Earlier this year, Rockwell Group completed the design for Bathhouse Flatiron, a whopping 35,000 square foot luxury spa featuring thermal pools, saunas, a steam room, and marble hammams in the heart of New York City. Reformulating what an American spa experience can look like, Bathhouse is a place to hang out and a home for those who seek to look and feel their best.
Having started life in Williamsburg in 2019, Bathhouse Flatiron sees the brand move across the river expanding into Manhattan with a sleek venue at 14 West 22nd Street, and a design concept based on the idea of the Hero’s Journey: a common trope from mythology that involves a hero who embarks on an epic journey or quest, encounters challenges with a decisive apex and returns home transformed by the adventure of personal growth.
Incorporating the best of contemporary recovery practices in a socially engaging environment, each component of the guest’s experience, from reception to treatment rooms, plays on the ‘Hero’s Journey’ narrative of helping visitors on their road to ‘recovery;’ Rockwell Group creating a new architectural language through dramatic use of light and shadow, comprising a muted, moody material palette including travertine, fluted glass, stone, concrete, tile, and metals with a patina finish.
Guests enter the luxury spa through the ground floor lobby greeted by a boulder-like reception desk made of two types of travertine. Portals of illuminated fluted glass emphasise the guests’ journeys and transition, and a heavy black stone back wall with a vertical beacon of light in the centre resembles a “light at the end of the tunnel.” Descending a set of black stairs, from here on in they embark on their journey into the unknown.
A lounge and café can be found on the first subterranean level, but it’s the second subterranean level where they’ll find plunge pools of various temperatures lit in different tones of blue, many of which are situated beneath large, pyramidal volumes which appear to have a mottled, metal sheen. A black tiled floor and heated black stone hammam benches surround the perimeter of these pools.
The saunas and steam room on the periphery of this space are designed to look like stepped pyramids clad in horizontal black, fluted concrete panels, and homogenised with the pools; these small building objects designed to create the feel of the remnants of a rediscovered civilisation. A ceremonial sauna — where Sauna Masters perform Aufguss, a sensory experience featuring scented oils, music, and heat — is lined in cedar with stepped bench seating, while The Banya, the hottest Russian-style sauna, is clad in horizontal green-purple slate tiles and features a black stone-encased furnace.
Traverse the darkened corridor to the scrub room, which is meant to be the inner sanctum of the Bathhouse experience and represents a cave within a cave. Here, lilac marble tables float under a ceiling with cove lights gently bathing the walls; it’s the very core of a deeply transformative wellness experience.
A multi-sensory odyssey of intense disconnection, Bathhouse Flatiron represents a new age in the world of wellness, a profound experience where switching off from the digital world outside is more deeply intense than the traditional city spas of old.
Bathhouse Flatiron New York Photography, Emily Andrews / Adrian Gout.
