I’ve been tracking this shift for a while, but it didn’t fully click until I was lying inside a 700-pound, NASA-inspired recovery chamber, wired up to electromagnetic pulses, vibroacoustic sound running through the bed to relax my nervous system and red and near-infrared light glowing over my closed eyes to support cellular recovery and circulation. All of this synced to a calm guided meditation and breathwork sequence.
That’s the Ammortal Chamber, the centerpiece of the Recovery Suite at The Santa Monica Proper and other wellness centers across the country. It costs roughly $160,000 to install, and the same machine sits in the training rooms of the NFL’s LA Rams, Denver Broncos and MLB’s Boston Red Sox, and in the recovery suite at Wimbledon to support athlete performance and recovery. At Santa Monica Proper, members are sandwiching a session between a business meeting and a dinner reservation, on a random Tuesday, not a training camp.
I spent a few days living the membership: bloodwork drawn on-site through Hundred Health, a four-handed Ayurvedic massage at the hotel’s Surya Spa, a session in the Hyperion recovery suite, a soak in a mineral bath, and a cold plunge set several degrees warmer than the punishing extremes my hard-core biohacker friends brag about. The experience did not feel like a spa day. It felt much more like infrastructure; the kind I, as a founder and entrepreneur, would love to have wherever I land, work, and unwind.
The social wellness club, a category I’ve been watching mature for years, is finally standing in for the bar, the boardroom, and the country club, funded by entrepreneurs who treat recovery like a KPI, not a perk.
The bar isn’t the default anymore
For most of the last century, “let’s grab a drink” was the default unit of business and social connection. That default is breaking down, and the data is unambiguous. Gallup’s 2025 consumption survey found just 54% of U.S. adults say they drink alcohol at all — the lowest rate in nearly 90 years of tracking, down from 62% just two years earlier. For the first time, a majority of Americans, 53%, now say even one or two drinks a day is bad for their health. Among Gen Z, nearly two in three plan to drink less this year, and almost 40% are going fully dry, not just for “Dry January,” but year-round, according to Circana’s most recent consumer survey.
That shift creates a real estate problem: if the bar isn’t the place anymore, where does business happen? Dr. Jonathan Leary, founder of Remedy Place, the club widely credited with coining the term ‘social wellness club’ when it opened in West Hollywood in 2019, and now with locations in Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, built his entire business on that gap.
“Life is stressful, loneliness is prevalent, and people need to connect, but most social experiences are filled with temptation and toxins,” Leary said of the concept. His model swapped the cocktail bar for an adaptogenic mocktail bar and the conference room for an infrared sauna. Same social function. Different chemistry.
John Mackey, the Whole Foods co-founder, made a similar bet with Love.Life, a 45,000-square-foot longevity club in Los Angeles that pairs functional medicine with over 25 diagnostic tests alongside pickleball courts, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, and a plant-forward cafe built by his own Whole Foods team. Membership tiers run from $400 a month to $28,500 a year for functional precision medical care. The pitch is nearly identical to Remedy Place’s, aimed at a different demographic: healthcare and community, under one roof, minus the fragmentation of seeing six specialists in six different buildings. I’ve spent enough time there to say it delivers on that promise. The staff and the community feel like family, not clientele, and it’s become one of my go-to venues for hosting events and clients precisely because it doesn’t feel like a rental space. It feels like somewhere people already want to be.
Social wellness clubs are a growing category, and operators are competing for the same founder and creator dollar. Proper Hospitality did something smarter: instead of building a standalone club, they built the club into a hotel.
Santa Monica Proper: the hotel that doubles as your third place
The Proper Club, which launched at Santa Monica Proper in April of 2025, is explicit about the audience it’s chasing: not just LA locals looking for a new Soho House alternative, but the business traveler who is in town for three nights and does not want their recovery routine – or their social life – to suffer because they left home. Membership runs about $6,500 per year, with add-ons for the Surya Spa and for personalized performance optimization. Members have access to the pool workspaces, private lounges with saunas, cold plunges, red light therapy, daily fitness classes, discounted room rates, and two complimentary nights per year at any Proper property. They also enjoy around 10 events a month, ranging from panels and private concerts to padel tournaments.
You still get the version of the hotel you’d expect from a Kelly Wearstler-designed property, including a bar pouring craft cocktails, an exquisite rooftop pool and farm-to-table restaurants built on local, sustainable ingredients. What stands out at Proper is that most wellness clubs ask you to trade the glamour of high-end hospitality for the discipline of recovery. Proper doesn’t make you choose. Instead, recovery is woven into the same thoughtfully designed spaces where guests dine, gather, work, and unwind.
“We didn’t want wellness to feel like an add-on to what we’d already built, and we didn’t want to turn our hotels into wellness retreats,” said Brad Korzen, CEO and Co-Founder of Proper Hospitality. “We wanted it to be part of the experience, approached with the same design-focused and intentional point of view as everything else we do.”
I felt like a queen the moment I walked into the Recovery Suite, Proper’s newest and most impressive lounge yet. Beyond the Ammortal Chamber, there’s the Hyperion suite for shorter, modular recovery sessions; a mineral bath; a Theralight 360 red-light bed; a dry sauna; compression boots; and a cold plunge. That last one is where I noticed something most cold-plunge marketing ignores entirely: temperature isn’t one-size-fits-all, and it shouldn’t be.
My friend and leading exercise physiologist, Dr. Stacy Sims, has built a career on the phrase “women are not small men,” and the physiology backs her up. A controlled cold-water immersion study found women experience greater cardiovascular strain and a higher frequency of cold-induced vasodilation reactions than men under identical conditions, and separate research on hormonal cycling shows women’s core temperature and stress response shift meaningfully across the follicular and luteal phases, meaning the same 40-degree plunge that energizes a man, or a woman on day seven of her cycle, can just as easily spike cortisol and blunt recovery on day twenty-one. Clubs that offer a range of plunge temperatures, rather than a single macho benchmark, are catching up on this science.
Then there’s the medical layer, and it’s where the protocol actually lives. Hundred Health, the longevity platform members can access through the club, ran my labs on-site: 100-plus lab tests, synced against wearables like Oura and Whoop, cross-referenced with medical history pulled from more than 450 electronic health record systems. It then builds all of it into a clinician-reviewed 100-day protocol covering nutrition, supplements, exercise, and lifestyle. The 100-day window is intentional and I followed it carefully.
As Hundred’s founder, Tyler Smith, has put it, “the company was built around cycles, long enough to drive physiological change, short enough to feel achievable, every 100 days, you retest, and the protocol updates against your actual numbers instead of a generic template.” It’s the same logic a founder applies to a quarterly OKR or planning cycle, just pointed at a body instead of a business.
Why this is a business story, not a lifestyle story
The Global Wellness Institute values the global wellness real estate sector at $876 billion, on pace to more than double to $1.8 trillion by 2030. That’s 23.5% annual growth since 2019, the fastest-growing segment inside a $6.8 trillion global wellness economy. GWI put it bluntly for 2026: ‘Healthspan is no longer adjacent to real estate.’ For hospitality groups, that line reads less like a trend and more like a roadmap.
For founders, it’s more simple than that. This generation grew up on Whoop scores and continuous glucose monitors, so biometric data was never new to them. What’s new is the willingness to pay for it: membership fees, hotel stays, whole calendars built around systems that act on the data instead of just collecting it. Recovery is no longer the reward. It’s the metric.
A $160,000 recovery chamber. A spa built around internationally recognized Ayurvedic doctor, Martha Soffer. A fully-integrated bloodwork platform. Wrap all of it in a membership instead of a day pass, and you get a hotel betting on you, not just housing you. I’ve covered this space long enough to know the hype when I see it. This was not that. I left Santa Monica Proper with a lab report and a protocol.
The next generation of high performers isn’t picking a hotel for thread count. They’re picking it the way they’d pick a business partner. The real question isn’t whether your next hotel has a gym. It’s whether it’s built to make you better without sacrificing the luxury, location and architectural aesthetics.
