The Best Luxury Experiences Leave Some Slack in the System

To build the ice luge, the general manager got into a helicopter with a chainsaw.

The guests were a group of American college friends who had bought out Eleven Deplar Farm, the 13-room lodge that sits on a converted sheep farm in Iceland's Fljót Valley, to celebrate a 40th birthday. They wanted a night that felt like a 1990s party.

Kurt Berman, who runs the place for Eleven, could have phoned down for a bag of ice. Instead, he flew his guide-operations manager up into the mountains above the valley, found an alpine lake that doesn't melt in summer, hacked out a block of ice that had been frozen for millennia, flew it back down, and carved it into a luge. At four in the morning, a group of adults who had long since made their money were drinking vodka poured through ice older than agriculture, with a playlist from 1995.

"You can't think that stuff up if you don't have the resources or the impetus to do it," Berman told me. He's right, but the res