Conversations on the future of hospitality and design: Anthony Picq
I recently had the thought that boutique hospitality, at its highest form, is closer to art than industry. A property can be seen like a living sculpture. There is a quote by Michaelangelo that I always liked: "The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material."
A boutique hotel is also shaped by the vision of its founder and his or her soul, charged with the energy of its land, and carefully merged into something new. The best of these places carry something ineffable: an atmosphere that lingers after you leave, like the memory of a painting or a piece of music, and sometimes you can’t explain why exactly.
Anthony Picq has spent more than 25 years moving between design, ecological farming, and sustainable hospitality across Europe before realizing his vision in Tenerife. Trained in naturopathy and phytotherapy, he restored a 200-year-old stone farmhouse into what is now El Agua: a hotel where silence is treated as design, coherence as atmosphere, and beauty itself as medicine.
On the feeling of arrival
For Picq, hospitality is not a static state but a progression of feelings. “There are three steps,” he tells me. “The intention when people come, the feeling they have while they’re here, and what they take with them when they leave. My mission is to make them feel at home. Not a hotel home, but the kind of home you return to where everything is warmer, where food tastes better, where everything feels better.”
That intimacy begins at the threshold. Guests are greeted not as room numbers but as people. “Sometimes, depending on the energy, we even give them a hug at check-in. We want them to feel they are friends more than guests.”
The design of the property supports that closeness. Natural textures, muted palettes, and flowing forms create coherence that guests feel instantly. “The beauty is healing by itself,” Picq says. “When you’re surrounded by positive energy, by aesthetics that fit together, you feel good. That’s the starting point.”
On silence as a design element
Silence is one of El Agua’s rarest luxuries. “People come here and they say: I can’t hear anything. Sometimes it even worries them — they’re not used to it. But then they sleep. People with insomnia who usually struggle suddenly rest for eight hours straight. The silence is like a cocoon.”
The placement of the property amplifies this quality. The southern orientation and morphology of the land create pockets where sound drops away entirely. “It’s a bubble,” Picq says. “You sit in certain corners and you hear nothing at all — not even the smallest noise. And people feel that. It changes their body.”
In an era of relentless noise, silence here is curated as carefully as architecture. It is not absence, but presence — a structural element as intentional as light or texture.
On beauty that transforms
The healing that happens at El Agua is not the result of elaborate therapies or expensive machinery. It comes from the atmosphere itself. “People arrive with tension,” Picq observes. “Sometimes even couples arrive together but are not really together. And then, suddenly, after one day, you see them barefoot, walking hand in hand, kissing in the gardens. Love is back. It’s the surroundings that invite you to love and to be loved.”
Guests describe their stays in poetic terms, leaving reviews that read more like personal reflections than assessments of service. “They don’t write: it was nice, the food was good,” Picq laughs. “They write poetry, they write about life. That’s when I realized: okay, this is not just a hotel, it’s an experience.”
On the impossibility of replication
When asked whether El Agua could be recreated elsewhere, Picq is certain. “Nothing is repeatable. Each place, each life, is different. You can inspire another project with a philosophy, but it will never be the same. El Agua is the land, the design, but also myself. People feel that mix.”
This truth resonates with me deeply. Years ago, when I built my fine jewelry brand Atelier Nallik, working with raw precious stones, I discovered that when I outsourced the making of the pieces for scaling the business, the pieces lost a bit of their vitality and magic. The soul of a creation lies not only in its form but in the presence that shapes it. Customers often told me they felt transformed when wearing the pieces.
Hospitality, too, can hold this quality. It can become art: alive, singular, irreducible. “It’s not architecture,” Picq agrees. “It’s art.”
On health and the human element
El Agua integrates epigenetic testing, strands of hair analyzed for nutritional and metabolic markers, but Picq resists the techno-futurist approach of many high-end resorts. “We don’t need oxygen rooms or machines. All the chemistry is already inside you. The epigenetic test is just a map, it helps people start. But the healing is in the space, the food, the energy. The test just gives direction.”
Guests often arrive overwhelmed by conflicting health advice. “Even doctors come here and they’re lost,” Picq says. “There are thousands of techniques online, thousands of diets. People don’t know where to start. So we give them something simple and then surround them with yoga, breath work, ice baths, meditation - but more than that, with beauty and silence.”
The impact is visible. Guests cry in the caves, release old weight, remember themselves. “Big men, very macho, they come here and they cry. Because society pushes us too far. People arrive on the edge. And here, finally, they let go.”
Reflection
What this conversation crystallized for me is that boutique hospitality can, in rare instances, transcend service and become sculpture. A space shaped with coherence and presence does more than host guests, it provides a safe space for being. It regulates, restores, and returns them to themselves.
El Agua is one such expression, but the insight is larger: the future of luxury will not be defined by spectacle or scale, but by depth. By places where silence is as deliberate as light, where beauty becomes medicine, and where presence is treated as design.
words by Jean Linda Balke, photography El Agua & L’Escale Voyage
