People often ask when The Ideal started, and I always smile a little before I answer because the honest answer isn’t February 2025. The real beginning was a hot summer in 2017, sitting by the pool during my son’s swim practices, a book in my lap and a quiet ache in my chest. I had everything I was supposed to want, but something still didn’t feel quite right.
That summer, I read something that lit a spark I couldn’t ignore. It was from Shannon Ables’ Choosing the Simply Luxurious Life, a book that would quietly reshape how I saw everything. It said:
“Every woman creates a unique way of living that correlates with her values, her passions, her attitudes toward her loved ones, and many other areas that she must consciously consider as she sets out to design an ideal life. The foundation of living a simply luxurious life is made up of substance, passion, quality, sensibility, sincerity, appreciation, and continual growth. What a simply luxurious life is not is blindly following whatever society or the media’s version of it glorifies, spending more than you make, living in a home that is not soothing or welcoming, having many ‘friendships’ or ‘friends’ but few relationships of real quality, creating a wardrobe driven by trends, not being mindful of your body’s unique beauty, falling prey to the fears and pressures that marketers and the media push on us, or ignoring the importance of learning something new and substantial each and every day.”
You know when words hit you like they were written just for you? That was one of those moments. I saw myself in the gaps between the lines, in the longing for a life that felt intentional, nourishing, beautifully my own. Not performative. Not trend driven. Not busy for the sake of being busy.
That quote became a mirror and a compass. I realized there could be more to the life I was living and that no one else was going to create it for me.
And one thing became crystal clear: travel needed to be part of it. Not as an escape, but as a practice. A priority. A way to connect with the world, myself, and my family. From that point forward, travel moved up on the list of priorities in our household budget. I started planning trips with more intention, not just for my family but eventually for friends. It turned into a hobby and then began to feel like something more. A calling, even.
So, while The Ideal didn’t launch publicly until 2025, it started eight years earlier in those quiet, reflective moments by the pool. It started with a vision of a life built on “substance, passion, quality, sensibility, sincerity, appreciation and continual growth.” A life where travel isn’t just something you do, it’s part of who you are.