ABOUT
A family of six, refusing to choose between mood and reality.
THE PREMISE
The Edited Wild is a design-forward family travel platform for people who have strong aesthetic standards and small children — and refuse to choose between the two.
We are a family of six living in Southern Sri Lanka, and we travel the world documenting the hotels, restaurants, and cultural experiences that pass our dual test: genuinely beautiful, and genuinely workable with kids in tow.
Everything we publish is editorial, honest, and scored both ways. We exist for the architect who books by the mood board, the creative director who travels for the food, the design-literate parent who still wants to stay somewhere worth photographing — and just needs to know it won’t be a disaster with a two-year-old.
THE METHOD
Four principles, kept on the wall of the studio.
01
We rate independently
Every review is entirely our own. What you get is the unfiltered reality of how our family actually experiences a space—the good, the bad, and the chaotic. It is the only way a review can mean anything once children are in the equation.
02
We score it twice
A Beauty score and a Workable score, on a ten-point scale, for every place we publish. A 9.5 in Beauty and a 4 in Workable is a useful sentence. It tells you what kind of trip this would be, and for which parent.
03
We bring the actual children
All four of them. The two-year-old twins who climb the marble. The eight-year-old who asks for a third pastry at breakfast. The four-year-old who has opinions about the duvet. We test what we recommend in the conditions you would test it in.
04
We file slowly
We publish forty-odd stories a year. We say no to most of them. We do not have a content calendar. We have a magazine.
THE STUDIO
Words, pictures and video by Alina Emrich and Kiên Hoàng, fact-checked by four small humans.
Alina and Kiên write, photograph and film. The children — Luna Mây, Ray Sao, Soleil My and Yara Linh — bear witness, mostly honestly, to everything that is put in front of them.
We work out of Sri Rama Shala, a yoga retreat and family sanctuary in Habaraduwa, Southern Sri Lanka. The mosquitoes are bad at dusk and dawn. The light is best at 6:30am. Everything you read here is made in that light, and published one quiet story at a time.