Calypso: more than a place to stay; it's a place you won't want to leave.
Calypso: more than a place to stay; it's a place you won't want to leave.
OPINION
In the spirit of JOMO - the ‘joy of missing out’ - a trend that sees travellers seek experiences that involve less stress, greater well-being and better reconnection with loved ones,Greg Bruce and his family head off to Waiheke Island to stay at Calypso: a special house in a special place for a few days of zero stress and 100% serenity.
At first, the door didn’t look special. It manifested as nothing more than a conventionally-sized rectangular hole in a wall at the top of some stairs.
But as I drew closer, I saw it was emanating a bright, white light, which, as I moved towards it, grew steadily brighter, until it was nearly blinding. The light entered my eyes and passed directly into my soul. The world appeared before me and its weight dropped from my shoulders. I had never seen so much light in one room.
I noticed something funny happening in my body – I could feel myself being rearranged, reformulated, transformed. I was becoming happier, kinder, wiser, more knowing and generally better: a better husband, better parent, better equipped to cope with the vicissitudes of life. No longer, my body instantly realised as it passed through that doorway, did it exist solely as a bag of stress and reactivity.
The living space was huge and open and oriented towards the house’s wide front, which was almost entirely glass. The immediate landscape was bright with green bush-lined hills, which quickly dropped away to a clifftop and beyond to the wide deep blue of the Hauraki gulf, which raced out to meet the pale blue of the sky, which went on forever.
My spirit left my body and soared like a seabird out over that water, swooping and whooping, absorbing the air, light, earth, water and all of the island’s considerable spiritual nutrients. Without wanting to overblow it, the view was so cinematic, so wide, so rich with water, space and stimuli that it was easily two minutes before I even thought about checking my phone.
I walked out the vast opening doors and on to the enormous glass-fronted deck. I could have sat there, looking out at that view, all weekend, and were it not for my three kids, I probably would have. The day was utterly cloudless, and remained so perfectly clear and blue for so long that I began to feel a bit disappointed.
“You know what I’d really like?” I said to my family. “To be sitting here inside watching a storm roll in across the water and hit the house, the wind and rain lashing the glass as we sit inside all nice and cosy, maybe with some pistachios and a glass of mulled wine.”
“Can I have wine?” my 7-year-old asked.
“No,” I said.
The fundamental tension of any holiday is between relaxation and recreation: there is nothing to do versus there is nothing that has to be done. At Calypso, that question was rendered irrelevant. If you walk through that doorway and want to go anywhere or do anything else, you are an idiot. You stay. Of course, you stay.
Prior to checking in, we had visited The Island Grocer, a beautifully designed and provisioned store full of enticing gourmet items, many of which are of island provenance. We had a $100 voucher, and we’d used it to acquire a selection of fancy cheeses, a bottle of Man O’War chardonnay, marinated olives, dips and some egregiously-priced crackers.
It was such a nice feeling, sitting in that light-filled room, in that place of serenity and joy, knowing that, when the sun began to dip and golden hour kicked in, all that food and wine awaited us. It was hard not to rip straight into it.
All we needed now was some music. My first thought was Coltrane, both because a sunny island retreat seems to demand jazz and because I once heard British writer Geoff Dyer talk about Coltrane, and I’m easily influenced by people I admire.
When I opened Spotify, my phone’s Bluetooth suggested I connect it to the home’s Pioneer amplifier, which I did, and which in turn connected to a magnificent surround sound system. Long, narrow speakers climbed the walls around the capacious, high-ceilinged living area, and the sound that emerged, like everything else in the place, was warm, generous and ultimately life-affirming.
I stood for some minutes, drinking deeply of the delights of the living room and then my spirit demanded I take it into the master bedroom. It was predictably, laughably, beautiful, glassed on three sides, with a plurality of wide, distant, land-and-seascapes, and two separate decks. Once I flopped down on the luxuriously-linened California King bed, I never wanted to leave.
How to reconcile the fact there are two places you never want to leave with the fact you have three kids demanding you leave both of them? I spent a fair bit of that first day sitting by the pool, coming up with suggested poses for them to do as they jumped into the pool. I had to come up with literally dozens of poses, and every one had to be both original and not lame.
That is tiring and thankless work and, on top of that, I was getting sick. It had been coming on since the previous day and late on that first day on the island it swept in, taking over my body and trying to erode my spirit. At first, it was mild and to be honest it never really got much beyond medium, but my sickness tolerance is low and by the time I woke up on our second day, I just wanted to lie on the bed moaning performatively.
It wasn’t ideal, I suppose, but what a place to be only slightly more than mildly sick, surrounded by the grand blue sky and the eternity of everything stretching off into the wild blue yonder. Yes, my body felt poorly, but in the face of the beauty of the world, I could see the insignificance of my illness.
I didn’t go in either the pool or the beautiful wooden hot tub, although I loved that the kids did and that they were having fun, and I loved that, while doing so, they were not jumping on me and demanding I do the creatively exhausting work of entertaining them.
The view of the pool area from the deck at Calypso.
They woke early on that second morning and turned on the big-screen Samsung frame TV, which has all the streaming apps, plus Sky Sport, which I was never allowed to watch. Our 7-year-old put on the criminally under-rated 2006 classic Night at the Museum, which I had never seen, and while I had thought I would use that time to read, I quickly became enraptured by the movie, with its brilliant comedic performances from Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson.
It was chilly, so I used the fancy remote control to turn on the beautifully designed and convincingly rustic-looking gas fireplace. The room warmed quickly, and despite the enormous space of the living room and its high ceilings, it soon reached a delicious, high cosiness,
In the late morning on the second day, our friends arrived. There were now 11 of us in the house, including seven kids, but it was so capacious we hardly noticed the difference.
I spent much of the day alone anyway, lying on the bed reading and moaning performatively whenever I sensed my wife was within earshot. I was trying to not be saddened by the fact we would be leaving the next morning. I was trying to embrace the awakening our arrival had wrought in me; to remain in the moment, to exist in that state of heightened spiritual connection to the world.
And then, in the late afternoon, it happened.
The clouds, which had been thickening and darkening on the horizon, began to move towards us across the water. As they came closer, it was clear they were pushing before them a great wall of heavy rain. I watched, thrilled, and attempted unsuccessfully to get everyone as excited about it as I was.
I was standing at the home’s enormous glass front, holding a glass of wine. The room was warm, we were chatting amiably with our friends, and the kids were playing Uno, mostly without fighting. Although the sun was far from setting, the sky was dark, and I watched, ecstatic, as the rain raced up the bay and across the land.
It smacked into the house’s glass front, lashing it in great whipping waves. It brought with it high winds, lightning and thunder. It was biblical. It was exactly what I’d hoped for.
I stood before it, transfixed and delighted. I wanted to stay there forever. It was easily two minutes before I started thinking about how great it would be if the sun came out again.
