Nostalgia Is the New Luxury and I Have Complicated Feelings About It

Last month I stayed at a resort that had a rotary phone in the room. Not a vintage phone that had been there since the property opened — a brand-new reproduction rotary phone, manufactured to look old, placed on a midcentury side table that was also new, next to a stack of hardcover books selected for their spine colors rather than their contents. The phone didn’t work. It was decoration. A prop in a set designed to make me feel something about a time I didn’t live in.

Nostalgia is having a moment in luxury travel, and I can’t decide if it’s charming or deeply cynical. Possibly both.

The Trend

It started with adult summer camps — those $2,000-a-weekend experiences where grown adults pay to do archery, make friendship bracelets, and sleep in cabins that are significantly nicer than any cabin that ever existed at an actual summer camp. The premise is regression as luxury: return to a simpler time, except the food is farm-to-table and the counselors have certifications in “experiential wellness.”

Then it spread. Retro ski lodges with wood paneling and fondue. Beach clubs styled like the Riviera in the 1960s. Train journeys designed to replicate the Orient Express experience, minus the murder and plus a $500 bottle of champagne. Hotels that removed the smart TV and replaced it with a record player and a curated vinyl collection — curated, naturally, by someone who isn’t you and doesn’t know what you like.

The aesthetic is consistent: analog everything, natural materials, a color palette borrowed from a Wes Anderson film, and a studied absence of technology that requires technology to maintain (someone is running that hotel’s booking system, social media, and payment processing on very modern devices behind the reception desk).

Why It Works

I understand the appeal. I’m not immune to it.

There’s a genuine exhaustion with the present. The average person checks their phone 144 times a day. Every surface in modern life wants your attention — your car dashboard, your refrigerator, the screen on the gas pump. Hotels used to be a respite from daily life. Now they have QR code menus, app-controlled room keys, and push notifications from the concierge. You went on vacation and the vacation has an interface.

Nostalgia travel offers an opt-out. The rotary phone doesn’t ring. The record player requires physical interaction. The wood paneling doesn’t update. These spaces promise a version of travel where you’re not a user — you’re a guest. And the distinction, in an era of constant digital mediation, feels like relief.

I stayed at a lodge in Vermont last winter that had removed all screens from the common areas. There was a library with actual books, a fireplace with actual fire, and a bar where the bartender made cocktails while looking at you rather than at a tablet. It was wonderful. I read for three hours straight, which I haven’t done at home in years because at home there are sixteen things competing with the book.

Why It Bothers Me

The thing about nostalgia is that it’s memory with the discomfort removed. The 1960s Riviera was glamorous and also deeply exclusionary. The summer camps of the 1980s were fun and also had terrible food, insect bites, and a kid named Derek who made everyone miserable. The Orient Express was romantic and also had unreliable heating and took three days to get somewhere you can now fly in two hours.

The luxury nostalgia industry takes the aesthetic of these experiences and discards the reality. You get the wood cabin without the discomfort. The rotary phone without the inconvenience. The analog aesthetic without actually giving up any modern convenience — because the Wi-Fi password is still on the welcome card and the espresso machine in the room is state-of-the-art.

This is nostalgia as set design. It looks like the past. It functions like the present. And the gap between appearance and reality is where the cynicism lives.

The adult summer camps bother me most. The people attending them didn’t have idyllic childhoods that they’re trying to recapture — they’re imagining a childhood they never had and paying to experience it as adults. The nostalgia isn’t personal. It’s aspirational. They’re nostalgic for a fictional past, and the resort has obligingly built it for them.

The Ones That Get It Right

There are places where the past isn’t performance. Where the wood paneling is old because the building is old, where the analog touches exist because nobody replaced them, where the atmosphere of another era is a byproduct of continuity rather than a design choice.

The Hotel & Café & Bar & Nightclub Negresco in Nice has been operating since 1913 and looks like it. Not “looks like 1913 the way a decorator imagines 1913” — looks like a building that was decorated in 1913 and has been maintained rather than redesigned. The difference is visible and felt. There’s a patina to genuine age that reproduction can’t achieve.

The overnight trains that still run across Europe — not the luxury recreations, but the actual sleeper services — offer an analog travel experience because they haven’t been updated, not because they chose a retro aesthetic. The beds are narrow. The dining car is functional. The views are extraordinary because the route was planned before highways existed and follows terrain that cars will never see.

These experiences are nostalgic because they’re continuous. They connect you to the past because they are the past, still running. The resort with the reproduction rotary phone connects you to nothing. It’s a mood board, not a memory.

Where I Land

I want to like nostalgia travel more than I do. The impulse behind it — slow down, disconnect, be present — is one I share. The execution — charge premium for a curated imitation of simplicity — is one I find hard to respect.

If you want the past, visit the places that never left it. They’re cheaper, more honest, and the rotary phones actually work.

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