The Bali wellness resort expanding to Hong Kong that grew out of a Cinderella love story
- Chicco Tatriele and his wife, Lahra, had a fairy tale romance that encouraged the couple to establish Fivelements, an eco-conscious wellness retreat
- The next step is the opening of Fivelements Habitat in Hong Kong’s Times Square in July
The story of Fivelements wellness resort is a Cinderella one. It began on a dark and stormy night in Bali, when a lost maiden showed up at Chicco Tatriele’s door, just outside Canggu, covered in mud and wearing a single shoe.
“I asked her what happened,” Tatriele says, describing how he first met Lahra, who would become his wife. “She was only wearing one shoe, because the other had been lost outside. She said: ‘I’m really sorry, I fell in the mud.’ I said: ‘Do you want to take a shower?’ She said: ‘Yes, thank you so much.’”
Lahra was recently divorced and relocating from Singapore to Bali, where she had bought a piece of land to build a house for herself and her two daughters. She had just signed a rental lease, and was walking along the beach in a semi-trance when the skies opened.
“I was saying to myself, I’m going to pursue my dream to do some sort of Balinese healing spa in New York,” Lahra says. “It was an unusual evening, where fate met some kind of divine intervention. I fell down in this tall, marshy, muddy grass, and that’s how I ended up at Chicco’s.”
A few months later, Tatriele brought her to see a piece of land he had just put a deposit on, where Fivelements is now. “We’d known each other only four months. But I said: ‘Hey, it’s beautiful, why don’t you have a look.’ We did – and she fell in the mud and lost her shoe again. We said, oh my God, it’s a sign. And this was the beginning of the story. And now we’re very careful where she walks.”
