January has a particular quiet about it — less a pause between things than a season in its own right. The holiday tables have been cleared. The year has not yet arrived in its full shape. Somewhere in the distance, the first travel decisions of the twelvemonth are beginning to be considered, unhurried, in rooms still warm from the week before.
We have always liked clients who travel in January. They come back differently. They go to the small Nordic towns when the daylight is measured in hours and the lamps inside windows mean something. They take the week in Kyoto that exists only in January, before the cherry season brings everyone else. They ask for the chalet above the town, for the first snow on the valley. They take journeys that require a little more of the body and a little more of the room.
There is a particular pleasure in a journey that does not try to be high summer. The hotel keeps fewer suites open. The restaurants are quieter. Guides have the patience that the shoulder months give them. The staff behind the front desk remembers the name you gave on arrival and uses it through to the last morning.
We find ourselves, each January, rethinking the map. The countries that surprise us in winter are not always the ones our travellers know. Japan in deep snow is a different country from Japan in April. Norway under the first true blue of a January sky has very little to do with Norway in July. Even Italy — a small stone village in Umbria, a chef who will open his kitchen for a single table — quiet in January, almost on its own terms.
If there is a single thread to the travel we design for the first month of the year, it is a certain preference for fewer people, softer light, and rooms with real fires. Beginnings that ask for nothing but that you are there. We propose, this January, to treat the month as a season, rather than a gap.
