We’ve stopped resisting the heat and started organising our lives around it.
But temperatures are cooling this week, so this edit splits cleanly in two: the things worth escaping towards, a brand-new Cycladic hotel, a wellness club moving across four Mediterranean islands, and the small, clever pleasures getting us through summer in the city, from £7 spritzes to a pillow mist built for 3am. Either way, we’ve welcomed the fight and we’re embracing it. Here’s what we’re loving this week.
BOOK A LAST MINUTE SUMMER GETAWAY HERE PANGAIA Wellness Club x OKU Hotels
Last minute travel plans? PANGAIA, the material-science-minded fashion label, is running a summer-long Wellness Club across OKU Hotels, teamed up with OKU Ibiza, Kos, Andalusia and the just-opened OKU Bodrum. Three disciplines anchor it: restorative morning yoga set to nature-inspired soundscapes, breath-led mindful Pilates built around mobility and control, and immersive sound healing with crystal bowls and chimes for a proper nervous-system reset. Each class opens with a co-branded intention card, the idea being that you set one before you begin and leave a little more grounded than you arrived, and ends, ideally, at The Nourishment Bar over one of PANGAIA’s juices (order the Solar Citrus, all orange, grapefruit, ginger and turmeric, after yoga). There’s a limited-edition unisex capsule collection too, in cream, stone and black, sold exclusively at OKU’s boutiques. This is the ideal programming to close off summer, turning a beach holiday into something you come home better for.
REFRESH WITH THIS SPRITZ Caravan Spritz Menu
A public service announcement for anyone spending the rest of August in London: Caravan’s London Bridge site is running a dedicated spritz menu all month, and every one of them is £7. It’s a rare bit of good value in Bankside, and the setting earns the detour, a beautifully restored 19th-century grain store with a cavernous dining room and its own dedicated bar. One of the capital’s original all-day destinations, Caravan is 15 years in and still reliably excellent, with a globally magpie-ish menu drawn from the founders’ travels: the jalapeño cornbread with fried egg and chilli butter, broken lamb meatballs with chermoula, slow-fermented sourdough pizzas, and an espresso tiramisu worth saving room for. There’s the specialty coffee they built their name on, too. Come for the spritz, stay for dinner… or breakfast, for that matter.
ADD THIS TO YOUR AUTUMN TRAVELS Luura - Cliff, Paros
Luura opened on the Paros seafront on 1 August, and this new openings, in the middle of summer, should sneak its way into your autumn plans. Adults-only and beautifully spare, 39 suites, 19 of them with private pools, it reads as a whitewashed Cycladic village. The real draw is the art: pieces from the Khoury family’s collection, among them Tschabalala Self’s monumental Leda, sit alongside site-specific commissions and work by Greek names like Sofia Mitsola and Kostas Paniaras. Dining comes via Mimi Kakushi, the Michelin-listed, 1920s-Osaka-inspired Japanese restaurant, and the Mediterranean Lenea, all seasonal sharing plates. Add a spa built around layered, “stacked” treatments, ceramics workshops with local artisan Maria Economides and a private chapel, and you have the first of what’s promised to be many more to come, a second Paros property and a Luura Athens, with Acropolis views, already in the pipeline.
EAT DESSERT HERE Farmer J x Happy Endings
Ice cream has become the collab currency of the London summer, Loewe did a pop-up at The Dreamery, Yo-Chi has landed in the UK, and Anya Hindmarch’s cult Ice Cream Project rolls on, so it was only a matter of time before the fast-casual crowd got in on the scoop. From 17–22 August, Farmer J teams up with Happy Endings on a limited-edition soft serve at its St James’s Park site: Happy Endings’ vanilla, an exclusive Farmer J chocolate-tahini sauce and a chocolate-chip cookie crumble. It’s served 11.30am–3.30pm each day and priced at £3.50, with toppings for an extra 50p, and, generously, free for children. A six-day window, and a bargain price tag, this is one for the diary. Blink and it’s gone.
SLEEP EASY WITH THIS Wildsmith's Stillness Pillow Mist
The days are only half the problem with the weather, it’s the airless, thrashing-about nights that really undo you. Wildsmith’s Stillness Pillow Mist won’t cool the room, but it does something quite useful: a 100% natural blend of ten essential oils – English lavender, Roman chamomile and rose geranium among them, all grown and harvested on the Heckfield Estate – that signals to a wired brain it’s time to stop. Mist it over your pillow and bedding before bed, then reapply at 4am when you inevitably surface, which makes it well suited to exactly the broken, interrupted sleep this heat keeps handing us. The numbers back it up: in consumer trials, 80% of users agreed they fell asleep more easily, and the same number found it easier to drop off again after waking. It’s £32, and worth it.
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