Mid-Week Escape: Uxua Brazilian Resort

Take me here now. PLEASE!

I’ve been following the progress of this sweet Brazilian resort and am so excited to finally share it. Uxua Casa Hotel has all the elements I love to find in a hotel: It’s lovingly created by a private owner, its dripping with local flavor and has a great design aesthetic. See, I’m not that hard to please.

Here’s the deal: Uxua was started by the fashionable Wilbert Das, the former creative director of Diesel. He traveled to the remote Trancoso region of Brazil, fell in love with it, bought some property and decided to share his special place with a quiet Brazilian resort. And importantly, he also wanted to incorporate the village into his resort. He built the hotel so it would mesh with and even aid the community. Four of the hotel’s colorful “casitas” face the 1586 town square and were original fishermen cottages. In the 16th century missionaries cleared the rain forest to establish the town for the native people and apparently not a whole lot has changed over the years.

Today, guests can watch locals do capoeira, the Brazilian martial-art in the town square, and take lessons from townspeople. Or they can go fishing for dinner then learn to clean and cook their catch in the local style. But mostly it’s the resort’s position on the town square that allows visitors to become a part of town life, at least for a week or two. Lets go, eh?

And of course the design is fantastic. Here are more photos of Uxua…

Mid-Week Escape: Far Out Stay in Austin s

The South by Southwest festival is upon us, do you know where you’re staying? The first (and only) time I was in Austin we stayed at the super-funky (in a good way) Austin Motel, with its irresistible slogan: “So close yet so far out.” I remember we shared some pooltime with a band named Estradasphere who played a gig nearby. Although that felt like the quintessential Austin experience, this time, I’d like to bump it up a notch and stay at the five-month-old KimberModern.

Built by two women who love to travel and had hospitality in their blood. Partners Kimber Cavendish and Vicki Faust spent $1 million to build the modernist five-room hotel in the South Congress neighborhood. With rates at $250 to $320 a night it\’s a tad steep, but take a look at some of the cool features.

Mid-Week Desk-Chair Travel: English Cottage Escape

Lets go back to a time before the recession, a time when we did things like travel for fun and throw away paper towels and partake in the fine luxury that is the dry cleaners. Well I’m exaggerating, but I am feeling terribly vacation-deprived. So here goes the first of a new series of mid-week escape travel pieces.

I dream of a solitary vacation, where I can read and rest and write and drink tea and sit by a fireplace and make like Emily Dickinson or Virginia Woolf (minus the depression and lesbianism). “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Woolf said. So here tis.

Boy it would be a good novel coming from here. I’d call it: “Eat, Sleep, Chill.”