There is a particular quality to winter in regional Victoria. The mornings arrive slowly, heavy with mist. The vines are bare. The air has a bite to it that wakes something up in you and then, almost immediately, makes you want to find warmth.
It was that feeling that led us to Lancemore.
This winter, Orans partnered with Lancemore Hotels to create The Slow Season — a new wellness experience at two of Victoria's most beautiful regional properties: Lancemore Milawa in the High Country and Lindenderry Red Hill on the Mornington Peninsula. It is, at its simplest, an outdoor sauna in a vineyard. But like most things worth doing, it is really about something else entirely.
Slowmaxxing: The Trend Nobody Saw Coming
For the past several years, wellness culture has been obsessed with optimisation. Cold plunges at 5am. Biometric tracking. Protocols and percentages. And while there is genuine science behind much of it, something has quietly shifted. People are exhausted by the relentlessness of it. They want permission to stop.
Slowmaxxing — the deliberate, almost radical practice of doing less, more intentionally has emerged as the counter-movement. Not laziness. Presence. The idea that a long morning in a sauna, a glass of wine by a fire and a walk-through dormant vines might be the most sophisticated wellness choice you make all year.
People are not looking for more things to do. They are looking for fewer, better ones.
The Slow Season is our answer to that.
Heat, Stillness and Vineyard Air
At Lancemore Milawa, the Orans sauna sits among the vines of Victoria's High Country — a landscape of remarkable quiet, particularly in winter when the cellar doors are less crowded and the hills carry a kind of hush. At Lindenderry Red Hill on the Mornington Peninsula, the setting is equally considered: rolling countryside, cool ocean air just over the ridge, and the particular stillness that comes from being somewhere genuinely beautiful with nowhere to be.
In both locations, the experience follows the same simple logic that has made sauna culture central to Scandinavian life for centuries: heat, rest, repeat. Your body responds to warmth by releasing tension it has been carrying without your permission. Your mind, with nothing to optimise, gradually goes quiet. The experience is not passive it is actively restorative in a way that is hard to explain until you feel it.
The Orans saunas at both properties are built with carbonised walnut and premium cedar, designed to sit within architectural environments rather than beside them. They do not announce themselves. They belong.
Why Lancemore
We are deliberate about the partnerships we choose. Orans exists at the intersection of science, craftsmanship and design, and we look for partners who share that seriousness about the quality of an experience.
Lancemore, recognised as Australia's most awarded hotel group and a Condé Nast Traveller favourite for eight consecutive years, builds properties with soul. Their Embers & Wine program, which runs each winter across their regional properties, has always been about encouraging guests to arrive, exhale and stay a while. The Slow Season is a natural evolution of that intention.
As Lancemore CEO Julian Clark put it: "Milawa and Lindenderry Red Hill have always offered the perfect setting to slow down, reconnect and savour the simple pleasures of a regional escape. This partnership with Orans adds another layer to that experience, inviting guests to embrace wellness in a way that feels effortless and restorative."
The Slow Season is available exclusively to guests booking directly with Lancemore Hotels at Lancemore Milawa and Lindenderry Red Hill, with complimentary sauna access included as part of their stay.
To experience the Orans range for your own home or project, visit our Melbourne showroom at Mount Waverley or explore the full collection at orans.com.au