Torfhus Retreat, Iceland

Some places earn your trust before you've even unpacked.

Torfhus Retreat is one of them.

Tucked into the raw, volcanic landscape of Iceland, Torfhus is the kind of property that doesn't try to compete with its surroundings — it simply sits within them. Turf-roofed cabins rise gently from the earth. The horizon stretches in every direction, unhurried. And if you arrive expecting a tick-box itinerary, the landscape will quietly ask you to slow down.

A Conversation That Has Stayed With Me

One of the most memorable parts of my visit wasn't a landscape, or a room, or a sunset — though all of those were extraordinary. It was a conversation with Roberto Herranz.

Roberto is one of those rare hospitality professionals whose knowledge runs deep in every direction: the practicalities of running a property, the geopolitics of sustainable tourism, the cultural nuance of a destination still learning how to steward its own fame. He speaks about Iceland and the hotel industry with the kind of insight you don't acquire from reading reports — it comes from years of paying close attention.

We talked at length about the east side of Iceland — a region that, at present, has no high-end hospitality offering to speak of. Roberto Herranz sees that as the next frontier: an area with real potential to develop a luxury market, one that doesn't yet exist there in any meaningful way. It's the kind of industry intelligence that rarely surfaces in travel media, and it's exactly the sort of conversation that makes a site visit worthwhile.

Iceland's Structural Advantage

What makes Iceland genuinely interesting from a sustainability perspective — beyond its visual drama — is something most travellers don't think about: geothermal energy.

Iceland generates the vast majority of its electricity and heating from renewable geothermal and hydropower sources. For a hospitality property, this fundamentally changes the carbon arithmetic. The baseline energy footprint looks entirely different here compared to a property running on a conventional grid in, say, mainland Europe or the United States.

Roberto was candid about this advantage, and also about the responsibility it creates. Having a head start doesn't eliminate the need for rigour — it raises the standard for what "doing the work" actually looks like.

Sustainability as Conviction, Not Convenience

What I look for when I visit a property is not whether they have a sustainability page on their website. I'm looking for evidence of decisions that cost something.

At Torfhus, I found it in the details.

Guests had been requesting slippers. It's a small thing — a comfort, an expected amenity at a certain level of hospitality. But Torfhus declined. Not because they were indifferent to guest comfort, but because they weren't willing to introduce a single-use product to satisfy it. They waited. They researched. And they held the line until they found the right solution — something reusable and rewashable, something that aligned with who they are.

That decision — quiet, unglamorous, commercially inconvenient — tells you more about a property's values than any certification.

The Rooms, the Space, the Silence

I want to be careful not to reduce Torfhus to its sustainability credentials, because the experience is beautiful in ways that have nothing to do with policy.

The property has the feeling of a small, scattered village — individual houses set apart from one another across an isolated, remote landscape, with enough distance between them that the sense of solitude is genuine rather than staged. You are aware of the space around you at all times, and that awareness is part of the experience.

The rooms are outstanding — considered, warm, designed with a restraint that lets the landscape do the talking.

The houses are built in the tradition of the Icelandic torfbær — the turf house that Viking settlers developed in response to Iceland's unforgiving climate and scarcity of timber. Stone forms the foundations and walls; reclaimed wood frames the interiors; and living turf roofs sit heavy and green overhead, providing natural insulation and causing the structures to dissolve almost entirely into the landscape around them. The design at Torfhus draws direct inspiration from the Viking farm settlement at nearby Stöng — so what you're looking at isn't a stylistic reference to history. It is history, reinterpreted with contemporary craft and intention.

There is a profound sense of space here, and of privacy. The properties feel genuinely removed from the world, in a way that very few places manage without feeling isolated.

What struck me most was the quality of the silence. Not emptiness — there's too much texture in the Icelandic landscape for that — but an absence of noise that feels almost physical. You become aware, very quickly, of how rarely you experience that.

The facilities are beautifully executed. Every element of the guest experience has been thought through.