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🔥 The Sauna Became a Social Network
Walk through NYC today and you can do a guided ice bath at one address, a 100-person "stadium sauna" at another, and a hyperbaric oxygen session a block away. 5 years ago almost none of this existed. Now it is a venture-funded category, and it is multiplying across New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami.
What are they
"Lifestyle lounge" and "luxury gym" get used loosely. It helps to split the space into three buckets, because they sell different things.
Social bathhouses (contrast therapy as a night out). Heat, cold, and breathwork turned into a group activity. The anchors are Othership and Bathhouse. You are sweating next to strangers, often with a guide, music, and scent direction.
Social wellness clubs (medical-adjacent self-care). Remedy Place, Continuum, and The Well. These sit closer to a concierge clinic wearing the clothes of a members' club: IV drips, hyperbaric chambers, lymphatic compression, bloodwork, acupuncture, plus lounge space. Pricier, more exclusive, more "optimization."
Luxury athletic clubs (the country club, reborn). Life Time and the top end of Equinox. A traditional gym at the core, wrapped in pickleball, co-working, rooftop pools, cold plunges, and food and beverage. The gym is the anchor, but the amenities are the reason you stay as long as you do.
None of them want to be called a gym or a spa. Nearly every operator insists they have created a new category.
The players
Othership. Born in Toronto in 2022, it is now the breakout name in social saunas. Guided sauna-and-ice-bath "classes" with breathwork, run by trained guides, in rooms that hold up to roughly 90 people. It opened in Flatiron in 2024, added a 6,500-square-foot Williamsburg location, and announced a 14,000-square-foot "social spa" on the Upper East Side for 2027. It raised $8.5 million in 2025 and is openly hunting for more cities. More than 300,000 people have passed through its studios. Its "Evening Social" is a two-hour, sober-curious alternative to a night out.
Bathhouse. The local heavyweight on scale and revenue. Founded in Williamsburg in 2019, it now runs three large NYC locations. Day passes start at $29 to $39; memberships run $145 to $225 a month, notably more accessible than the medical-club tier. In 2026, it raised $35 million from Imaginary Ventures (the firm behind Glossier and Skims) and told CNBC it expects roughly $120 million in run-rate revenue by the end of 2026. The expansion map is aggressive: Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, Nashville, Stamford, Berkeley Heights, and an 85,000-square-foot Los Angeles flagship.
Remedy Place. Dr. Jonathan Leary's "Social Wellness Club," from West Hollywood (2019) to NYC (2022), with Flatiron and a two-story Soho location. This is the optimization end: ice-bath breathwork, infrared saunas, hyperbaric oxygen, lymphatic compression, IV and NAD therapy, acupuncture, and biomarker testing. Memberships range from around $500 to $600 a month at the base to about $2,500 a month for all-access, with a la carte services from roughly $30 so non-members can walk in. Most of its revenue actually comes from non-members. The company has said it plans 16 clubs nationally.
Continuum Club. The most exclusive of the bunch. Opened May 2024 in a century-old Greenwich Village building (former David Barton Gym, later Peloton's Tread studio), 25,000 square feet, led by former Today Show health correspondent Jeff Halevy. It leans on AI biometrics and "vertically integrated" personalized services and reportedly runs around $10,000 a month. It is deliberately tiny: roughly 100 members to start, capped near 250.
The Well. Opened in Flatiron in 2019 as a 13,000-square-foot blend of spa, medical practice, and organic restaurant, and is now extending into wellness residences in Miami and beyond.
Life Time. Bringing its "athletic country club" model to a 71,000-square-foot Williamsburg building with 13 pickleball courts, a co-working lounge, recovery wet suites, and a rooftop social club, alongside its existing Manhattan clubs.
Why now?
Drinking is down, and people still want to go out. Gallup found 62% of US adults under 35 drink, down from 72% two decades ago. The sober-curious shift leaves a hole where the bar used to be.
The loneliness gap and the "third place." Sociologists call the spaces that are neither home nor work "third places," and America has been losing them for decades. These clubs are explicitly selling community.
Biohacking went mainstream. Cold plunge and sauna picked up a big tailwind from longevity podcasters. Contrast therapy became aspirational first, then social.
The money followed. This is now a fundable category, not a lifestyle hobby. Bathhouse's $35 million round, Othership's raise, Remedy's national plan, and a wave of athlete and consumer-brand investors all point the same way. Fortune counted eight private wellness club brands in NYC alone.
The science is real but uneven
Sauna and cold exposure have legitimate and growing evidence for recovery, mood, and some cardiovascular markers. The bigger claims (hyperbaric chambers "reversing aging," IV drips as routine maintenance, AI "prescriptions") run ahead of sufficient data. A reasonable read: treat the contrast therapy as well-supported and the optimization upsells as more speculative.
Why you should care
The healthspan story is not that everyone needs a sauna membership. It is that healthy behavior sticks better when it is social. Heat, cold, mobility, strength training, and low/no alcohol hangouts become easier to repeat when they are attached to a place people actually want to go.
The evidence still needs sorting. Sauna has the strongest case. Cold exposure may help with mood, alertness, and recovery, but it is not magic. Hyperbaric chambers, IV drips, NAD therapy, and AI “optimization” plans are much more speculative as routine wellness tools.
That is also the business filter. The durable version is probably heat, cold, communal recovery, and social fitness: cheap inputs, high utilization, and clear repeat value. These clubs matter because they are trying to make healthspan behavior feel less like discipline and more like culture.
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Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. We aim to provide useful, evidence-informed insights. Your health is personal, and decisions should be made based on what works best for you.