Awera Island · Mentawai Islands · Indonesia · November 2026
The world's first remote
island sober retreat.
A four-week residential recovery programme for high-functioning professionals. Four clients. One island.
The Philosophy
Remove the noise,
and the work begins.
This is not rehab. Most places offering recovery still use the same models — group-based, one-shoe-fits-all, the same structures that existed thirty years ago. They helped people, and still do. But they're not the only way.
What we know about addiction has moved on. Trauma, nervous system dysregulation, the weight of identity — there's a science to this that most treatment still hasn't built around. Richard has worked inside rehabs and across this field long enough to see what that gap costs people. Recovery Club is built around what we actually know now, not the 12 steps, not a template.
The aim isn't sobriety as an end point. It's leaving with the capacity to regulate yourself — your nervous system, your responses to discomfort — without reaching for something external. You work on that here, while an island is doing the heavy lifting.
A remote island in the Indian Ocean, jungle and ocean and nothing else. No bar to walk to, no city to disappear into for the night. Surf, paddleboarding, a small team who know what they're doing. That's the whole environment, and it's deliberate.
"The goal is not just sobriety. It's identity. Who you are without the substance, the achievement, the mask."
The Setting
Awera Island,
Mentawai Islands, Indonesia.
One of a chain of islands off the coast of Sumatra. Remote, quiet, and surrounded by the Indian Ocean. This is not a clinic, a spa, or a treatment centre. It's a container.
You're never making this journey alone. A flight to Padang, an overnight ferry to the Mentawais, a private boat to the island — and at every stage, someone from the team is with you. By the time you step off the boat, something has already shifted.
No bar to walk to, no taxi to call, no city to vanish into for the night.
The Mentawai Islands are legendary in surf culture — world-famous breaks a short boat ride away, calm bays for paddleboarding and snorkelling right on the doorstep.
The Mentawai are among the world's oldest surviving tribal cultures — traditional tattooing, shamanic healers, a way of life barely changed in thousands of years.
For work calls, family contact, and anything else you need to manage.
In Pictures
A closer look.
A remote island in the Indian Ocean — jungle, ocean, and the space to do the work properly.
