The Community
A story about what luxury actually is — and why the most accomplished people in the world are still looking for it.
Origin
In 1996, Stefan Beiten founded what would become the Argo Venture Studio. Over the next three decades, the ventures grew — from the technology company that became Nokia Maps to dozens of companies across two continents. But one project changed everything.
The joint venture behind BBC’s Planet Earth reached over a billion people worldwide. It did not just document nature — it changed the conversation. The conversation between people and the planet. Between people and one another. Between people and life itself. It made visible something that had always been true but rarely felt at scale: that our aliveness is not separate from the aliveness of the world around us. That experience laid the philosophical foundation for everything Sicily Prime would become.
What Stefan was building, underneath all of it, was something harder to name: a practice of creating spaces where serious people could stop performing. In 2004, he joined YPO — the world’s largest CEO network, 35,000 members strong. He went on to found the YPO Berlin Chapter. Later came The Argonauts — a 5,000-member entrepreneurial peer community built around the same conviction: that the people you sit with shape the life you lead.
But Stefan did not build Sicily Prime alone. He initiated and invited — and every person who joined brought something that expanded the vision. Alexander Plajer, who had spent three decades designing spaces for Karl Lagerfeld and Porsche Design, brought the conviction that architecture must listen to the land before it speaks. Ken Schluchtmann, twice World Architectural Photographer of the Year, brought the eye that makes a collection of individual properties feel like one coherent body of work. Loes Fokker, organisational psychologist and co-founder of The Argonauts, brought the understanding that community is not a feature but a culture that must be designed with as much care as a building. Arthur, Franz-Philippe, Davide, Susanne, Sherri — each chose this project because they recognised in it something they had been looking for themselves.
What unites this team is a shared philosophy — what we call aliveness. It is rooted in a simple but radical shift: from the old pursuit of me-happiness — the individual accumulation that defines most of modern life — to we-happiness, the flourishing that only happens in relationship, in community, in a shared commitment to place and to each other. This is not a new idea. It is deeply congruent with Italian culture, where the table is never set for one, where the passeggiata is a collective act, where the quality of life is measured not by what you own but by who you share it with.
Three decades of creating these spaces, and a team that embodies this philosophy in everything they do — this is the foundation Sicily Prime is built on. Not a business plan. A lived understanding.
What Thirty Years of Community Taught
Sicily Prime is built entirely around the highest level of luxury — the luxury of connection. The architecture serves the landscape, not the other way around. The hospitality is Sicilian — seasonal, generous, rooted — not the interchangeable elegance of an international chain. The community is curated by a team that has spent a collective lifetime learning what curation actually requires. And the place itself is not a backdrop but a participant — a landscape so layered with history, beauty, and civilisational memory that it does half the work of making people present.
Membership deepens with every year. Because the people around the table are the asset. And that asset — unlike anything you can buy — appreciates with time.
Three Levels of Luxury
The first thing successful people acquire is things. The house in the right postcode. The watch. The membership to the place with the waiting list. More, bigger, branded — the language of the showroom. It answers one question: what do I own? Most of the market still operates here. It is not wrong. It is simply where everyone begins.
The second thing they learn is taste. Fewer things, better chosen. The quiet watch instead of the loud one. The hand-built kitchen, not the showroom version. Craftsmanship over logos. Rarity over volume. This is where the cultural conversation around luxury has arrived. The whispered rather than the shouted. But not where it ends.
The people who had been through both phases — who had acquired everything and then refined everything — were still restless. Not because they lacked things or even taste, but because they lacked a space they could walk into without armour. A table where no one was selling, performing, or positioning. A place where accomplished equals could sit together and the conversation could actually go somewhere. This was not a market gap. It was a human one.
The quality of the people around your table. The depth of a conversation without agenda. The trust that forms slowly, over shared meals and unhurried evenings, when people who have built real things in the world are given no reason to perform and every reason to be present.
This is the only form of luxury that appreciates with time.
The Conditions
Connection of this kind requires something even the best peer networks struggle to provide in a boardroom or a city hotel. It requires neutral ground — a place that belongs to no one’s home culture, no one’s professional territory, no one’s social hierarchy.
A place where a founder from São Paulo, a family office principal from Seoul, a retired CEO from Toronto, an artist from Berlin, an AI coder from San Francisco, and an entrepreneur from India can sit at the same table and discover that the questions keeping them awake at night are the same questions — regardless of passport, generation, faith, or background.
This is not idealism. It is what every member of this team has witnessed and embodied as their approach to life — tested and retested across decades of peer communities, from YPO forums to Argonauts gatherings, from structured retreats to unscripted evenings where something real happened because the conditions were right. The deepest conversations happen when people leave their familiar worlds behind and meet in a place that strips away the scaffolding of status. What remains is the human being.
That collective understanding — accumulated across hundreds of events, thousands of conversations, and a shared conviction that the quality of presence matters more than the quality of the venue — now finds its fullest expression in Sicily Prime. Not a conference format. Not a resort designed to insulate you from the world outside its walls. A real place with its own gravity — ancient enough to remind you that your concerns are not new, alive enough to make you feel that your presence matters, and generous enough to welcome anyone willing to arrive honestly.
The Place
Sicily has been a crossroads for over three thousand years — not as a metaphor, but as a material fact. Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spanish — each civilisation arrived, and rather than erasing what came before, layered its own genius on top.
The result is the most culturally stratified landscape in the Mediterranean: a place where a Greek theatre built in the fifth century BC still hosts performances, where Arab citrus groves shade Norman churches, where Baroque palaces rise from streets that were already ancient when Rome was young.
This is not multiculturalism as a slogan. It is multiculturalism as geology — three millennia of human encounter compressed into the stone, the food, the language, and the rhythms of daily life. Sicily has never belonged to a single people. It has always been the place where different worlds met, collided, and created something none of them could have built alone.
The Question
More than 2,500 years ago, Plato walked the streets of Syracuse. He came not as a tourist but as a philosopher drawn to the most ambitious city in the Greek world — a place where ideas about how to live were tested against the demands of politics, power, and real human relationships.
The Greeks had a word for it: eudaimonia — not happiness in the modern, shallow sense, but human flourishing. A life lived in balance. A life where beauty, truth, and connection are not luxuries reserved for retirement but the organising principles of every day.
In Syracuse, it was lived — in the proportions of the theatre carved into the hillside, in the long meals where philosophy was a dinner conversation. Rome translated eudaimonia into the villa. The Baroque architects of Noto, rebuilding an entire city after the earthquake of 1693, expressed the same conviction in stone and light: that the art of living well is itself the highest achievement.
The timeless wisdom that Plato brought to Syracuse — that a life fully lived requires presence, honest inquiry, community among equals, and coherence between what you believe and how you act — did not stay in antiquity. It is the operating system of this coastline. And it is exactly what the most accomplished people in the world, having acquired and curated everything the market offers, are still looking for.
Sicily Prime exists to carry that wisdom forward.
Qualification
The people we invite have already done the work. They have sat in YPO forums. They have practised vulnerability in EO peer groups. They have defended their portfolios in front of Tiger 21 members who ask the questions a financial advisor never will. They have learned — through years of structured peer experience — that trust is not a feeling but a practice, and that the quality of your inner circle is the highest-leverage decision you will ever make.
We restrict membership to people from these communities not as a marketing gesture, but because we know from thirty years of experience what makes a space work. It is not wealth. It is not status. It is not where you were born, what language you speak, what god you pray to, or how old you are. It is the willingness to show up as a whole person — and the training to know what that means.
Dimensions
A place becomes a space when it holds meaning. Not a resort, not a hotel chain — a specific location with a specific history, where your presence is not transactional but rooted. Sicily Prime turns a place into a space you belong to.
A curated community of YPO, EO, Tiger 21, and Argonauts peers. People who have built, who have led, who understand that the quality of company matters more than the quantity.
The food, the wine, the sea, the archaeology, the conversation. Sicily demands presence. It rewards those who arrive ready to be changed.
Not a wellness programme, but the natural consequence of living here. The Mediterranean diet, natural movement, social connection — the operating system of this coastline.
EU residency. Italian citizenship. The structural freedom to choose where you live, work, and build — not by permission, but by right.
What you leave behind is not a portfolio. It is a place in the world that your children and grandchildren can return to. A family anchor in the most historically alive landscape in the Mediterranean.
Structure
Equity investors — both Tier One (Golden Visa, €500,000) and Tier Two (founding & strategic partner) shareholders. Full access to all Sicily Prime experiences, the Internal Marketplace, investor reporting, and the community. 14 days complimentary annual hospitality. Voting rights as defined in the shareholder agreement. Priority access to new villa cohorts and cultural events. The architectural core of everything Sicily Prime builds.
Paying, non-equity members who participate in the Sicily Prime world through hospitality bookings, seasonal events, and cultural programming. Annual membership fee. Access to the villa collection for stays at published rates. Invitations to community gatherings, harvest dinners, and peer events. A path to deeper engagement for those exploring what Sicily Prime offers before committing to equity.
The outermost circle — followers, supporters, and the extended network. Access to Sicily Prime’s content, newsletter, and public events. Referral pathway into the membership and investment community. The starting point for anyone drawn to the vision before they are ready to act on it.
Presented as concentric circles, not a hierarchy. Every circle deepens with time. The door is always open to those who belong.
Rhythm
Seasonal gatherings shaped by the land, not by a marketing calendar.
Not a detailed calendar — a rhythm. A promise that every visit will hold something you did not expect.
If you are a member or alumnus of YPO, EO, Tiger 21, The Argonauts, or a comparable peer community — and the questions on this page are questions you recognise — we would welcome the conversation.
All photographs by Ken Schluchtmann