The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘Nowhere else has felt so tactile and textured’
Iceland’s new wave of hotels combine luxury with a sense of being embedded in raw nature. Simon Parker checks in
Plumes of dry ice warped and knotted over a pasture of rocket, lamb’s lettuce and chickpeas – like miniature cirrus clouds cloaking the mossy summit of a tabletop mountain. Meanwhile, langoustines, soaking up to their pinkish waists in rich garlic butter, basked beside fat-marbled slivers of salmon sashimi. Surrounded on three sides by vast 16:9 widescreen windows, cut into enormous hunks of reclaimed Austrian pine, the Viking long room – at the heart of Iceland’s brand-new Torfhus Retreat, where I was eating dinner – radiated a cosy candlelit hygge.
Between dishes that sizzled, smoked and hissed, I couldn’t think of another meal, or hotel that I’d been to anywhere else in the world, that was so tactile and textured. I wanted to stroke every three-ton pillar of basalt, rap my knuckles against the 300-year-old recycled oak tabletops and feel the snap of brittle cod skin crisps against the inside of my cheeks.
“We consider what we’re doing here as anti-à la carte,” said Thorarinn Eggertsson, Torfhus’s executive chef, as he delivered a seared veal fillet specked with flakes of truffle snow. “We’ve actually banned the word ‘buffet’ entirely. Consider this more a modern Viking dining experience, characterised by smaller plates and multiple, interactive tastes.”
Think Nobu-meets-Noma, via the rich Icelandic fishing grounds of the North Atlantic. Thorarinn’s stomachcuddling cuisine was the antithesis of the icy drizzle lashing horizontally against the panes just beyond my plate. It was informal and filling, abundant in umami – best eaten in woolly jumpers, thermals and slippers.
Torfhus feels like an exclusive Alpine chalet, a private Alaskan fishing lodge or a boutique southern African safari camp. Its individual guesthouses, set across 124 grassy acres, are unpretentious and homely, with British-made Burlington bathrooms and recycled pine-slat walls still flaunting the burrows of thousands of woodworms. Perhaps the lambskin and horse-hide rugs aren’t to most modern tastes, but nevertheless, these are the sort of cosy minihomes you feel relieved to return to after a hike or ride in the cold and unforgiving great outdoors of southwest Iceland’s
Golden Circle.
The country’s financial crash of 2008 saw its tourism industry enter a well-documented boom period – and it now accounts for 42 per cent of the entire economy. But with rapid growth came a proliferation of one-size-fits-all, mid-range guesthouses, often costing about £120 a night. Not cheap by any standard, but all too often their drab and prefab rooms, produced quickly for the mass market, offered very little for travellers who craved something better.
“For us, luxury means feeling embedded in nature – in a closed community,” said Torfhus’s owner, Alexandra Hoop – as we brushed our hands through the wild Icelandic grass that insulates the retreat’s 25 turfcovered houses. “That means a gated world with a private restaurant.”
It’s the dichotomy between climatic harshness and comfy interiors that has come to epitomise Iceland’s emerging luxury hotel scene. And while it would be impossible to ignore the wellknown Ion Adventure Hotel, which sits on stilts above the lava-strewn Thingvellir National Park, the move towards extreme location-meets-luxe first appeared in the shape of Hotel Ranga in 1999. Arranged on mostly one storey, the all-wood retreat resembles a Swiss mountain cabin floating on a lava field, but with outdoor bathtubs and a mini observatory equipped with powerful telescopes. Just a two-hour drive from Reykjavik, it became a popular south-western stop-off for both a local and an international crowd, hungry for destination dining beyond the capital.
A seasonal haul of lobster, lamb, reindeer and puffin still draws on Iceland’s self-sustainable culinary heritage. Meanwhile, its recently redesigned Icelandic Suite has largely been carved out of shipwreck mahogany and foreign hardwoods – a nod to the south Icelandic tradition of using what the ocean washes up.
That’s not to say the Ranga isn’t starting to look a little tired in places; the bathrooms certainly look dated. But it was a flag-bearer for Iceland’s new breed of hotelier, such as Olafur Sigurdsson, the co-founder and manager of the four-star 360 Hotel, which opened last year.
“Icelanders are entrepreneurs,” he told me, as we pondered an undulating rural scene of 110,000 young pine, birch and larch trees planted across the hotel’s 250 acres of hillside grounds. “People come here to enjoy our nature. A good Icelandic hotel should reflect the rough aesthetic of the mountains.”
The 360 Hotel certainly achieves that – with a panorama that takes in distant volcanoes and icy lakes. Inside, there’s a blend of stainless
steel girders, aluminium ventilation pipes and exposed electrical wiring – combined with deep Philippe Starck armchairs, slick concrete walls and Serta mattresses. This rural retreat, along with the Ranga and Torfhus, completes a discernible route around Iceland’s otherwise guesthousesaturated Golden Circle.
Venture beyond Iceland’s southwest corner and luxury becomes harder to find, apart from one obvious exception: Deplar Farm. Situated in an often snow-packed valley, in the country’s isolated far north, the 13-room converted sheep farm has become renowned as one of the most exclusive heli-skiing retreats on earth.
Besides the thrill of off-piste adventuring, it also offers kayaking, horse riding and salmon fishing in rivers so remote that they remain largely unknown to the masses. Back at base there’s a yoga studio, a film lounge, hot pools, treatment rooms and a live-in sommelier. But it certainly doesn’t come cheap – nightly rates start at about £2,500 per person per night.
Deplar Farm has sat at the unequivocal zenith of the country’s luxury revolution since its arrival in 2016, but hot on its tail (in 2018) was the Retreat Hotel at the Blue
Lagoon – just a 20-minute drive from Keflavik International Airport. Moss-green carpets, floor-to-ceiling windows and hunks of jagged lava once again distort the separation between outside and in. Even the cosy yoga studio and library look out on a jagged moat of cerulean geothermal salt water.
The Retreat’s spa – carved into an 800-year-old lava flow – is the big draw for both day and overnight guests, plus private access to the
Blue Lagoon. But without a doubt, it’s on the plate that this hotel excels. Often, tasting menus can be annoyingly eclectic – pretentious for the sake of simply showing off. At Moss Restaurant, however, its fiveand seven-course food and wine pairings live up to the grandeur of the epic surroundings.
The crispy seared scallop, resting on a delicately sliced cross-section of cauliflower, may well prove to be the most perfect plate of food I’ve ever consumed. But the real show-stopper was undeniably the tender fillet of “best end” organic local lamb, perched on a smoking birch log beside tart Icelandic bilberries. It seemed flawlessly to incarnate everything Iceland’s opulent new wave has come to represent.
For more hotels in iceland, see: telegraph.co.uk/tt-icelandhotels