, a lovely woman with an accent as dense as the property’s wild vineyard, invited us to spend a morning picking olives on her grove, to press them with our own hands, and to taste the slow rhythm of a life inextricably tied to the land. Later she led us into her cellar to make wine, to coax something – however unpalatable – from the grapes that we had plucked alongside her. That evening we sat at her table, sharing the fruits of our labour over dinner and wine (rocket fuel), listening to stories of her childhood and her family; stories that seemed inseparable from the surrounding hills and the light and sea outside.

In those intoxicating house, I felt a connection not only to our host but to the place and to the rhythm of life that had unfolded there, quietly and beautifully, long before we arrived, and it stayed with me in a way no tourist itinerary could ever have done.

I think of Italy, too, where another hotelier handed us the keys to his own convertible and urged us to follow the roads he loved, to amble without maps to the hidden coves and hilltop villages he treasured, to eat at trattorias where the menus were scribbled in chalk by families who had cooked there for generations, to sit in piazzas where time itself seemed to pause and the world moved at the tempo of sunlight on stone. We spent a few reckless days - reckless in the best way - reckless in the generosity of letting strangers inhabit your favourite places, and I understood in those long, winding drives why boutique hotels exist: because when a property is small enough to trust its guests, and brave enough to share what it loves most, the experience becomes not a visit but an inhabitation of a place.

And then there is the kind of connection that leaves you undone, and I cannot think of Soneva without recalling the first time I left, the way I cried on the departing boat, not from sadness exactly, but from a fullness of feeling. From the way every gesture of the staff, every touch of thoughtfulness, every detail that I hadn’t even noticed until it mattered, had been orchestrated without effort or ostentation, so that I could feel seen, known, and cherished in a way that felt both extravagant and intimate; and every visit since has only deepened that impression, every meal, every path through the jungle, every cup of tea made to my exact liking seeming to say, “we remember you, and this is for you.”

Closer to home, Elements of Byron holds a similar understated allure, though in a language entirely its own, where the sunrise over Belongil Beach spreads across the sand and sea and sky in a way that feels almost ceremonial, where Osprey Spa, attuned to the elemental energies that pulse through the land and water, leaves you subtly transformed without you ever noticing.

Song Saa Private Island in Cambodia extends this philosophy further still, where jungle paths and overwater pavilions, a raw bar tucked into the foliage, and the people who care for the land and guests alike make the island feel like a living being, breathing around you and welcoming you into its pulse, and in each of these places the smallness of the property is precisely what allows such presence, such intimacy, such generosity.

Boutique hotels carry a cool that is quiet, unshowy, almost accidental, born of the fact that they don’t need to assert themselves through scale or spectacle but through character, through personality, through the way they allow you to feel something, to inhabit a place fully, to taste it, to touch it, to know it in a way that cannot be copied or manufactured. It’s in the olive groves and convertible drives, in the laughter over wine pressed with your own hands, in the staff who remember your favourite coffee and the way the light falls in your room at sunset, that you realise travel is not about seeing the world but about feeling it, being present in it, being drawn into its cadence and leaving changed.

And so I gravitate, again and again, to these small places, because they remind me that good things do come in small packages, that the gifts of intimacy, connection, and presence are sometimes the largest gifts a journey can offer, and that in these places, fleeting though the moments may be, the world feels more alive, more beautiful, and entirely worth inhabiting.