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A team offsite at Skugga Estate is two days in the Mae On valley, 30 minutes from Chiang Mai city centre. The team works in the Festival Hall at Skugga Estate Vineyard, makes something with its hands at Skugga Estate Farm, 1.5 kilometres away, and eats together every evening. The Festival Hall seats 150, takes up to 200 for a full reception and up to 400 standing. The offsite has a rhythm that a hotel ballroom does not. A morning session in a hall built for gatherings. A coff

A romantic weekend at Skugga Estate is two nights in the Mae On valley, 30 minutes from Chiang Mai city centre. The couple stays at Skugga Estate Farm, in a suite or the cabin, spends Saturday on shared tasks, and eats at Skugga Estate Vineyard, 1.5 kilometres away, on both evenings and at Sunday brunch. The weekend has a pace for two. Cacao to taste, side by side. A bar of chocolate wrapped by your own hands. A coffee that tastes of pink guava and wild strawberry. A pool in

A group weekend at Skugga Estate is two nights in the Mae On valley, 30 minutes from Chiang Mai city centre. The group stays in a four-bedroom villa at Skugga Estate Vineyard, spends Saturday at Skugga Estate Farm, 1.5 kilometres away, and eats together three ways: a barbecue lunch, a private dinner and Sunday brunch. The weekend is built from small, tactile things. Hands in cacao. Eleven chocolates tasted side by side. A slot car taking the last corner too fast. A string of

A family weekend at Skugga Estate is two nights in the Mae On valley, 30 minutes from Chiang Mai city centre, in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The plan bases the family at Skugga Estate Farm, with a two-bedroom cabin, a pool and a playground, and finishes with Sunday brunch at Skugga Estate Vineyard, 1.5 kilometres away. Friday afternoon, the car leaves the main road and the weekend slows to the speed of a child with a task. There is a working farm with a chocolate lab, a bakery, a r

A weekend at Skugga Estate is two nights in the Mae On valley, 30 minutes from Chiang Mai city centre, in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The plan spends one night at Skugga Estate Farm and one at Skugga Estate Vineyard, two separate sites 1.5 kilometres apart, and fills the days with workshops, a barbecue lunch, a long dinner and Sunday brunch. Friday afternoon, 30 minutes out of Chiang Mai, the car turns off the main road and the weekend changes shape. Nobody hands you a schedule. Th

Past the last roundabout the road thins out. Shopfronts give way to fields. Fields give way to low hills. By the time the sat-nav says 30 minutes, the city has stopped sounding like a city, and the plan for the day has shrunk to a table, a menu and a long afternoon. This is the slow Sunday in the Mae On valley. It has one rule: nothing is rushed. Brunch among the vines at the Vineyard. A short drive to the Farm. Coffee, chocolate, tea and bread, in whatever order the afternoo

Somewhere past the last roundabout, the city stops arguing. The shopfronts thin out. The road narrows. Rice fields open on one side and the hills close in on the other, and the air changes before the view does. Thirty minutes from the centre of Chiang Mai, you are in the Mae On valley, and the weekend you planned has just become a different weekend. That drive is the reason this itinerary has two bases. Chiang Mai asks a short-trip visitor to choose between the Old City and t

Fermentation is time used as an ingredient. It sits among the forces shaping dining in 2026 and 2027, according to MICHELIN inspectors, from house-made ferments prepared weeks ahead at Baan Tepa in Bangkok to slow processes that build depth without weight. In the Mae On valley the same idea runs through a landscape, not a menu. Coffee ferments. Cacao ferments. In the north, tea ferments into miang. The vines at the Vineyard were planted in 2025, and wine is the ferment still

The biggest wedding trends for 2027 are the multi-day weekend, smaller and more private guest lists, hospitality that moves around the room, and settings rooted in their place. The Knot's 2027 trends report draws on search, save and spend data from 1.7 million US couples. Bridebook's UK forecast draws on three years of search data and a panel of planners. Surveys from Korea, Hong Kong and India add the Asian view. The direction is the same in each. The weekend replaces the da

Anthony McDonald with the 1951 MG TD, imported new to Bangkok and restored over three years at Skugga Estate Farm. Thailand has no national motor museum. What it has instead is a scattering of private collections, each one assembled by an individual for their own reasons and later opened to the public. A businessman west of Bangkok with a thousand vehicles and no admission charge. A shopping mall in Hua Hin holding seven generations of Mercedes SL. A tropical garden outside P

For most of modern wine history, the map was simple. Vines grew between the 30th and 50th parallels, north and south, in a band where the climate behaved the way centuries of European tradition said it should. Everything else was considered unsuitable. That map is being redrawn. What "New Latitude Wine" Actually Means The term was coined in 2003 by Thailand-based wine author Frank Norel, at a conference in Bangkok, to describe wine grown outside the traditional latitude belt.

Carbonic maceration coffee is a specialty processing method in which whole, intact coffee cherries are sealed inside pressurised tanks flooded with carbon dioxide, triggering a controlled fermentation that takes place entirely inside the fruit. The result in the cup is unlike anything produced by conventional processing: red fruits like cherry, raspberry, and plum, often backed by tropical notes such as mango, lychee, and passionfruit, with a rounded, silky mouthfeel and acid

Something happens when couples start planning a vow renewal. The first instinct is usually a beach. The second, if they have spent any time thinking about it, is often Chiang Mai. A vow renewal in Thailand typically costs between 30,000 and 150,000 THB for a ceremony of ten to thirty guests, significantly less than an equivalent event in Europe or Australia, and often less than half the price of comparable settings in Phuket or Koh Samui. The cost is one part of the picture.

Most people who visit Thailand come back talking about the food. The curries, the street noodles, the fruit. Rarely the chocolate. That is about to change. Thailand produced more than 3,100 tonnes of raw cocoa beans in 2025, nearly 40 per cent more than the year before. Exports of cocoa and chocolate products hit US$131 million last year. Japan and China, two of the world's most discerning food markets, both saw Thai chocolate export growth of over 40 per cent in a single yea

A Thai wedding is not a performance. It is a sequence of gestures, a choreography of care, respect, and shared intention that has evolved over centuries and remains largely intact today. For couples choosing Chiang Mai as a destination wedding location, this is often the unexpected part. Beyond the scenery and the climate, Thai wedding traditions offer something rare in modern celebrations: rituals that slow time rather than fill it, built for connection rather than spectacle

Under three hours from Hong Kong, Mae On valley has a working vineyard, a bean-to-bar chocolate lab, a classic car gallery, and fine dining at 410 metres elevation. Here is what a weekend at Skugga Estate looks like. Under three hours away HK Express runs two nonstop flights daily between Hong Kong International Airport and Chiang Mai International, averaging just under three hours. For anyone whose weekend effectively starts at the boarding gate on Friday afternoon, that mat

Singapore sits one degree north of the equator. The temperature on your wedding day at home will be somewhere between 28 and 32 degrees Celsius, with humidity to match. Chiang Mai offers something genuinely different: cool evenings, mountain views, and outdoor ceremonies where guests reach for a wrap after dinner rather than fan themselves through your vows. But Chiang Mai's climate is more varied than most destination wedding guides suggest. There is a window of near-perfect

Mae On valley sits 40 minutes east of Chiang Mai. The elevation is 410 metres. The pace is different. Here is what Skugga Estate offers people who want a weekend that actually slows down. Why the valley matters Northern Thailand draws visitors for its temples, its markets, its mountains. Mae On is quieter than all of that. The valley runs east of Chiang Mai Old City, past the San Kamphaeng Hot Springs, into farmland and forested hills that most visitors never reach. Skugga Es

The Mae On valley changes. That is the thing visitors from Singapore, Hong Kong, and the UK notice first when they come back a second time: the same estate looks different in November than it does in July. The light is different. The temperature is different. The vines are a different colour. What is on the menu is different, because what the farm is growing is different. Skugga Estate runs two sites approximately 1.5 kilometres apart in the Mae On valley, 40 minutes east of

Gallup's Singapore Workplace Report 2026, published this month, found that 86% of Singapore workers were disengaged in 2025, costing the economy an estimated USD 73.6 billion annually. Only 14% of the workforce is engaged at work, well below the regional average of 25%. 43% report daily stress. These are not abstract numbers. They describe the operating conditions for every HR manager and founder in Singapore trying to hold a team together, align leadership, or get a distribu