“It's easy to love and it's really easy to leave.”
— Tracy Georgiou
Tracy keeps a beach casita two blocks from the ocean in Manhattan Beach, fifteen minutes from LAX. She describes it in a way that tells you almost everything about how she lives: “It's easy to love and it's really easy to leave.”
That one line holds a tension most of us never resolve. We want a home that anchors us and a life that lets us move. Tracy, founder of the creative studio Long Weekend, has spent years learning to hold both at once.
She calls it polarity. “For me to feel really expansive and able to move, I need the balance of the place that feels really grounded and rooted that I can drop into.” At SOTIYO, that idea is familiar — movement works best when something steady sits beneath it. We wanted to know how she builds that steadiness, then carries it with her.
We caught her on a video call — a rare moment with her actually at home, between a trip just finished and one leaving Sunday. She walked us through the rituals, the cities, and the year that rearranged all of it.
A Routine That Travels
Tracy is, by her own account, type A. But her routine isn't rigid — it's portable. “I have a routine that's really sustainable that can go with me everywhere, and that can also be put down for a day or two or a week and returned to without resistance.”
It starts before her phone does. An hour without the screen. A glass of water, a ginger drink, a coffee. She meditates, journals, offers a little gratitude to the world — all before she lets the outside world ask anything of her. Then she moves her body, every single day.
Movement is both joy and connection for her. In LA she returns to the same yoga studio, the same trainer, the same dance classes. In New York she drops into a class she's attended on and off for ten years. “Teachers greet me like, what's up girl, I didn't know you were coming today.” She hasn't lived there in six years. She still shows up.
This is where her approach reveals itself. Tracy doesn't have one home and a string of hotels. She has many small homes, each running its own version of the same routine. She knows where she gets her coffee in Paris, her juice in her old New York neighborhood. “It's really easy for me to hold routine when I can visualize the place I'll be.”
When a place is new, she brings the ritual anyway — her matcha whisk and powder unpacked in a hotel lobby. And the routine she guards above all the others has nothing to do with food or fitness. “The most important routine that I come back to is presence and checking in.”
Finding the Thing Only Locals Know
Tracy is obsessed with hospitality, professionally and personally. She seeks out places with soul — “places that feel special and like they could only exist where I'm going.” Sometimes that's a luxurious stay at Mezzatorre on Ischia; sometimes a great one- or two-star place on the same island. The principle, she says, holds at every level.
The harder question is how you still find the local, specific thing when so many cities feel flattened by the same recommendations. Her answer is a single word: community.
“I'm not trying to find the best, most secret, up-and-coming, fanciest, craziest recommendation,” she says. She asks people. In Scottsdale, a friend in food and beverage pointed her to The Ends, a restaurant locals favor; there, the bartender ordered her entire meal, then told her where he likes to eat. One question leads to the next.
It's a generous way to travel: let the people in a place hand you the place. “Live like a local and really try to absorb and be where you are.”
Cities That Keep Changing
Returning to a city you love means watching it change without you. New York is that city for Tracy — fifteen years of her life, six of them now behind her.
She's made peace with the tension. The corner bistro that once served fries in a coffee filter has tidied up its plating. A favorite eyewear shop she went to for a repair had moved; a new condo stood where it used to be. “You can't be everywhere all at once all the time.”
So she returns as what she calls a compassionate observer — holding her memories lightly, curious about what's new. The places she loves are living things, too. It's a posture, not nostalgia: familiar, she says, but not entirely known.
The Year Everything Cracked Open
Ask which transitions shaped her most and she goes straight to 2020. She gave up her New York apartment and put everything in storage — not knowing for how long, or where she'd land. Clothes went to her parents' house in Nebraska. For two years, nothing was hers. “That was really uncomfortable and hard at times, but it was also really freeing.”
After fifteen years in one office, in one city, something gave way. “Something inside me cracked open.” She learned she could be her own structure and take it anywhere. A consulting project with a designer friend brought her to LA to try it out. The beach, the casita, the west side — none of it was planned. “I never would have ended up here had I not gone through all the discomfort beforehand.”
The clearest thing she says about all of it is also the simplest: “I am home.” Not a place. A way of being.
What She Carries
Tracy notices how an object feels before she lets it in. “If it's close to me, if it's on my skin, it better feel good. If I'm carrying it, it better have great hands.” She's drawn to things that are timeless, useful, a little irreverent — and built to last.
What travels with her is unfussy: a carry-on, a small Nalgene water bottle, a journal, a soft cashmere sweater, Birkenstocks, a physical book (usually from the library). In LA she keeps a kit in the car at all times — workout clothes, hiking shoes, a swimsuit and towel, a sweatshirt. Not for emergencies, she clarifies. For the unexpected swim.
A Long Weekend as a Mindset
The name of her studio is also a philosophy. “A long weekend is a mindset,” she says — joyful, light, an easy way to make space and reconnect. No big lift, no once-in-a-lifetime plan. Sometimes it asks you to dance all weekend; sometimes to be a lizard in the sun.
What's next looks a lot like that rhythm. A week in Greece, split between Hydra — which she's missed — and Folegandros, an island she's never seen. Later, a first visit to Stromboli and a week sailing the Aeolian Islands, with a return to Salina, where a single seaside sandwich once made her fall for the place. Quiet time at the Minnesota lakes with family. A dance retreat in Todos Santos she loved enough to book again. “There's a specific melody to how I move throughout the world.”
And the pins still waiting on the map: the Basque coast and San Sebastián, and Hostal Empúries on the Costa Brava — a seafront hotel beside the old Greek ruins, exactly the kind of place with a point of view she keeps seeking out.
Where the Steadiness Comes From
What stays with us isn't the itinerary. It's the discipline underneath it — the ginger drink, the hour off the phone, the whisk in the hotel lobby. Tracy moves widely because she's built something steady to move from. At SOTIYO, that's the whole premise of Human Flow: comfort isn't the opposite of motion. It's what makes motion feel like yours.
Her current mantra is three words, repeated like a small ritual of its own: “Be kind, be kind, be kind.” It travels well.
Find Tracy Georgiou at longweekend.com, on Longweekend Instagram, on Instagram, and on her Substack.
If this one stayed with you, you might enjoy our conversation with Kurt Slanaker on movement, meaning, and the weight of well-designed things. Kurt is also the one who introduced us to Tracy — and we understood perfectly why. And if you're in the mood to keep reading, take a look at Pablo Rubio Ordás on why the best destination is going home — another take on movement that keeps returning to something solid. Or subscribe to Roam Lines, and we'll send the next one when it's ready.
