The World Through Their Eyes

At the very least, I thought, I’d come home from New York with a good story. It was 2022, and an agency representing Mandarin Oriental had called. They’d seen the launch of my new venture, The Luminaire, and wanted to discuss creating journeys together. That call was every founder’s dream.

I co-founded The Luminaire to make intellectual travel cool. My parents used to drag me round museums and galleries on holiday. I hated it. Only later did I realise how much I’d got out of those trips. As CEO of another luxury travel company, I’d seen a growing appetite for travel that satisfied people’s curiosity. Our idea was to find people with exceptional knowledge and connections, then create journeys that would open doors.

That New York meeting led to Mandarin Oriental Exclusive Journeys, launched in 2024. Today, travellers can walk in silence with Japan’s Yamabushi mountain priests, meet a 15th-generation Satsuma pottery master, take a watchmaking masterclass in Geneva or visit the art preservation specialists at Factum Arte in Madrid.

One of my favourite stories concerns a woman who hadn’t travelled since her husband died. Together, they’d visited everywhere from Antarctica to the Galápagos, and she doubted we could tempt her anywhere new. I suggested AlUla in Saudi Arabia, one of the new wonders of the world. When she returned, she told me about her female guide, whose family in Riyadh had wanted her to marry. Instead, she’d left to work in AlUla.

“I suddenly realised that travel is about seeing the world through somebody else’s eyes, through a different perspective,” she told me.  She had put into words exactly what we’d set out to do.

Later, he develops the film and sends the photographs to my hotel. Proof that I remembered to wind the camera at least some of the time.

Art curator Carrie Scott

At Art Basel’s Unlimited 2026 exhibition, Carrie Scott takes a small group in before opening time. They spend an hour with a handful of works, discussing why they were made and how they were installed. While everyone else races to see everything, Scott gives people time to look.

Having grown up in England and the US, she speaks with a gloriously transatlantic accent. “People in England hated my American drawl and people in the US despised my English accent,” she says.

The curator and art historian has run galleries in New York and Seattle, worked alongside photographer Nick Knight and curated exhibitions of John Pawson’s photography. The art world is a connected web, and few seem more than a couple of degrees of separation from Scott. The photographer exhibiting in a tiny Venice gallery. The artist everyone is talking about at Frieze. Scott has their number, and they seem to have hers.

Yet what makes Scott compelling isn't simply who she knows. It's her determination to help people understand art rather than tell them what to think. Through Seen, a next-generation art consultancy she founded in 2024, she introduces audiences to artists and the workings of galleries and collecting. She wants people to have the confidence to make up their own minds.

Samata sends a few puffs of smoke into a hive to keep the bees calm. As it drifts into the sunlight, I watch them crawl across the golden comb.

Later, over lunch in the organic vegetable garden, each dish explores a different honey: heather with warm goat’s cheese, chestnut with roasted aubergine, lavender with Manchego. I begin to understand why Khalid talks about honey as a sommelier talks about wine.

I learn that honeybees communicate through dance. They also drink water, which prompts me to ask whether they ever visit the hotel pool.“

All the time,” Khalid laughs. “The hotel staff phone me and say, ‘Your bees are bothering the guests. Can you come and get them?’” His defence is simple: “How do you know they are my bees?”

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As told to Kerry Smith