Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2025 i Robb Report

It has long been said that there are plenty of fish in the sea. But if you're having dinner in the United States, that adage only recently began to apply to turbot. The flat white fish—whose most prized varieties are sourced off the coasts of northern Spain and western France—is relatively common in Europe, but it's a newer addition to America's fine-dining offerings. That's thanks to the growing number of chefs stateside turning gourmands on to the ingredient they alternately regard as “exquisite,” “noble,” and having a certain “level of prestige.” “It's my favorite fish to cook. It's my favorite fish to eat, too,” says Ed Szymanski, the chef at New York City's Crevette, which serves a whole turbot with seaweed butter. “I think it's the most delicious finfish in…

The race village at Port de Saint-Tropez is awash with people in nautical navy and white, the de facto dress code for the Loro Piana Giraglia Regatta. This is the second year the fashion house has lent its name to one of the Mediterranean's most prestigious summer races. The course zooms from the French coast to Genoa, Italy, taking a sharp turn past Giraglia, a small island off Corsica's northern tip. It's the latest in a long line of marine events the brand has sponsored, dating back more than 20 years. The link between sailing and the brand—and more consequentially the Loro Piana family—is exemplified by the man Robb Report is here to meet: Pier Luigi Loro Piana. An avuncular figure in his 70s with the physique of a man…

IT BEGAN WITH guests bringing highspec cameras and long lenses with them. (Some even knew how to use them.) Then they started ditching the kit and bringing an actual photographer instead. That seems almost quaint now, as a new niche of pro film crews are accompanying travelers on the most exclusive jaunts, equipment in hand to discreetly capture each moment, ensuring it's truly unforgettable. This must-have addition has emerged in the wake of a wider shift in the demands of the most adventurous travelers, says Robb Report Travel Master Christopher Wilmot-Sitwell of Cazenove + Loyd—he describes that change as from “status-driven tourism to story-rich experiences.” Of his core clients’ needs, he says, “It's no longer just about where they go, but how they remember, capture, and share it.” And such…

A little over three years ago, interior designer Assel Baimakhan saw her clients’ future home, expecting an empty concrete box. But the two-story penthouse—built in 2012 and spanning 5,016 square feet with sweeping views of the Tien Shan Mountains-held a surprise. Instead of Baimakhan's desired blank slate, the space was full of scaffolding welded together and bolted into the walls. “When I first visited the apartment, I was shocked,” says Baimakhan, the founder of Chicago-based Casa Azzurra. “The previous owner had started construction and installed heavy metal structures in every room. It turned out he was afraid of earthquakes and tried to turn the entire apartment into a bunker.” While the project's location in Almaty, Kazakhstan, is known to be a seismically active area, the shoddily constructed system felt like…

There's a title bout underway between the top contenders in the business-jet ring, and Bombardier is looking like an early favorite with its 19-seat Global 8000. Not only is the aircraft, which broke the sound barrier in flight tests, the fastest business jet in aviation history, it established a second milestone with its 8,000-nautical-mile range. For owners, that means the $83 million jet can fly nonstop between most of the world's major cities while affording unprecedented levels of comfort. These range wars come as no surprise. “The big builders have always had great interest in the top of the market—having the biggest, fastest, longest offering—and it's getting crowded,” says Brian Foley, a consultant and former aviation executive. Besides the Global 8000, Foley points to the Gulfstream G800, scheduled to go…

Provenance, performance, beauty, and rarity—these are the pillars of any truly collectible car, and few epitomize them better than Ferrari. The 1960s-era 250 GTO and the subsequent 365 GTB/4 Daytona Competizione are prime examples. Now, a 1973 Daytona Competizione Series III is set to add a new steward to its story as it headlines the Gooding Christie's Pebble Beach Auctions, taking place August 15 and 16 on California's Monterey Peninsula. “The competition Daytona is the last road-registered, factory-built competition Ferrari,” says James Cottingham, managing director and lead acquisition consultant for DK Engineering, a U.K.based Ferrari specialist. “It's definitely the end of a chapter of these race cars that private owners could buy and genuinely drive to the track, race them competitively, and then drive them home.” Cottingham would know—his family…

Welcome to Robb Report's 2025 Travel Issue. If there's a common thread this year, it isn't passport stamps, platinum status, or yacht-to-villa transfers—it's authorship. As a journalist, I can appreciate the impulse. Today's most discerning travelers aren't interested in someone else's itinerary; they want the byline. Whether it's flying at the speed of sound, trading coasts for a new hemisphere, or filming your own Antarctic epic, the journeys in these pages are as original as the people behind them. Our marine and aviation editor, Michael Verdon, discovered this firsthand. For his feature “High Fliers” (p. 94), he joined a group of private pilots navigating their jets on a 42-day odyssey from North America to Nepal. For these travelers, charting their own course is the thrill. At sea, the tempo may…

Think of it as a hyperefficient way to sample all the bottles you still haven't uncorked: With scores of restaurants offering over 5,000 wines combined, the Marina Bay Sands Hotel has the unique ability to serve many highly acclaimed and coveted vintages under one roof. The selection varies widely, from a $168-a-bottle Châteauneuf-du-Pape to a $23,000 jeroboam of Heidi Barrett's acclaimed Napa red blend for Amuse Bouche. Some options crack the six-figure mark—and not just for the sake of going big. The hotel operates an in-house Wine & Spirit Education Trust academy, and the breadth and depth of the list means the dedicated sommelier at each venue has serious knowledge. Some servers even wear WSET's hard-earned pins on their uniforms. That's essential, because the property's cellars feature bottles from 80…

Flying from Lagos to London for her first family vacation was an eye-opening experience for a young Thelma West—and not just because of the culture shock. “There were a lot of us bursting out of the plane,” she says of her parents and four siblings. “I always wondered how [my mother] did it!” Though she returned to the U.K. to study engineering at 16, a lifelong fascination with the diamonds in her mom's jewelry box led her to HRD Antwerp, a leading school for gem graders. After working internationally as a gemstone buyer, she moved to London for a job as a diamond grader in 2003. And in 2012, when a friend asked for help turning an old diamond into a new ring, she started her eponymous jewelry house. Its…

Despite the deep Scottish roots of Mar Hall—the 180-year-old estate turned hotel and golf club just west of Glasgow—the only tartan seen is on the staff's ankles. “Collectively, we said we're never going to go down the tartan route,” says Jim Hamilton, creative director of local design firm Graven, who headed up the property's recent $27 million renovation along with Lisa King, design director of Align Partners. “There's an amazing old Scottish piece of architecture, and there's some nice modern Scottish hospitality,” he continues, stressing the importance of balance between contemporary aesthetics and traditional motifs. Twenty minutes later, Hamilton points to the flash of red-andblack patterned socks peeking out from the cuff of a team member's pants. “That's our only bit of tartan we've got in the hotel,” he says…

When Bombardier established flight parameters for the Smooth Flex Wing on its Global 7500, the engineering team realized aerodynamic realities were working against them. “We wanted this wing to be the fastest we'd ever designed … very slender with minimal drag at Mach 0.85 or 0.90 and flexibility in terms of torsion,” says Bombardier's Stephen McCullough. But for “challenging airports,” such as London City, the aircraft needed extra lift and drag to be able to land at speeds as low as 120 knots. These opposing constraints resulted in a blueprint that “looks like two different wings,” he adds. “It would've been a compromise if we hadn't done something mechanically different.” The result is a smaller, sleeker, more flexible wing with a split-aileron configuration. The innovative design makes it a turbulence…

In 1999, John Demartini read an article in Robb Report about The World—a 644-foot 12-deck residential cruise liner that continuously circles the globe, visiting major cities and remote outposts alike. The author and speaker was drawn to the idea of being part of a floating village, imagining life at sea as both an endless adventure and a welcome refuge for writing and research. Nearly 24 years after becoming one of the ship's first occupants, Demartini is still in the same apartment, having authored dozens of books and visited nearly 1,000 ports, “from Antarctica to Borneo,” he says. “Most people dream like we live.” Long an island unto itself in the market, The World functions more like a luxury condo complex than a cruise ship. Its 150 to 200 residents—from 20…

IT'S AN INDELIBLE image of an unforgettable woman. Princess Diana is sitting by a pool, a few months before she died, her hair windswept and her smile relaxed. She's on vacation in an elite, discreet enclave in the Caribbean, an island she treasured as one of the few places she could wander undisturbed by the paparazzi: Barbuda. At that time, it was a jet-set escape, centered on the K Club, a small resort owned by Italian fashion entrepreneur Mariuccia Mandelli of Krizia. “Princess Diana walked past me on the beach there,” recalls interior designer Tara Bernerd, who vacationed at the retreat with her father, Elliott Bernerd, one of Britain's most successful property developers. The K Club was seen as a low-key counterpart to Mustique or St. Barts. “The island was…

Ryan Denehy travels enough to have been disappointed by a range of high-end hotel gyms. Still, back home in New York, the 38-year-old entrepreneur has occasionally used the intimate wellness club at Tribeca's tony Greenwich Hotel. “You can actually get a stand-alone membership for just that, and no one really knows about it,” the avid cyclist says. “It's pretty much always empty.” But fitness centers at properties around the globe are starting to fill up—because they've recently gotten really good. Take Surrenne at the Emory in London, a 25,000-square-foot space opened in April 2024, which offers a hyperbaric chamber, a great signature facial, and the first Tracy Anderson studio outside the United States. The Sporting Club at Philadelphia's Bellevue Hotel has an N.B.A.-size basketball court, three golf simulators, and an…

Hotelier Marie-Louise Sciò is glad she didn't know what she didn't know when she joined the family business, which operates a trio of luxury stays in Italy. “I didn't go to hospitality school,” says the entrepreneur, whose best-known property is Porto Ercole's Il Pellicano. “It was a very rigid world, with a lot of men running it.” Her fresh, out-of-thebox thinking has helped her forge a reputation as an innovator—not least for her approach to the hotel's boutique, which was once just “a little shop with crappy caps and all that.” To bring it up to snuff, she began partnering with a who's who of well-known brands and makers, such as fine-jewelry designer Francesca Amfitheatrof and even Birkenstock. “That was the groundbreaking one, and it was really huge in terms…

The baby cow's bravado is understandable. After all, we're the unexpected guests, hurtling through its 9,200-acre home—Montana's Jumping Horse Ranch—in a Bentley. It's an unlikely pairing: the baronial British marque and the rough-hewn landscape that helped put the “wild” in Wild West. Yet the union feels right in the new 2026 Bentayga Speed. Acceleration, agility, and power are on full display as we traverse grasscarpeted hills scored with what resemble nothing more than wagon-wheel tracks, then briefly trail the calf. The swagger here isn't just bovine; the Bentayga makes its own kind of noise, courtesy of an optional Akrapovič titanium exhaust that delivers a sonic punctuation easily mistaken for a thunderclap. Though both Montana and Bentley share screen time on Yellowstone, they find true common ground in this luxury S.U.V.…

The concept of a portable digital audio player (DAP) goes back to 1979, the beginning of the bitsand-bytes era of music recording. At the time, all such devices—like most digitally recorded music of the period—sounded awful, but the sheer luxury of on-the-go listening promised an intoxicating sonic adventure. Thankfully, technology has advanced, and 46 years later, a few of these components are, well, truly sublime. Peripatetic audiophiles will be enamored with the Astell&Kern SP3000M Copper Nickel Limited Edition ($2,699), a top choice in the segment of pocket-size players enabling the enjoyment of highresolution music or media files anywhere. Astell&Kern products are made in Korea, and—as is the Korean way—are as fastidiously packaged as they are designed and built. Worthy of the most ceremonious unwrapping video, a black cardboard carton contains…

The twisting, swooping swirl of metal, glass, and wood rises from the ground floor of the century-old warehouse, climbs to the second story, then bursts through the roof, elevating visitors over Rotterdam's historic harbor in a double helix that does double duty as both staircase and artwork. That the Tornado, cantilevered atop the new Fenix museum, looks like it could be an amusement-park thrill ride is no accident: Its Instagram-worthiness is baked into a plan to put this 700-year-old city on the metaphorical map. Right next door to Fenix, which opened in May and tells the story of human migration through the lens of art, an empty storage facility is being transformed into 86,000 square feet of dance studios for everything from ballet to hip-hop, with an adjacent 400seat theater…

THE SUN WAS SHINING, the sky was cobalt, and the clouds over New Zealand's South Island were prettier and puffier than any Pixar animator would dare render. Science consultant Travis Taylor and his partner had racked their bikes after a 17-mile ride that trailed beside Lake Hāwea then rose through farmland before winding along the river into Wānaka. The two were relaxing on the sofas with their devices, a light summer breeze blowing through the open doors of their rented house, when they looked over at each other and realized that, without having uttered a word about it, they were deep into the exact same Google search. “We were both investigating the visa process, individually and simultaneously,” says Taylor. “It's just one of those things that clicked for both of…