Our wellness shelf has become one of our favourite little corners of No.82.
It's home to around thirty brands across seven different categories, and everything you see has been chosen with a bit of thought behind it.
Things we love, things we use ourselves, and little finds we think are genuinely lovely to have with you when you travel.
And the shelf actually has two sides to it.
You're always welcome to pop into No.82 and have a browse, pick something up for yourself or find a little gift for someone else.
But we also wanted the collection to become part of the holidays we create here.
So when you book your escape with us, we'll choose a few little treats from the shelf and put together a gift bag especially for you. Your name on it, waiting at No.82 before you go.
Just a little something from us to take with you on your travels.
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What the bag is for
This piece is about that second side of the shelf, the gift bag, and we're following it the whole way through one trip.
Greece, in September, for a week.
The seven categories are hydration and performance, sleep and relaxation, skin, SPF and beauty, beauty from within, gut health and immunity, energy and lifestyle, and travel essentials and recovery.
Seven headings, and every one of them names something a long journey has a way of disturbing.
It isn't a welcome pack. It's a little bag with your name on it and your own trip behind it.
Each one is built around four questions. Where you're going, how long for, what type of holiday it is, and what you personally like.
Which means there's no standard bag, and there was never meant to be one. Every one of them is different, because every traveller is.
It's a little more work than filling a box would be, and it's the part we'd never give up.
The reasoning behind it is simple enough. Travel puts a load on the body, and it does it in a handful of predictable ways, most of them dull rather than dramatic. Flying, jet lag, a routine that falls apart the moment you leave the house, different food, and rather less sleep than you had planned on.
Most of that can be planned around, if somebody hands you the right small items before you go.
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First, the water
Greece in September is warm, and hydration is usually the first thing to slip.
Ancient + Brave's True Hydration is the one we'd reach for. It's an electrolyte powder built around the natural electrolyte profile of coconut water, carrying sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium, and the brand's own claim for the magnesium is that it contributes to electrolyte balance and to the reduction of tiredness and fatigue.
It comes as a glass jar of thirty servings, which is a beautiful object and stays firmly at home, or as sachets of fifteen, which is the format that goes in the bag.
We're particularly glad of the sachets.
We made the case for the Humantra sachet in the carry-on back in June and we won't make it twice, so the short version will do here. It weighs nothing, it takes up no room, and it's far easier to put in a bag in Westbourne than to find in an airport at six in the morning.
'It weighs nothing, it takes up no room, and it's far easier to put in a bag in Westbourne than to find in an airport at six in the morning.'
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The one that goes on before anything else
Sun protection is the item we're least willing to leave to chance, and Greece in September is still a sun holiday.
Eucerin's Sensitive Protect Face Sun Cream is the SPF 50+ we'd put in.
It's a 50ml facial sunscreen made for skin that reacts badly to most of them, water-resistant, with an active list running to Tinosorb S, licorice extract and glycyrrhetinic acid. Eucerin rates the protection as "very high" across both UVA and UVB.
Fifty millilitres is also a size that travels, which matters rather more than it sounds like it should.
Perhaps the least glamorous item on the shelf, and the one we'd argue hardest for.
It's also the one we'd rather you didn't buy at an airport, where the choice is whatever happens to be on the shelf and your skin meets it for the first time on day one.
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And then the one that never leaves the house
Then there's Mauli Rituals' Sleep Dharma Himalayan Bath Salts, which we should say plainly isn't going anywhere near your hand luggage.
It's 460g of pink Himalayan salt and powdered amethyst, scented with ten essential oils.
Chamomile, lavender, vetiver, jasmine sambac, clary sage, rose geranium, patchouli, palma rosa, bergamot and lime.
The brand states it's 100 per cent natural, with nothing synthetic and no artificial fragrance in it at all.
Powdered amethyst isn't an ingredient we'd have particularly expected to find in a bath, and there it is.
It's a lovely present to be handed and a hopeless one to pack.
Four hundred and sixty grams of anything is a conversation at the bag drop that nobody wants.
Which is where the first side of the shelf comes back in, the one you can pop into No.82 and browse any day of the week. The bag goes with you. The shelf is still standing there when you get back, and the week after a holiday is, more often than not, the week a holiday comes apart.
So this one is a homecoming product rather than a packing one, and we'd sooner say so than pretend it folds flat.
'It's a lovely present to be handed and a hopeless one to pack.'
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One bag we cannot show you
We wanted to write this piece a different way.
The plan was to take one real bag, packed this month for one real client flying to Greece, and lay the contents out on a table item by item. A photograph of that would have said more in one go than three sections of this can.
We can't do it, and the reason is the same reason the whole idea works.
Every bag is built around one person and one trip, so there's no representative one to photograph, and any bag we put together for the purpose would be a bag assembled for an article rather than for a traveller.
So you're getting the thinking instead of the picture, which is a little less satisfying and rather more honest.
What we can tell you is what the thinking draws on, and our own record of that is specific enough to be useful. A long-haul flight to the Maldives might take hydration sachets, a silk sleep mask, a collagen supplement and an SPF skincare kit, while a European city break might take an inhaler duo, a city guide and a gut health probiotic.
Greece in September sits somewhere between the two, which is perhaps why it comes out looking like water, sun protection and sleep, in roughly that order.
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Before you fly, and after you land
None of this is the holiday, and we'd hate anyone to mistake it for one.
The shelf exists because we'd rather you landed in a fit state to enjoy the week you've spent months looking forward to.
The small items are the ones left until the night before and then forgotten, and they're the cheapest part of any trip to get right.
Greece is on our minds this month for a second reason. On Wednesday 30 September we have Domes Resorts and Sovereign at No.82 from 6pm until 10pm, with nine Greek canapés coming along Poole Road from Romanzo's Taverna and tickets at £25 a head. It's a lovely way to spend a Wednesday in Westbourne.
Different evening, same country.
If you're booking your holiday with us this autumn, there'll be a little gift bag waiting for you too. You don't need to ask or add anything on. We'll choose a few lovely things from our wellness shelf that we think will suit your trip, and they're simply from us to you.
And you absolutely don't need to be booking a holiday to come in and enjoy the shelf either.
Pop into No.82, have a browse and tell us where you're heading and when you're going. Beach days, a long-haul flight, a few days wandering around a city…… we'll happily show you the three things we'd be slipping into our own bag.
Bring us your travel plans. We'll help with the lovely little extras.
Come find us at No.82.
hello@agentnouveau.com