There is no cooler place to have a midlife crisis than Iceland. (Though there are certainly warmer places.) If you find yourself emerging from a breakup, burnout, career upheaval, life milestone—or just another fashion month—there may be nowhere better to press reset. Just ask Nicole Kidman. The actor spent August cruising Iceland aboard the Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection’s Evrima, letting her curls loose as she explored the northern coast before declaring it the “trip of a lifetime.” Hunter Schafer gallivanted with fellow Euphoria alum Alexa Demie around Reykjavík Pride, took in Björk’s Echolalia exhibition, and joined revellers at the artist’s surreal eclipse rave.
Iceland’s own Laufey, meanwhile, practically sprinted back post-tour. “I was in New Zealand a week ago finishing up my Australia leg and even though I was halfway across the world there was a yearning to go home,” she tells Vogue. “So I stopped in LA for four days and then booked it to Iceland!”
Her post-tour prescription is refreshingly unfussy: the two-time Grammy winner goes to her local public pool.
“A trip to Vesturbæjarlaug for a swim and Kaffi Vest [cafe] afterwards is the best way to restore. It has my favorite steam bath in the world. They also just added new dry and infrared saunas.”
There is a reason people with extremely full, highly visible lives keep washing up here. Iceland is beautiful, obviously. But plenty of places are beautiful. What it does unusually well is make your problems dissipate rather quickly.
The landscape is too dramatic, the weather too
The landscape is too dramatic, the weather too capricious, the water too cold. You’re forced out of your head and into your body, no matter who you are. Former Icelandic First Lady Eliza Reid has spent more than a decade bringing literary types here through the Iceland Writers Retreat. She believes the effect goes far beyond scenery. “Iceland is the perfect country for a creative reboot,” says the author of the new memoir The First Lady Next Door.
“I have seen time and again how this ethos has helped visitors find peace, perspective and renewed energy.”
I returned to Iceland (my ancestral homeland) this August with a compelling need for all three. I was begrudgingly entering a new decade feeling woefully behind schedule. (For the rest of my mental fracas, you’ll have to read my debut roman à clef, if I ever finish the draft.
If my publisher sees this: no, you didn’t.) Suffice to say, I felt as though I had zoomed, scrolled, and sobbed my 30s away through a series of false starts and ego deaths. A tad dramatic? Of course. I’m a Leo. So I marked my birthday by subjecting 15 brave Icelandic girlfriends (and one gung-ho pal from LA) to a ceremonial sauna followed by a chilly North Atlantic swim. At Sækot, a private seaside hut in Reykjavík’s tony west end, Swimslow founder Erna Bergmann led us through a gusa—an Icelandic ritual of escalating heat, essential oils, music, breathwork, lymphatic massage, meditation and, finally, an ocean plunge.
Somewhere between scented steam, running screaming into freezing
Somewhere between scented steam, running screaming into freezing water, and a glow bar stocked with my Icelandic essentials—BioEffect’s EGF Power potions and marine collagen seltzer by Collab—my existential (and under-eye) baggage ceased to feel terribly urgent. “We live so much of our lives thinking, planning, performing, processing. Iceland has this incredible ability to interrupt that,” Bergmann says.
“You have heat and cold, darkness and endless light, wind, water, geothermal energy and the ocean. There is something about those extremes that makes it almost impossible not to become present.” That word—present—comes up constantly around Icelandic wellness. Not optimization or biohacking, but simply coming back to yourself. The following days became my own experiment in this idea.
Terrified of heights, I flew over Svartagljúfur gorge on the country’s longest Mega Zipline for a jolt of adrenaline, then traded harness for saddle at the new, female-run Icelandic Equestrian Experience. Among our riding party was Kaleo frontman JJ Julius Son, newly home after weeks sleeping on a tour bus. Turns out even Icelandic rock stars need to decompress. “Coming home is always a special feeling,” he says.
It has been in our culture to go
“It has been in our culture to go to the naturally heated swimming pools outside for generations. It’s my favorite way to unwind and relax, especially after a long stint on the road.”
After giving our Icelandic band of ponies one last cuddle, Julius Son and I put that tradition to the test at a hot-spring concept unlike any other, Reykjaböð Hot Springs, days before it opened to the public.
Roughly 35 minutes from Reykjavík, Reykjaböð (böð meaning “baths” in Icelandic) is Iceland’s answer to the intensive European health spa. Its founders have turned the country’s instinct for alternating temperatures into an entire sensory circuit. There’s Laug, a float pool; Varmi, an infusion sauna; Laut, a greenery-filled nature pool; and Demba, or “Temperature Rain,” cascading from overhead showers.
Most dramatic is Hrím, an Arctic Snow Room where snow falls between bouts of sauna and soaking. “Each demands your full attention, and that is often exactly what people need,” says co-founder Brynjólfur J. Baldursson, also behind the Greenhouse Hotel, a nearby spot. “We did not want to design a place for thinking about wellness.” Move from heat into cold, and suddenly you aren’t rehashing a tiff or worrying about your inbox.
You are thinking: Christ, this is cold
You are thinking: Christ, this is cold. Wellness veteran Katherine Connolly, who helped develop Soho House’s original Cowshed spa concept, was enlisted to curate the Reykjaböð experiences. Designed by Arnaldur Schram of Reykjavík Arkitektar, the building draws on Hveragerði’s greenhouse culture, old barns and surrounding mountains. Hálfdan Pedersen’s moody mix of stone, warm timber and greenery blurs the boundary with the outdoors.
He describes Reykjaböð not as an escape from real life, but “a place where, for a while, nothing is expected of you.” Beyond the baths, steamy trails are a treat for hikers and mountain bikers, while the forthcoming Hot Springs Lodges offer overnight cabins with skylights for Northern Lights-gazing from bed. Elsewhere in the Golden Circle, Laugarás Lagoon offers a more sybaritic reset.
Designed by Icelandic studio T.ark Architects, with interiors led by Anthony Bacigalupo, it sits in a wooded bend of the Hvítá River, pools cascading over two levels amid trees and mist—a cocoon for the serious business of doing very little. Except, perhaps, eating. At Ylja, chef Gísli Matt—who learned to bake lava bread from his grandmother—treats the post-soak meal as an extension of the ritual.
For me it’s all connected
“For me it’s all connected. You come out of the lagoon warm and relaxed, and the food should continue that feeling,” he says. As I sipped an earthy broth of forest mushrooms, birch, and spruce before locally caught salmon crudo with a sorrel reduction, I had to agree. Then there is Hvammsvík, the Hvalfjörður hot spring where eight geothermal pools spill toward the North Atlantic.
(It also recently featured in a spectacular three-country Vogue wedding celebration.) Icelandic photographer, director and artist Saga Sig sums up its appeal: “It reminds me why I live here: you don’t need to go far to feel completely transported.”
During her pregnancy, Sig has also turned to Flothetta, a form of float therapy developed in Iceland by aquatic bodyworker Unnur Valdís Kristjánsdóttir.
Using buoyant support and sound therapy, a practitioner gently moves the body through warm water. “It’s a little bit like being in space—no gravity and no time,” says Sig. The dreamy treatment is offered at a dedicated Reykjavík clinic as well as several pools, including Reykjaböð. But not every Icelandic reset requires a luxury lagoon—or, indeed, a bathing suit. Icelandic culture content creator Unnur Eggertsdóttir recommends Noztra, an ocean-facing ceramics studio in Reykjavík’s Grandi, for meditative solo time.
Better still: rent a country house, kill
Better still: rent a country house, kill the Wi-Fi and acquire a gigantic jigsaw. “Icelanders are obsessed with puzzles,” she says. And then there is businesswoman and former First Lady Dorrit Moussaieff, who has spent 25 years based in Iceland, circling the globe and returning to recharge. Now, as she and former president Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson announce their divorce, her relationship with the country remains decidedly intact.
If ever there were a place to split up in style, Iceland may be it. “I will always love Iceland,” she tells Vogue, rather fabulously, from a yacht in Mykonos. She relishes how little Icelanders care who you are. “No one is impressed by celebrity,” Moussaieff says. “They expect and are only concerned with authenticity. I find being there refreshing for so many reasons.”
Her reset guide is gloriously maximalist: Soak at Hvammsvík.
Ride horses—“essential, not missable. Don’t worry about getting hurt, Iceland has the best hospitals.” Eat fresh fish and seaweed from the ocean, as her dog Samson taught her. Learn to knit. Swim in a cold lake because “it clears your brain.” Drive the Eastfjords and “don’t be afraid to try the snails.” Have Jökull Bergmann whisk you into the mountains with his family’s Arctic Heli-Skiing operation.
Need a new look? Seek out Icelandic fashion
Need a new look? Seek out Icelandic fashion designer Steinunn, an alumna of Tom Ford’s Gucci. “She is a national treasure.”
Most importantly? “Say no to the tourist things. Just go out into nature and explore,” she urges. “And if you get lost? Well, the search and rescue teams are elite. They’ll find you.”
Her philosophy captures something essential about Icelandic wellness: it is not passive.
You get wet, cold, sweaty. You walk, ride, make things, eat from the sea. You submit to the elements until they drown out the noise. Justin Bieber understood this when he disappeared to Deplar Farm in remote Fljót Valley last year to record Swag, spending downtime cold plunging, taking saunas, and snowboarding. He later called it the best trip of his life. Clearly, I am biased and regularly drink the mineral-rich Kool-Aid.
But right now, Iceland’s pull feels particularly pronounced. Schafer went whale watching and waterfall-chasing after the eclipse; Kidman took to the open seas; Laufey flew halfway around the world to come home. “A visit will not undo everything someone is carrying,” Baldursson says. “But sometimes a few days are enough to pause, let the body lead, and give the mind a chance to rest.”
I have found the same to be true of the country I have adored all my life.
Iceland cannot mend a broken heart, finish your book, cure burnout, or tell you what the next decade should look like. But it can make everything else recede for a minute—and sometimes that is exactly where the restart begins.
Source: www.vogue.com
