‘We have liquor
in the rooms and
we have chocolate
cake on the menu’
THE FIRST NAME in high-end fitness, Equinox has
become the totem brand for that tier of today’s wellness-
focused consumers – a demographic whose growth
shows little sign of slowing – who take their commitment
to health very seriously, and are willing to pay to prove it.
Now they have a new means of doing so: booking a night
or three at the first Equinox hotel, located at New York’s
Hudson Yard. For a company that has operated under the
motto ‘It’s not fitness, it’s life’ for close to three decades,
the totalizing potential of the hotel seems like an ideal fit.
But with investment in several more properties already
confirmed, how do you ensure that your brand can stretch
sectors and remain successful? Aaron Richter, Equinox’s
SVP of Design, outlines the challenges of shifting from
bench press to bedpost.What’s the genesis of Equinox’s move into the hotel
industry? AARON RICHTER: When I first joined the
company over a decade ago, there was already talk of
hotel deals on the books. This was an idea that Equi-
nox’s executive chairman Harvey Spevak had, and then
brought me in – as someone with hospitality experience
– to think about how the brand would best translate to
that sector. We were kicking around ideas, but then the
economy went to hell in 07/08 and those existing deals
fell by the wayside. What’s interesting was that the fitness
brand actually expanded at a very rapid pace during the
downturn. It gave us access to distressed real estate. We
could rethink our deals and really grow our portfolio, so
we focused on that for seven to eight years. When the
economy started to come back, we decided to reassess
how the brand could flex itself. The hotel idea got legs
again because our owner The Related Companies has a
tremendous hotel pipeline, and as the developer was also
instrumental in helping us obtain space at New York’s
Hudson Yard. Because of that relationship we have access
to some of the best real estate development in the world,
as well as being a valued and trusted tenant. For instance,
having a spot on LA’s Grand Avenue Project, for any other
aspiring hotel company, would be a lark, but here we are,
developing maybe only our third or fourth hotel and it is
in a Frank Gehry building. That doesn’t usually happen.What were the key challenges in shifting the Equinox
brand to this new context? We need to provide a project
that works for the wider luxury segment. Of course,
we’re able to determine what luxury means in terms of
wellness – we’ve been doing that for a long time. But we
have to consider that we’re taking a brand that’s very well
established aesthetically in the fitness category and then
transposing that not only onto a hospitality setting, but
more specifically onto a luxury hospitality setting. We do
commercial interiors with a residential sensibility all the
time. We feel pretty comfortable dealing in commercial
fit out spaces and making them welcoming and friendly.
The difficulty is that if you ask all of our stakeholders
what luxury means to them, they’ll give you ten different
answers. So the hard part is collectively defining what
luxury is and picking what we’re celebrating. The tuning
that had to happen in terms of the brand is deciding what
to yell about and what not to yell about.Was there any friction between the 'high-performance
lifestyle’ that’s been so central to the Equinox brand
and creating a hospitable environment for hotel guests?
Look, we have liquor in the rooms and we have chocolate
cake on the menu. When we think about high-perfor-
mance living, it’s not monastic living. We see it as living
life wholly and fully. So we don’t worry about people
having a drink at night or lapsing on their diet plan. We’re
not creating a triathletes hotel – although we could –we’re creating a hotel that is essentially giving visitors
a place where they can go to facilitate that mindset of
wanting to stay well as they travel. What we’re doing is
removing all of the impediments that might get in the way
of that, whether that’s achieving a great night’s sleep or
having access to the right clothing or having the facilities
to pursue your individual fitness goals. Essentially, that
means you’re not going to be able to come up with an
excuse with regard to the offering. There will be nothing
hindering you and everything encouraging you to engage
in fitness and wellness while you’re at the property.What sort of clientele do you envisage staying at the
venue? We’ll have a pretty broad spectrum of people
staying with us, from the fitness junkies who will take full
advantage of the property, to so-called ‘fitness tourists’
who will reside at the hotel but might go and workout
at three or four other clubs in the neighbourhood. Then
you’ll get a demographic that’s interested in what we offer
by proxy, so they feel that if they’re staying with us they
are doing a little bit better for themselves in terms of
sleep or diet. For them its more incremental, rather than
having to buy into the entire package. We like to have
that optionality. Even though we are certainly making it
easy for the fitness enthusiasts to be completely taken
care of, there’s also something for the onlookers and the
aspirational folks. And that gives us the opportunity to
dovetail them into the brand and the lifestyle; even if they
don’t fully join in, they still get to witness what we do and
maybe that’s the start of a path for them.144 HOSPITALITY