Back in 2019, Toronto natives Robbie Bent, Myles Farmer and their friends had an idea to help people connect better: Why not take a bath together?
Free ice baths in Bent’s backyard, a sauna built into a garage and a WhatsApp group filling with thousands of devotees served as the initial proof of concept for their club, Othership, which opened its first brick-and-mortar location (that wasn’t in a private residence) in Toronto in 2022. The company now counts four outposts in Toronto and New York hosting guided sound immersion, singles socials, group cold plunges and DJ takeovers. In June, Othership raised $11.3 million to fund a US expansion plan.
Othership’s rise is part of a larger, global trend that has been ramping up for years. Now, wellness clubs centred on socialisation are cropping up across the world in New York, LA, London, Dubai and beyond, with concepts that vary from Othership’s $64 drop-in classes to a $10,000 monthly cost for an all-inclusive, intensive approach at New York’s Continuum. Other spaces include Santa Monica’s Proper Club, opened in May 2025, Dubai’s Peaq Wellness, opened in 2024, and the upcoming Erewhon tonic bar-and-padel court stocked Kith Ivy in New York. In a sign of the times, London-based nightclub Tramp announced its wellness concept, Tramp Health, opening next year.
Recently, Farmer got his final piece of evidence that he was onto something: Someone proposed in the middle of the Toronto club. “If people are doing that … I don’t know how much farther they can go,” said Farmer.
The rise of the wellness club is in line with a number of themes, including culture’s widening interest in health optimisation combined with professionals’ need for “third spaces” for social connection and networking in cities. Beyond connection, many clubs are hoping to establish themselves as authorities on wellness with advisory boards of scientific experts, and doctors on call — in a noisy world marked by constant fads and misinformation.
Part of these spaces’ proposition is to attract a wide variety of people — wellness as a common ground for those as different as a young pop star and a senior partner at a law firm, as Continuum founder Jeff Halevy put it.
“There’s an understanding everyone shares, the way people congregate around a religion: we all believe in the same thing and are showing up to do a certain thing,” said Halevy. “The belief system is how we treat our bodies is very important.”
And, while sitting in the hyperbaric chamber or floating in a tank will cost you, socialisation is the main product.
“There are brands and doctors who are selling longevity, and the truth of the matter is it’s impossible to sell longevity,” said Halvey, who points out that, according to Harvard Medical School’s longest-running study on lifespan, the key factor is not diet nor exercise but social connection. Though millions of career-focused young people congregate in big cities, they can be lonely.
“It’s hard to meet people in big cities in authentic ways,” said Farmer. But a wellness context “provides an environment where it’s okay to say hello to someone.”
Sauna in the City
Today’s iteration of the wellness club, was jumpstarted in LA, with the 2019 opening of Remedy Place. A members club touting itself as a healthy alternative to nightlife-focussed clubs like Soho House, it has appeared on the Instagram feeds of Kim Kardashian and Drake. Now, the format is spreading across the globe.
“When I would talk about social wellness and social wellness club, everyone used to be like, ‘Jon, that’s the most LA thing in the world. That’s never going to work anywhere except LA,’” said Remedy Place founder and CEO Jonathan Leary. This year, it opened in Boston, its third city after New York. “They’re not just trends. These are global movements.”
Run clubs’ rapid, post-pandemic rise in cities like New York and London points to the same sort of craving, said Hattie David-Wilkinson, global head of wellness for global head of wellness and longevity for Maybourne’s wellness members club Surrenne, which opened in 2024.
People — namely, Gen Z and Millennials — are drinking less, or, at the very least, want to get better sleep without sacrificing their social lives. They’re looking to congregate in settings beyond cocktail bars or wine-fuelled art gallery openings, said Henrique de Castro, co-founder of The Altar, a club debuting in New York in late 2025.
Santa Monica Proper Hotel, known for its buzzy rooftop scene and parties DJed by the likes of Neil Frances and Anderson Paak, decided to play into the trend when launching its Proper Club this year. Rather than duplicating a Soho House vibe, Proper focussed on wellness, spending $4 million to revamp its spa and fitness centre with a futuristic bed called the Ammortal Chamber, with infrared and sound vibration therapy. In addition to late-night parties, it hosts fitness classes, sound baths and panel discussions on longevity.
Nearly every culture has embraced communal approaches to well-being for centuries, from East Asia’s sentos and jjimjilbang to the Middle East’s hammams and Finland’s saunas. Especially in Europe, wellness retreats and longevity resorts like Clinique La Prairie or Lanserhof have existed in the countryside for decades — and newer, health-centric concepts are bringing moonlit yoga and thermal baths to vacation party spots like Rosewood Mayakoba on Mexico’s Riviera Maya and Soho Farmhouse Ibiza.
Tales of former clients’ week-long detox retreats served as part of the inspiration for then-Goldman Sachs employees Sheba Jafari and de Castro to open The Altar. In LA, Roger Briggs, founder and CEO of LA-based wellness club Hume, was inspired by far-flung destinations to open the stylish location in 2024 in Venice Beach. (Hume’s interiors were partly inspired by Moroccan hammams.)
For clubs in the city, the idea isn’t retreat but its opposite: integration into wealthy professionals’ everyday routines.
“My favorite places in the world were often reserved for vacation,” said Briggs. He enlisted artists such as Martin Meunier and Louise Martens to give it a resort feel with custom tubs, art pieces and ceramic installations in a cavernous interior.
Spaces are designed to push people together. Othership’s newest Williamsburg location features two large communal ice baths rather than several smaller ones. The Altar’s sauna is designed to replicate “how we’ve been gathering since the beginning of time, as a circle around the fire,” said Jafari.
Phone-free, the room filling with heat and endorphins, “if you’re sitting there for 15, 20 minutes, you’re going to be talking to the person next to you,” said Jafari. (It helps that The Altar’s creative director, photographer and filmmaker Stuart Winecoff designed the lighting to be soft and sensual, making visitors look extra toned and tanned.)
Surrenne hosts events like a pool float featuring a 13-piece orchestra guided by a psychotherapist — but it also has a monthly book club.
Culture Shift or Bubble?
Social wellness is set to only get bigger. Hume is considering new locations in east LA, New York and south Florida, while Proper is planning to bring massive wellness centres to upcoming locations in Dallas and Lake Tahoe. Surrenne is opening a new location in Paris in 2027, with plans to open in the US next. Othership has its eyes on New York’s Upper East Side for its largest location, next.
Still, a boom often begets a bust. These new concepts are in their nascency, and scaling is the next challenge. There’s a finite number of people willing to spend top dollar to fully immerse themselves in the expanding world of wellness.
A year in, Continuum unveiled a $5,000 membership tier. Eventually, after opening in a few more select cities, the company will use its trove of data collected on sleep, recovery and performance to launch a more accessible assistive tool. Othership, too, has a breathwork app, available for $18 a month.
Clubs run the risk of falling prey to consumers’ subscription fatigue. As wellness clubs are on the rise, so are general members clubs. In New York, for example, 15 members clubs, including restaurateur Jean Georges’ Chez Margaux and London’s The Twenty-Two, have opened since 2020.
And incumbents who already own slices of the fitness or social space are incorporating wellness amenities into existing offers: Soho House locations have added infrared saunas and ice baths, as has luxury gym brand Equinox, whose foray into wellness and hospitality includes a $40,000 longevity membership. Life Time, once a suburbs-focussed luxury gym that now calls itself an “athletic country club” as it moves into cities, just unveiled its members-only Life Time High Performance Club in Manhattan with the typical slate of wellness features as well as a podcast room, production suite and private training area.
Still, de Castro sees the rise of these new types of wellness clubs as part of a wider shift, akin to what happened to boutique fitness in the past two decades: today’s staples, such as Barry’s, Soulcycle and other tailored classes trained people to pay up rather than settle for general gym membership.
“It changed the whole culture of working out,” said de Castro. “There’s literally 99 fitness concepts around us in a five minute radius, and they can all exist.”
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