The rise of the social wellness club
The Vitamin IV Drip lounge with day beds at Remedy Place in Manhattan. The centre, which dubs itself as a ‘social wellness club’, wants to combine wellbeing practices with social activities © Benjamin Holtrop I’ve never been to a member’s club quite like Remedy Place, which opened last month in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighbourhood. It is a greige cocoon of taupe carpets and putty-coloured daybeds, with every inch of its 7,200 square feet engineered for health optimisation.
The sound system emits both lounge music and inaudible frequencies designed to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Palo santo and sage are diffused throughout the building in an hourly “aromatic design ritual”. The bar, billed as “Toxin and Temptation Free”, sells snacks and drinks infused with ingredients that promise to make you feel better, not worse, from nootropic seltzers to trail mix with adaptogens (natural substances such as ginger and reishi mushrooms, which herbalists use to combat stress).
So far, so peak wellness. But it is beyond the bar, in the bowels of the two-storey building, that things get really interesting. There are IV bags glistening on hooks next to a succession of sleek, mushroom-coloured daybeds. There are lymphatic drainage suits, which look like futuristic sleeping bags, lying dormant in treatment rooms. There is a pair of glass-hatched hyperbaric chambers, which await their passengers like escape shuttles in a sci-fi movie. And every now and then I see a swirl of dry ice from beneath a curtain, in some far off corner, meaning that someone, somewhere, has opened the door to a cryotherapy chamber.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Hannah Marriott
