No. 01 — The Atelier
The Restorative Hour
A slow, full-body decompression in our quietest treatment room — warm stones, hand-pressed oils of jasmine and tobacco leaf, and the particular silence that comes after a long week.
Chapter Three · The Vellum Story
A small house, built slowly.
For nearly fifteen years I worked in the beauty pages of magazines — first at Town & Country, then at a small house in Mayfair, then back to New York. I had been to a great many spas. Most of them, I am sorry to say, felt like airports: pleasant enough, but designed for someone else's idea of rest.
The summer my mother became ill, I came out to Southampton to look after her. She was a private woman, exacting about beauty in the way her generation was, and she had a small ritual every Saturday morning that I had not paid attention to in years — a warm cloth, a careful oil, ten unhurried minutes at the kitchen table. After she died I kept doing it. It became the most considered hour of my week.
"I wanted a room that felt like the one I grew up in — quiet, warm, and slightly out of step with the hour."
Vellum is the room I wanted to find when I went looking. Two cottages, kept small on purpose — one on Jobs Lane, one on Plandome Road — staffed by therapists I have worked with for years, and by a front desk that knows your name and your husband's tea. We do excellent skin and we do honest bodywork, and we mean for an hour with us to feel like the one my mother used to keep.
Margaux Whitford · Founder