Most "wellness clubs" are a treadmill row and a smoothie bar with good lighting. ANIMO built a 48,000 square foot one in Brussels and put a 16,000 square foot open gym at the center of it. One hundred sixty-five feet of turf. Fully custom PLAE olympic half-racks. A recovery floor with ice baths, saunas, and hyperbaric chambers. Then they capped membership at 2,500 and made you book a visit to get in. This is a great example of smart operations and good design coming together to curate a great experience for its members.
- Type
- Social Wellness & Performance Club
- Location
- Brussels, Belgium
48,000 SFThree levels
16,000 SFOpen gym
2,500Member cap
A 48,000 SF Brussels club built around a 16,000 SF open gym, 165 feet of turf and custom PLAE racks, with membership capped at 2,500.
What's inside
- PLAE
- Technogym
- Rogue
- Keiser
- Reformer Studio
- Private Training Suite
- Recovery Lounge
What they got right
- A 16,000 SF free-access open gym anchored by fully custom-built PLAE half-racks. The main equipment story on the floor, spec’d for athletes rather than going for something off the shelf. They sit as the statement piece on the floor.
- A 165-foot turf runs the length of the space for hybrid and functional cross-training. Real square footage given to movement. Preserved open space.
- Four ANIMO signature concepts on site: Reformer, Move, Flow, Perform. Plus Run, exclusive to this location, across six concepts group-wide.
- A full recovery ecosystem: a contrast bathhouse (two dry saunas, four ice baths), infrared sauna, hyperbaric chambers and compression, plus a Dr. Barbara Sturm and Proverb spa.
- Performance testing built in: VO2 max and lactate threshold analysis, giving members quantitative metrics to compete and measure against.
- Opened early 2025 and already at 2,350 members against a hard cap of 2,500. Entry is now by club visit only, with a waitlist once it fills.
Love & Miss
- Love
- The floor tells the truth. One hundred sixty-five feet of turf and custom PLAE half-racks aren’t a hospitality flex. That’s a real training environment. Add VO2 and lactate testing, a serious recovery floor, and a membership cap that protects the experience, and you have a club built for people who actually train. Very few operators in Europe are combining performance and hospitality at this level.
- Miss
- Sizing the gym is where most operators get hurt. They lock a location and a buildout, then run the numbers backward and find they need more members than the market or the floor can actually hold just to break even. Now they are scaling to survive instead of scaling by design. And ANIMO looks like it did the opposite. Capping at 2,500 seemed to be best case scenario for them, and a luxury members' club is happy to stop there. If it pencils at the cap, the next move isn't cramming more bodies into this building. Sounds like a great time to scale.
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