Transform Your Mind and Team: How Fable Sonoma Uses Neuroscience to Create the Retreat of the Future
I’m excited to announce the launch of Fable Sonoma, a serene 10 acre nature retreat 1 hour from San Francisco with a unique design philosophy: using insights from neuroscience to create a magical physical environment that maximizes connection, creativity, healing and personal growth.
As a product leader in the tech world, I have spent a career designing and evolving products based on data, using science to guide the evolution towards an ideal customer experience. However, I found that kind of sharp data-driven product design largely lacking in many of the physical spaces I inhabited in my daily life. This was particularly true in our Zoom-centric world where both the way we experience connection with our work colleagues and the way we heal ourselves through therapy are done in bland offices or staring at each other through computer screens. I live in the Bay Area, one of the most stunningly gorgeous places on earth, yet found my most important thinking for work and self-reflection being done in entirely uninspiring physical environments.
It’s time to expect more of the environments where we work, heal, and form relationships.
A growing body of neuroscience research shows the ways that cognition, creativity and mood are affected not just by nature, but by architecture, design, and art. That’s why we created Fable Sonoma. It’s an immersive, participatory container in a gorgeous natural setting — the ideal formula to foster creativity, connection and healing among groups and individuals.
At launch, we’re focused on creating the perfect environment for 2 types of experiences:
- Therapy retreats that deliver measurably better clinical outcomes through an ideal physical space for healing.
- Corporate retreats, team offsites and small conferences that allow teams to get creative in an environment designed for successful connection, especially in a post-Covid world where in-person interaction among teams was lost over video meetings and awkward return to office mandates.
Fables are stories we imbue with meaning, and at Fable Sonoma, we invite our guests to actively participate in authentic & open forms of in-person engagement surrounded by nature as a way to “create your own story”, using the wild natural environment as a canvas to author a new chapter in life.
A new kind of nature retreat
Creating Fable is a deeply personal mission to me.
As an avid outdoorsman, I intuitively know what neuroscience has proven: time in nature improves our mental health and sharpens our cognition. Growing up in the mountain highlands of northern New Jersey, I spent much of my childhood exploring the woods, eventually becoming an Eagle Scout. I seek out nature for key moments to connect with friends, coming-of-age rituals for my children, and even devoted time in my career to building a product to allow people to choose forests as their final resting place.
New answers to old problems are being found in the world of neuroaesthetics — a relatively recent field of study that aims to understand how our physical environments affect our mental well being. The research shows just how powerfully our surroundings impact our mental well-being:
A 2019 study of over 900,000 people found that children who grew up with less green space had a 15–55% higher risk of developing psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety, depression, and substance abuse.
Once you experience participatory, immersive art spaces, you never see passive traditional museums the same way. The rapid rise in popularity of venues such as TeamLab (now the most visited museum on earth), MeowWolf, and even Burning Man points to the strong desire people have for new ways to share the experience of beauty, as our world becomes more oriented to remote work and interacting with each other at a distance.
There’s just something special that happens when people have an experience or encounter together. It’s a magical formula for connection, engagement, and memory creation.
Rather than jump back into tech, I wanted to build a thoughtfully designed physical space that breaks down barriers between people and boosts their potential for creativity and growth.
Some of the key elements of Fable’s design philosophy include:
- Integrating nature seamlessly into the overall experience, such that even indoor elements feel like an extension of the outdoor natural world.
- Proactive participation and immersion: An overall layout of the property that encourages discovery, providing a starting point for groups to create their own meaning.
- Design for connection: Common spaces that encourage playful interaction among groups
- Dynamic art and color, and sound: Lighting, audio and art that can automatically change to match the experience being created by guests
The property
Over the past 2 years, my wife @esthercrawford and I have searched for what we felt would be the perfect property to serve as both a test bed for this concept, and as the physical space we’d most want to experience for ourselves throughout life. We want our children and extended community of friends to benefit from what we’re building and our long-term plan decades down the road is to retire here as our forever home.
After a frustrating stretch of viewing nearly 40 available properties across California, we were at a low point. I told Esther, “Let’s just be patient — we’ll know it when we see it.” Finally this January, we came across this beautiful property in Sonoma county, and it was love at first sight. It sat right in the “goldilocks zone” for everything we hoped to create. A few of the elements that blew us away were:
- Surrounded by natural wonder: With a diverse topography including shady forests, big open meadows, hillsides with stunning panoramic views, and a babbling waterfall and creek, the property felt like a mini National Park in ways that outshone much larger properties we’d visited. It was so quiet that we could hear the rustling of leaves in the wind, cries of red tailed hawks, and the family of a doe and 3 deer fawns that followed us around while we explored felt like a sign from the universe that it was meant to be.
- Proximity to the Bay Area: Situated only 60 minutes from San Francisco, we knew this location would be easily accessible in a way that even popular retreats like Harbin Hot Springs and Esalen are not.
- Connective potential of the house: The 4k+ square foot home on the property is a mid-century modern masterpiece we knew would be the perfect starting point for our design & artistic vision. It already had so many funky features that made it feel like it was built for connection: huge common spaces, a 70s style fireside conversation pit, and even a whimsical secret room accessible through a closet we’ve come to call the “Narnia room”.
- Nature “living inside”: The home feels like a treehouse — every room has incredible hillside forest views, and the seclusion of the property eliminates the need for curtains (no neighbors to see inside). This creates an amazing flow between the indoors and outdoors. The pool and spa feel like a natural extension of the forest, with wild turkeys often strutting by the lounge area.
- Secluded but not isolated: Despite being so secluded, the property is close enough to civilization that great restaurants and grocery stores are close by, food delivery services work, and loads of fun wine country activities are minutes away.
- Zoning: The rural residential zoning of the property allowed for vacation rentals under county regulations, a key requirement for us to share it with the community.
What’s next?
While we’ve put in a tremendous amount of work over the past few months to get to launch day, it’s truly day one. Over the coming months and years, we’ll continue to evolve the design of the indoor and outdoor spaces, aiming to produce measurably improved outcomes from the retreats hosted here.
Key to that effort will be gathering qualitative and quantitative data about the experiences that happen here, and using that data to inform the future of Fable’s roadmap. We’ll be working with experts in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and design to continue to find the most impactful scientific insights and use Fable as a laboratory to implement them in the real world. If this sounds interesting to you as a researcher or as a participant, please get in touch with us at info@fablesonoma.com.
Interested in authoring the next chapter of your story at Fable Sonoma? Learn more here!
