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Annual Retreat

Once a year, we step away from the day-to-day. No meetings, no screens, no big agenda. Just time given to each other.

We go to a house we call the Treehaus. No, it’s not in a tree. But the Bauhaus does have deep roots on Cape Cod, and this one fits the name. It’s quiet. A little old. The architect’s roots in Dutch modernism are clear.

We cook. We clean. We eat. We hang out—at the table, on walks, standing by the sink. Drying dishes, it turns out, is where some of the best conversations happen. Maybe because your hands are busy and your mind isn’t.

Some of our favorite chefs come up from New York. They bring crates and baskets and a bunch of ideas they want to try. One night it’s Michelin-level technique. The next, it’s lobster rolls on paper plates.

One year, I brought in my team from Little Poutine to orchestrate a ten-course meal drawn from the history of the Cape, with each course themed around a project COLLINS had worked on.

Midweek, we take the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard. We wander. No one’s in charge. We stop by the “Gingerbread” houses and visit a hand-carved carousel from 1876 that still runs the way it did when Ulysses S. Grant came to see it.

Back on the mainland, we spend time in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where scientists study oceans, pigments, and patterns in nature. They talk about the invisible, the interdependent, the almost-gone. We like the way they think.

Not far from the Treehaus sits one of Buckminster Fuller’s first geodesic domes. Built in the 1950s, when people still believed design could save the world. It’s weathered storms, neglect, time—but the structure holds. Some of us walk over to take a picture. Others head down to the beach.

And that’s the whole point, really. Nothing grand. Just time together.

Photography by Max Kütz