There is something rather satisfying about Hermès responding to the age of artificial intelligence with a pen.
For its 2026 Venture Beyond campaign, the house commissioned Parisian illustrator Linda Merad to create 12 hand-drawn works for its website: strange, charming marine creatures mingling with shoes, watches and other Hermès objects. The drawings began by hand, were translated digitally and eventually animated.
We have spent the past decade removing friction from almost everything. Images can now be produced in seconds. Buildings are rendered before they exist. Brands arrive fully populated with a typeface, colour palette, tone of voice and several hundred pieces of content before anyone has had much time to wonder whether they have anything particularly interesting to say.
Luxury has always relied on something rather different: time, rare skill and knowledge acquired over decades, sometimes passed from one generation to the next.
Someone knew how to do something that most of us could not. A material was difficult to obtain. An object took an unreasonable amount of time to make. An artist had a particular hand. A place could not be reproduced somewhere else.
As production becomes easier, those things become more valuable, not less.
This is what we have been thinking about at XALA.
Not how to fill a property with expensive things. There is no shortage of expensive things in the world. The more interesting question is whether the land, the artists, the architecture and the people making things there can become part of one another.
Our lighthouse on the Pacific coast will form part of XALA Dialogues, an evolving cultural platform inviting artists, designers and photographers into conversation with the land, light, ocean and community, beginning with commissions and collaborations. Who knows, perhaps one day Turrell will visit.
Elsewhere, we are beginning to explore objects and small surprises created specifically for XALA, using materials that originate from the land itself.
Luxury has become peculiarly obsessed with revealing everything. Every room photographed. Every experience listed. Every surprise announced in advance and placed conveniently on Instagram.
Rarity requires leaving things undisclosed.
For the very small number of people for whom XALA will be a home, discovery will always remain part of the place.
Hermès understands something similar. The interesting part of Merad’s work is that the authorship is visible. Someone imagined it. Someone made it. It belongs to a particular creative universe.
As machines become capable of producing almost anything, luxury will increasingly be defined by what cannot easily be reproduced.
And something worth discovering for yourself.
