Gwyneth Paltrow Shares Her Travel Rule For When Things Go Wrong

Forbes

13-05-2025

Gwyneth Paltrow leads visitors through a unique sensory experience at Genesis House.
In the heart of Manhattan's Meatpacking District, Gwyneth Paltrow has helped turn a luxury showroom into something resembling a Korean forest. The Forest Within, a new immersive installation at Genesis House, is her latest collaboration—one that fuses nature, tech, and wellness into a multisensory sanctuary filled with peonies, LED-lit rock formations, and the scent of petrichor. But the project isn't just about aesthetics.
'I think we are at this crazy inflection point as a culture and society where we're tipping over into so much input all the time,' Paltrow told me at the opening. 'We have not adapted to it. Our nervous systems absolutely cannot cope with what's happening on any level.'
Designed to pull visitors into a sensory reset—complete with guided meditation voiced by Paltrow herself—the installation is meant to be a reminder that, even in the middle of New York City, stillness is possible. 'We experience emails like a—like a bad email is like a gunshot,' she said. 'And it's not commensurate with what's happening.'
This fascination with the nervous system and the need for presence isn't limited to pop-up installations—it's become central to how she travels. And when things go wrong, which of course they often do, Paltrow has a simple rule. 'I try to go in with the mindset of, like, this might not go according to plan, and let's just sort of try to roll with it, you know?' she said.
'There was one time I was stuck on the Eurostar for six hours when my kids were toddlers. You can lose your mind, or you can try to be calm and go a bit inward. What will losing your mind in a train car do for anybody?'
Even when travel feels like chaos, she turns to what she calls her grounding rituals. 'I always walk,' she said. 'I was once in France, and I had this tour guide in a museum, and he said, Do you want to take the elevator or do you want to walk? And I said, I prefer to walk. And he said, 'Good, me too. I believe that walking brings the body and the soul together.' And I was like, that's true. I never articulated it like that.'
She and her husband, Brad Falchuk, will often spend hours walking through a city—sometimes to dinner, sometimes just to get lost. 'Last summer, we were walking around Rome, and we had one of those days where we walked for about six hours and got lost. And we stumbled upon one of those ruins that had sort of a modern facade that had been peeled away, and it was like some 11th-century… you know what I mean?' she laughed. 'It was one of those moments where it was just a treasure that someone else had unearthed.'
Hydration, she added, is the other essential. And when arriving somewhere new, especially across time zones, she avoids overindulging until she's settled. 'I try to mine like the food, the alcohol, and stuff until I get totally adjusted to the time,' she said.
She lights up most when talking about the places that truly feel like sanctuaries. We go to Italy in the summer, in the hills of Umbria. It's like true countryside, very rustic. That's where I feel totally at peace,' she said. 'It's unmanicured, and there's a wildness to it. They call Umbria the Green Heart of Italy. And all the flora and fauna there… you know, all kinds of wild things running around in the bushes and olive trees. I just feel like beautifully insignificant when I'm there.'
Paltrow is quick to draw distinctions between different types of nature. 'The forest is so gentle and it's so inward and it's so quiet and like, there's so much peace in the forest,' she said. 'But California, the coast—it's almost brutal. It's so raw and beautiful, and the waves are so strong, the ocean's so cold and brackish. There's something inhospitable about it that I love.'
The daughter of a filmmaker, she grew up bouncing between coasts and continents—and hasn't slowed down. 'I've never been to Korea, which I'm dying to go to. Korean food's my favorite food,' she said. 'And I've only ever been to Tokyo in Japan, so I would love to kind of go out into the islands and do that whole trip.'
When I mentioned my own desire to ski in Japan, she nodded. 'Yeah, people say you go in January and February, and it's unbelievable. That would be really cool.'
While The Forest Within is open through June 29 and offers a stylized version of that immersive nature, she believes everyone can recreate their own version at home.
'If there's a spot outside in nature where somebody could go and do the thing that connects them most deeply to themselves—whether that's listening to a beautiful piece of music or reading a poem or just simply lying down on the grass—that's kind of what we're trying to achieve here,' she said. 'It doesn't cost anything and can be a powerful tool in shifting our consciousness.'
And for fellow parents wondering how to bring little ones along for the ride, Paltrow had one final piece of advice. 'I always just sort of packed up my kids and went, and I tried not to be too precious. My dad always said, 'You're on the time you're on.' We'd be falling asleep at the table and he'd be like, 'We're going to the Pompidou.''
Because when it comes to travel, her rule is clear: expect disruption—and find calm anyway.