editor-in-chief Liz Morris welcomes you to the festive season

Welcome to a very upbeat and inspiring holiday season issue, which I hope will keep you cued into the current style trends, new talents, brilliantly personalised gifting ideas and gourmet know-how for Christmas and the New Year.

Whilst this is essentially holiday reading, the issue has a ton to offer that’s fresh and frontlining the luxury lifestyle zeitgeist right now. The one thing about luxury is that it moves with the times and shifts perspectives, from material opulence to rarity, to experiences or spirituality, and now encompasses a new term that describes a luxury of wellbeing.

Emotional luxury is a feeling. It can be as simple as feeling safe, or having enough time, or feeling comfortable, which, if you think about it, is probably the all-time jackpot of feelings. It’s been a very perplexing year. World events, including catastrophic climate change, human rights horrors, displacement, the economy and the constant threat of threat is manifesting in an either insecure or rogue mindset because life, increasingly, presents as reliably unreliable. Yet, life is about engagement, so we search for new, relevant talismans and symbols to fortify us.

For most of us, home and a sense of belonging in it, is the first thing we experience when we wake up, and the last shelter we sense before sleeping, and the ultimate feeling of emotional luxury is a home that feels like home. You can’t write the formula down because it’s different for everyone, but what I wanted to propose with the interiors in this issue is that there are different and unexpected ways to achieve it.

The pressure to be stylish is a status choice, but the desire to live well is a personal drive. If you do nothing else these holidays, think a bit about what your possessions do for you, what job do they do, what is their emotional value? And going forward, choose what you need to make you comfortable.

Season’s Greetings from us all at H&G.