How I work.

There's a kind of travel that can't be booked. Not from a website, not from a directory, not from most agencies. The suite worth asking for by name. The chef who only cooks privately. The collector who'll open their home for the right person. This is the kind of travel I design.

The Naylor Standard isn't a price tier or a hotel category. It's a way of working that puts you, not the destination, at the centre: private travel drawn from the properties, partners and specialists I trust, and shaped to your taste, your story and your time.

The single test

Every line of every journey I design is held against one question: could you have arranged this yourself? If the answer is yes, it doesn't belong on your itinerary. It's the difference between booking a five-star hotel and being given the suite worth asking for by name; between dining at a Michelin-starred restaurant and having it for an evening, with a menu designed around your father's seventieth.

The rule is not "expensive". The rule is unrepeatable, in the same form, by anyone else.

What it gives you

Dining as the spine of a journey

The meals are usually the moments people remember, so I treat dining as design. Every restaurant is anchored to something real: a Michelin listing, a chef whose work I know, a kitchen I trust. The work is knowing which meals to design as set-pieces and which to leave casual: the family lunch that runs all afternoon, the breakfast nobody wants to leave.

The moments that are asked for, not booked

A handful of moments on every journey I design aren't visible on any platform. They happen because the right person made the right call, on behalf of the right client: a museum after hours with the curator who knows it best, a morning at a dig with the archaeologist working it, a cellar tour of an estate that doesn't open its cellar. Each is arranged on request and subject to availability.

They're the difference between a very comfortable holiday and a journey that quietly rearranges your sense of what's possible.

The people behind it

Historians, chefs, conservationists, master craftspeople, private hosts. These relationships are earned, over years of asking the right questions and looking after people properly when it counts. They aren't on a list. You don't pass through the destination. You spend time inside it.

How a journey takes shape

Every journey begins with a long conversation: what you love, what you can't stand, the trips that worked and the ones that didn't. Then I design quietly. You see a thoughtful proposal, with properties chosen for reasons I can explain and costs laid out without surprises. We refine it together.

Then I look after every detail until you're home, and if something needs attention while you're travelling, you're not chasing a call centre. You're reaching me directly.

Invisible luxury

The best luxury, in travel, is invisible. It's the absence of the small frictions that drain a trip the way a slow puncture drains a tyre. It's the room ready when you arrive, and the welcome card written by someone who actually knows you.