Make room for joy
In a moment where wellness has become both a lifestyle and a language, a new retreat brand is quietly redefining what healing actually looks like.
Founded by three sisters, Lara, Tania, and Maya Kalla, Wellness and Wildness is a luxury retreat brand created with care, instinct, and a deep understanding of how people truly want to feel when they step away from their everyday lives. Their retreats are designed for those who want to be held, pampered, nourished, and reminded of their joy. They are not about retreating from life, but returning to it, rested, playful, embodied, and deeply cared for.
At its core, Wellness and Wildness is built on a feeling many people recognise but rarely articulate: that healing doesn’t live only in stillness. It also lives in laughter, in movement, in moments of play, and in letting yourself loosen your grip on who you think you need to be.
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This feeling sits within a larger cultural shift happening across the wellness world. After years of rigid routines, hyper-optimization, and aestheticised ‘perfect’ healing, people are craving something looser, more human. Wellness is moving away from control and toward experience. The rise of somatic practices, community-led rituals, pleasure-based health, and travel that prioritises feeling over fixing reflects a collective desire to soften without losing vitality.
A simple but powerful truth sits at the heart of everything they create: healing lives between softness and freedom.
Mornings might begin slowly, with yoga, meditation, sound healing, breathwork, or a massage designed to soften the body and quiet the mind. As the day opens, the energy shifts naturally into something lighter. Music playing, bodies moving, people laughing, dancing, creating, and most importantly reconnecting with parts of themselves that don’t often get space.
There is a playfulness in the way Wellness and Wildness approaches healing. There is also a quiet rebellion around the concept. In a world that asks people, especially women, to constantly self-improve, optimise, and heal harder, Wellness and Wildness offers permission to simply be. To enjoy without justifying it. To rest without earning it. To move, dance, laugh, and indulge not as a reward, but as part of a well-lived life. Guests are invited to rest deeply, but also to express themselves freely. Nothing feels forced, everything feels intuitive, spacious, and human.
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Luxury runs through every detail, retreats take place in beautiful private villas, luxurious hotels, and on incredible boats, each chosen with an eye for atmosphere, comfort, and ease. Cleanliness is immaculate, service is thoughtful and seamless creating an environment where guests can fully exhale.
You attend Wellness and Wildness to be looked after. Meals are thoughtful and abundant, treatments are integrated naturally into the day rather than squeezed in between activities. There is a sense of being cared for that goes beyond surface-level indulgence.
What makes each Wellness and Wildness retreat especially memorable is how deeply it reflects its destination. Location is part of the experience itself.
In Egypt, guests cruised along the Nile through Luxor and Aswan, surrounded by history, water, and vast open skies. Life on the boat set a gentle pace, encouraging presence, reflection, and connection.
In Italy, days unfolded among lavender fields, slow meals, truffle hunting, and pasta-making classes, experiences rooted in the land, designed to engage the senses and invite the utmost pleasure.
Their upcoming retreat in Çeşme, Turkey, taking place this May, brings together yoga and gastronomy. Michelin-starred meals, carefully chosen restaurants, long shared tables, and moments designed to savour both food and conversation come together to create an experience that is nourishing.
These retreats attract people who are curious, open, and ready to experience wellness in a way that feels alive. Some arrive deeply familiar with yoga and healing practices. Others simply want to feel good again.
It comes as no surprise that Wellness and Wildness retreats tend to sell out quickly, with very limited spaces remaining for May.
Wellness and Wildness is not about becoming someone new. It’s about returning to yourself rested, lighter, and a little more alive than when you arrived.
Lara, Tania, and Maya remind us that healing does not have to be serious to be profound. That luxury can be playful. That freedom and care are not opposites, but partners.
And perhaps most importantly, that true wellness always leaves room for joy.
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Thalia is obsessed with food and luxury travel, so much so that she basically lives on a plane. She’s always curious about the story behind what she’s tasting or where she’s going, and loves sharing those discoveries with the world… sharing is caring.
