As European hot spots become overcrowded , travellers are digging deeper to find those less-populated but still brag-worthy locations. Greenland, moving up the list, is bracing for its new popularity.

Aria Varasteh has been to 69 countries, including almost all of Europe. He now wants to visit more remote places and avoid spots swarmed by tourists—starting with Greenland.

“I want a taste of something different,” said the 34-year-old founder of a consulting firm serving clients in the Washington, D.C., area.

He originally planned to go to Nuuk, the island’s capital, this fall via out-of-the-way connections, given there wasn’t a nonstop flight from the U.S. But this month United Airlines announced a nonstop, four-hour flight from Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey to Nuuk. The route, beginning next summer, is a first for a U.S. airline, according to Greenland tourism officials.

It marks a significant milestone in the territory’s push for more international visitors. Airlines ran flights with a combined 55,000 seats to Greenland from April to August of this year, says Jens Lauridsen, chief executive officer of Greenland Airports. That figure will nearly double next year in the same period, he says, to about 105,000 seats.

The possible coming surge of travellers also presents a challenge for a vast island of 56,000 people as nearby destinations from Iceland to Spain grapple with the consequences of over tourism.

Greenlandic officials say they have watched closely and made deliberate efforts to slowly scale up their plans for visitors. An investment north of $700 million will yield three new airports, the first of which will open next month in Nuuk.

“It’s the rumbling before the herd is coming,” says Mads Mitchell, general manager of Hotel Nordbo, a 67-room property in Nuuk. The owner of his property is considering adding 50 more rooms to meet demand in the coming years.

Mitchell has recently met with travel agents from Brooklyn, N.Y., South Korea and China. He says he welcomes new tourists, but fears tourism will grow too quickly.

“Like in Barcelona, you get tired of tourists, because it’s too much and it pushes out the locals, that is my concern,” he says. “So it’s finding this balance of like showing the love for Greenland and showing the amazing possibilities, but not getting too much too fast.”

Greenland’s buildup

Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark more than three times the size of Texas. Tourists travel by boat or small aircraft when venturing to different regions—virtually no roads connect towns or settlements.

Greenland decided to invest in airport infrastructure in 2018 as part of an effort to expand tourism and its role in the economy, which is largely dependent on fishing and subsidies from Denmark. In the coming years, airports in Ilulissat and Qaqortoq, areas known for their scenic fjords, will open.

One narrow-body flight, like what United plans, will generate $200,000 in spending, including hotels, tours and other purchases, Lauridsen says. He calls it a “very significant economic impact.”

In 2023, foreign tourism brought a total of over $270 million to Greenland’s economy, according to Visit Greenland, the tourism and marketing arm owned by the government. Expedition cruises visit the territory, as well as adventure tours.

United will fly twice weekly to Nuuk on its 737 MAX 8, which will seat 166 passengers, starting in June .

“We look for new destinations, we look for hot destinations and destinations, most importantly, we can make money in,” Andrew Nocella , United’s chief commercial officer, said in the company’s earnings call earlier in October.

On the runway

Greenland has looked to nearby Iceland to learn from its experiences with tourism, says Air Greenland Group CEO Jacob Nitter Sørensen. Tiny Iceland still has about seven times the population of its western neighbour.

Nuuk’s new airport will become the new trans-Atlantic hub for Air Greenland, the national carrier. It flies to 14 airports and 46 heliports across the territory.

“Of course, there are discussions about avoiding mass tourism. But right now, I think there is a natural limit in terms of the receiving capacity,” Nitter says.

Air Greenland doesn’t fly nonstop from the U.S. because there isn’t currently enough space to accommodate all travellers in hotels, Nitter says. Air Greenland is building a new hotel in Ilulissat to increase capacity when the airport opens.

Nuuk has just over 550 hotel rooms, according to government documents. A tourism analysis published by Visit Greenland predicts there could be a shortage in rooms beginning in 2027. Most U.S. visitors will stay four to 10 nights, according to traveler sentiment data from Visit Greenland.

As travel picks up, visitors should expect more changes. Officials expect to pass new legislation that would further regulate tourism in time for the 2025 season. Rules on zoning would give local communities the power to limit tourism when needed, says Naaja H. Nathanielsen, minister for business, trade, raw materials, justice and gender equality.

Areas in a so-called red zone would ban tour operators. In northern Greenland, traditional hunting takes place at certain times of year and requires silence, which doesn’t work with cruise ships coming in, Nathanielsen says.

Part of the proposal would require tour operators to be locally based to ensure they pay taxes in Greenland and so that tourists receive local knowledge of the culture. Nathanielsen also plans to introduce a proposal to govern cruise tourism to ensure more travelers stay and eat locally, rather than just walk around for a few hours and grab a cup of coffee, she says.

Public sentiment has remained in favour of tourism as visitor arrivals have increased, Nathanielsen says.

—Roshan Fernandez contributed to this article.

Agache, the holding company of LVMH founder and Chief Executive Bernard Arnault ’s family, is in exclusive talks to buy a majority stake in storied soccer club Paris FC, extending one of Europe’s richest families’ foray into sports.

Agache said in a statement Thursday that the Arnault family is teaming up with Austrian energy-drink maker Red Bull, which is currently negotiating a minority stake in the second-tier Parisian club.

While Red Bull will be involved with the sporting element in an advisory function, the Arnault family intends to provide the club with the resources its needs for its economic and sporting development.

Though the move would be the family’s first step into soccer, Red Bull is already heavily invested in the sport with stakes in top-level clubs in Germany, Austria and the U.S.

Through LVMH, however, the family has ramped up its sports involvement and sponsorships recently.

Earlier this month, the company struck a 10-year partnership deal with Formula One, capitalising on the sport’s global ascendance. And this summer, LVMH brands were hard to miss at the Paris Olympics after the luxury-goods maker paid roughly 150 million euros to be a sponsor of the global event.

With the controlling stake in Paris FC, the family aims to establish both the men’s and women’s side among the elite of French football, Agache said.

“With the arrival of Agache as the club’s majority shareholder, the club will take on a new dimension with new goals and criteria for success,” it said.

The current owner of Paris FC, Pierre Ferracci, will remain president, Agache said. Antoine Arnault will be Agache’s representative on the club’s board of directors.

Paris FC, founded in 1969, returned to professional ranks in 2015 after spending four decades in the amateur leagues. It hasn’t been a part of France’s top flight league since the late 1970s, but currently sits at the top of the second-best division in the French leagues.

When Abby Tennenbaum, 44, and her husband, Ross Tennenbaum , 46, purchased a $2.1 million vacation property in 2021 about 80 miles southeast of Seattle in the mountain resort community of Suncadia, Washington, they encouraged their two young daughters to collaborate with the family’s interior designer, Emily LaMarque, on decorating the house. The 3,143-square-foot, five-bedroom home had a budget of $500,000 for furnishings and decorating.

The Tennenbaum sisters—Ella, 12, and Edie, 8—gave LaMarque feedback on paint colours and wallpaper patterns, but they also expressed other specific preferences. They weren’t into insect art (though butterflies were okay).

They thought it would be neat to have indoor swings—which the house now has on all three of its levels. And Edie, who has always loved bunk beds, worked with LaMarque to design a bunk room, which is both sisters’ favourite space. “It looks so good and it’s so cool,” Edie says of the sleeping spot that has four full-sized beds.

The girls even convinced their parents, Abby and Ross Tennenbaum, that the kitchen needed a snow cone machine. Abby is an occupational therapist turned stay-at-home mother and Ross is the CFO of Avalara, a tax software company.

Children have long contributed thoughts on their bedroom designs: Pink! Blue! Princesses! Rocket ships! But now they are driving interior decisions around the house. “We’ve always talked with our clients’ children,” says Lynn Stone, co-founder of Hunter Carson Design, which is based in Manhattan Beach, California. “What we are seeing now is something different: Now we expect the kids to get involved.”

Stone and her co-founder, Mandy Gregory, routinely receive emails, Pinterest boards, Instagram messages and TikToks from their clients’ mini-mes. “Kids send us texts if they are out shopping, saying, ‘Do you think this will work in our room?’” Stone says. “One client’s daughter said, ‘Please, don’t meet with Lynn and Mandy without me, and if you do, FaceTime me!’”

A sampling of product requests from their pint-sized clients include CB2’s Goop-designed Gwyneth Boucle Swivel Chair (“Teens love this chair,” Stone says), Gucci wallpaper, Bella Notte handmade linens, customised neon signs, shelves to show off Lego collections and bedroom mini fridges (“Parents often say no to mini fridges,” Stone says). One teenager emailed Stone a screenshot of a Sotheby’s auction artwork in the $20,000 range that she wanted for her bedroom. Stone told her, “I too love this, but I don’t see it making its way into either of our houses.”

In 2021, Stone and Gregory were hired by stay-at-home mom Neeraj Rotondo, 56, to update her son’s bedroom and bathroom in the roughly 5,000-square-foot, five-bedroom Manhattan Beach house where Rotondo’s family had lived for more than a decade. The Mediterranean-style house is currently estimated at $6.2 million, according to Redfin. Rotondo’s son, Sam, who was 14-years-old at the time, gave his opinions: He wanted his room to have a couch-like bed, framed N.B.A. jersey artwork and a space to play card games with friends. The bedroom cost $8,000 and the bathroom was $23,000.

While that project was underway, Neeraj Rotondo’s two daughters, Leena and Kayla Rotondo, who were teenagers, convinced their mother that the family’s unused media room needed a refresh. “It was brown and navy with reclining chairs and super not welcoming,” says Kayla, 19.

Kayla was inspired by a Pinterest photo of reality star Khloé Kardashian ’s theatre room, especially its long, glamorous cream-coloured couch. Stone and Gregory outfitted the Rotondos’ screening room with a custom-built daybed with grey velvet cushioning, floating lounge chairs, fluffy cream pillows and faux fur blankets, shimmery grasscloth wallpaper, hand-blown glass sconces and candy jars. It cost $42,000.

“It was soooo fun that we were young and we got to bring our idea to life,” says Leena, 20. Her sister agrees. “It feels like the only room in the house that was just for me and Leena,” Kayla says. “It wasn’t anyone’s vision but ours.”

Savannah, Georgia-based Khoi Vo , who is the CEO of the American Society of Interior Designers, thinks it’s “wonderful” that youngsters are interested in home design, which gives family members a forum for communicating with each other and thinking about how they live together. “As a dad to a pre-teen, I think any chance a parent can get to engage in dialogue with their kids is an opportunity,” says Vo.

Vo emphasises that families need to recognise an interior design project’s constraints, whether it’s money, time, space, scale or all of the above. “A child might say, ‘I want a turret that I can shoot an arrow out of and a moat with alligators,” he says, noting that, yes, of course it’s okay to say no to the castle.

“If you’re designing a space just for you—you’re the only one who is going to use it—you don’t need to seek your 12-year-old son’s opinion,” Vo says. When it comes to the living room, though, Vo says it’s fine to talk as a family about it—but, that doesn’t mean the son needs the wall of television screens he wants for sports night.

Houston interior designer David Euscher thinks the pandemic made everyone become more aware of how they live in their own environments and how spaces influence behaviour. “Even without that event,” he says, “young people look for ways to exercise some control over their lives, and influencing their parents’ design choices at home is one way to do it,” he says.

In 2022, Wendy Becktold, 53, of Berkeley, Calif., hired local interior designer Nureed Saeed, owner of Nu Interiors, to design a bedroom for her son, Simon. Wendy Becktold, an editor, and her family moved into a roughly 2,400-square-foot, three bedroom 1922 Craftsman house in 2016, which she and her husband purchased for $1.3 million.

“Since I’m the youngest child, when we moved, I obviously got the smallest room,” says Simon, 16, who has an older sister. “For my furniture, I got hand-me-downs from everyone else. It was little-kid, vandalised furniture all around my room. So I leveraged that, and was like, well, mom, I have the smallest room and the worst furniture. Maybe it would be a good idea to get a little room redo. I guess it worked.”

Saeed created image boards featuring varying furniture and colours and she and Simon talked through the selections. He gravitated toward Midcentury Modern shapes, walnut woods and a colour palette of navy, tan, white and black with a hint of greige.

“Definitely more adult than I would have expected out of a 14-year-old,” Saeed says. As his space morphed into his new one with fresh paint, furniture and lighting, Simon says, “It was surreal to watch it become my room after I’d been speculating about how cool it was going to be.”

Once the bedroom project was complete, Saeed moved onto designing the living room and entryway, where Simon expressed his preferences for modern furniture. “I didn’t want to overstep my role as the youngest child,” he says, “but I did definitely say, ‘This is cool,’ ‘This is a good idea,’ ‘I’m not as keen on these things, like a couch.’”

The house project had limits. “We made careful considerations for our interior design selections because it’s quite an investment,” Wendy Becktold says. The bedroom project, for example, cost close to $10,000, but she says it was worth it, as the new space can be useful even after Simon leaves the nest someday.

The Becktolds’ project is an example of how Saeed thinks there has been a societal shift in how children are regarded today. “We view them as their own humans who, even at young ages, their opinions are worth honouring and listening to,” she says.

“It’s not like children sit down buttoned-up for a kick off meeting, but at some point, parents are always like: My kids really like this thing but I don’t know how to integrate it,” says Los Angeles-based Emily LaMarque, founder of an eponymous firm, who designed the Tennenbaum family’s house in Washington.

LaMarque says her recent clients’ offspring often fall into two camps: those who are inspired by nature or music. “There’s a lot of Taylor Swift,” she says, noting that for music fans, it’s less about capturing a specific musician’s aesthetic and more about exuding a vibe—though LaMarque will coordinate album cover posters with other artwork and decor.

One 10-year-old gave LaMarque four iterations of her bedroom floor plan. “Specifically, she said ‘I want a pale wood bed here. I want two nightstands. I want my two guitars to go here. I want a credenza—and I want a record player on it so it needs to be deep enough and I want plants on it.’”

LaMarque riffed back and forth with one 13-year-old drama lover, whose bedroom they decided to outfit with a nook that has curtains that can be tied back so the girl could have a theatre area. LaMarque says, “when she got her new bedding that she had helped pick out, she was literally jumping up and down.”

In Singapore, it’s not unusual for total strangers to ask, “Have you eaten yet?” A greeting akin to “Good morning,” it invariably leads to follow-up questions. What did you eat? Where did you eat it? Was it good? Greeters reserve the right to judge your responses and offer advice, solicited or otherwise, on where you should eat next.

Locals will often joke that gastronomic opinions can make (and break) relationships and that eating is a national pastime. And why wouldn’t it be? In a nexus of colliding cultures—a place where Malays, Indians, Chinese and Europeans have brushed shoulders and shared meals for centuries—the mix of flavours coming out of kitchens in this country is enough to make you believe in world peace.

While Michelin stars spangle Singapore’s restaurant scene , to truly understand the city’s relationship with food, you have to venture to the hawker centres. A core aspect of daily life, hawker centres sprang up in numbers during the 1970s, built by authorities looking to sanitise and formalise the city’s street-food scene. Today, 121 government-run hawker centres feature food stalls that specialise in dishes from the country’s various ethnic groups. In one of the world’s most expensive cities, hawker dishes are shockingly cheap: A full meal can cost as little as $3.

Over the course of many visits to Singapore, I’ve fallen in love with these places—and with the scavenger hunts to find meals I’ll never forget: delicate bowls of laksa noodle soup, where brisk lashes of heat interrupt addictive swirls of umami; impossibly flaky roti prata dipped in curry; the beautiful simplicity of an immaculately roasted duck leg. In a futuristic and at times sterile city, hawker centres throw back to the past and offer a rare glimpse of something human in scale. To an outsider like me, sitting at a table amid the din of the lunch-hour rush can feel like glimpsing the city’s soul through all the concrete and glitz.

So I’ve been alarmed in recent years to hear about the supposed demise of hawker centres. Would-be hawkers have to bid for stalls from the government, and rents are climbing . An upwardly mobile generation doesn’t want to take over from their parents. On a recent trip to Singapore, I enlisted my brother, who lives there, and as we ate our way across the city, we searched for signs of life—and hopefully a peek into what the future holds.

At Amoy Street Food Centre, near the central business district, 32-year-old Kai Jin Thng has done the math. To turn a profit at his stall, Jin’s Noodle , he says, he has to churn out at least 150 $4 bowls of kolo mee , a Malaysian dish featuring savoury pork over a bed of springy noodles, in 120 minutes of lunch service. With his sister as sous-chef, he slings the bowls with frenetic focus.

Thng dropped out of school as a teenager to work in his father’s stall selling wonton mee , a staple noodle dish, and is quick to say no when I ask if he wants his daughter to take over the stall one day.

“The tradition is fading and I believe that in the next 10 or 15 years, it’s only going to get worse,” Thng said. “The new generation prefers to put on their tie and their white collar—nobody really wants to get their hands dirty.”

In 2020, the National Environment Agency , which oversees hawker centres, put the median age of hawkers at 60. When I did encounter younger people like Thng in the trade, I found they persevered out of stubbornness, a desire to innovate on a deep-seated tradition—or some combination of both.

Later that afternoon, looking for a momentary reprieve from Singapore’s crushing humidity, we ducked into Market Street Hawker Centre and bought juice made from fresh calamansi, a small citrus fruit.

Jamilah Beevi, 29, was working the shop with her father, who, at 64, has been a hawker since he was 12. “I originally stepped in out of filial duty,” she said. “But I find it to be really fulfilling work…I see it as a generational shop, so I don’t want to let that die.” When I asked her father when he’d retire, he confidently said he’d hang up his apron next year. “He’s been saying that for many years,” Beevi said, laughing.

More than one Singaporean told me that to truly appreciate what’s at stake in the hawker tradition’s threatened collapse, I’d need to leave the neighbourhoods where most tourists spend their time, and venture to the Heartland, the residential communities outside the central business district. There, hawker centres, often combined with markets, are strategically located near dense housing developments, where they cater to the 77% of Singaporeans who live in government-subsidised apartments.

We ate laksa from a stall at Ghim Moh Market and Food Centre, where families enjoyed their Sunday. At Redhill Food Centre, a similar chorus of chattering voices and clattering cutlery filled the space, as diners lined up for prawn noodles and chicken rice. Near our table, a couple hungrily unwrapped a package of durian, a coveted fruit banned from public transportation and some hotels for its strong aroma. It all seemed like business as usual.

Then we went to Blackgoat . Tucked in a corner of the Jalan Batu housing development, Blackgoat doesn’t look like an average hawker operation. An unusually large staff of six swirled around a stall where Fikri Amin Bin Rohaimi, 24, presided over a fiery grill and a seriously ambitious menu. A veteran of the three-Michelin-star Zén , Rohaimi started selling burgers from his apartment kitchen in 2019, before opening a hawker stall last year. We ordered everything on the menu and enjoyed a feast that would astound had it come out of a fully equipped restaurant kitchen; that it was all made in a 130-square-foot space seemed miraculous.

Mussels swam in a mushroom broth, spiked with Thai basil and chives. Huge, tender tiger prawns were grilled to perfection and smothered in toasted garlic and olive oil. Lamb was coated in a whisper of Sichuan peppercorns; Wagyu beef, in a homemade makrut-lime sauce. Then Ethel Yam, Blackgoat’s pastry chef prepared a date pudding with a mushroom semifreddo and a panna cotta drizzled in chamomile syrup. A group of elderly residents from the nearby towers watched, while sipping tiny glasses of Tiger beer.

Since opening his stall, Rohaimi told me, he’s seen his food referred to as “restaurant-level hawker food,” a categorisation he rejects, feeling it discounts what’s possible at a hawker centre. “If you eat hawker food, you know that it can often be much better than anything at a restaurant.”

He wants to open a restaurant eventually—or, leveraging his in-progress biomedical engineering degree, a food lab. But he sees the modern hawker centre not just as a steppingstone, but a place to experiment. “Because you only have to manage so many things, unlike at a restaurant, a hawker stall right now gives us a kind of limitlessness to try new things,” he said.

Using high-grade Australian beef and employing a whole staff, Rohaimi must charge more than typical hawker stalls, though his food, around $12 per 100 grams of steak, still costs far less than high-end restaurant fare. He’s found that people will pay for quality, he says, even if he first has to convince them to try the food.

At Yishun Park Hawker Centre (now temporarily closed for renovations), Nurl Asyraffie, 33, has encountered a similar dynamic since he started Kerabu by Arang , a stall specialising in “modern Malay food.” The day we came, he was selling ayam percik , a grilled chicken leg smothered in a bewitching turmeric-based marinade. As we ate, a hawker from another stall came over to inquire how much we’d paid. When we said around $10 a plate, she looked skeptical: “At least it’s a lot of food.”

Asyraffie, who opened the stall after a spell in private dining and at big-name restaurants in the region, says he’s used to dubious reactions. “I think the way you get people’s trust is you need to deliver,” he said. “Singapore is a melting pot; we’re used to trying new things, and we will pay for food we think is worth it.” He says a lot of the same older “uncles” who gawked at his prices, are now regulars. “New hawkers like me can fill a gap in the market, slightly higher than your chicken rice, but lower than a restaurant.”

But economics is only half the battle for a new generation of hawkers, says Seng Wun Song, a 64-year-old, semiretired economist who delves into the inner workings of Singapore’s food-and-beverage industry as a hobby. He thinks locals and tourists who come to hawker centers to look for “authentic” Singaporean food need to rethink what that amorphous catchall word really means. What people consider “heritage food,” he explains, is a mix of Malay, Chinese, Indian and European dishes that emerged from the country’s founding. “But Singapore is a trading hub where people come and go, and heritage moves and changes. Hawker food isn’t dying; it’s evolving so that it doesn’t die.”