JOHN REED Gelsenkirchen: Feature Gym

A 24,219 SF gym in a German retail block, with antique law books behind gym80 machines, that proves design, not budget, makes a gym feel expensive.

I was in Germany this week to meet with gym80, and I went to look at this on the way through. Gelsenkirchen is not where you would expect to find a gym worth the detour. In a suburban retail block in Buer, sharing a site with a supermarket and a parking lot, there is a 24,219 SF fitness club with a full wall of antique law books behind the machines, a room papered in moths, and gym80 steel on the floor that was built about four miles from the front door. It is better designed than most of the hotel gyms we get called in to fix.

What's inside

gym80
Matrix Cardio
Two Finnish Saunas
Indoor Cycling
Coffee & Health Bar

What they got right

They themed the rooms instead of finishing them. The machines sit in front of a wall of antique bookcases, leather spines, busts, globes, a brass telescope, lit warm against a deep green wall. Turn a corner and the walls are papered floor to ceiling in moths and butterflies. Elsewhere there are gilded animal heads, hand-painted wayfinding, blackletter script on the sauna door, and a pillar lettered PUMP UP THE GYM GELSENKIRCHEN. It was unique, to say the least.
The machines are made across town. gym80 is JOHN REED’s house equipment brand, and their own machine-training page calls it the Porsche among equipment makers, “die Manufaktur aus Gelsenkirchen.” It names no other manufacturer.
The shell is completely ordinary and it does not matter. This is not a converted church or a bank vault. JOHN REED has both of those elsewhere, and I half expected one here. It is a corner unit in a retail complex next to a supermarket. The building gave them volume, parking and a good window line, and nothing else. Everything worth looking at was added after the lease was signed.
They built a lounge, not a juice fridge. There is a proper social room here: velvet seating, big planting, rattan pendants, warm lamps, art on the walls. It is somewhere you would actually sit down before or after training. Most operators allocate that space to a vending machine and a bench, then wonder why nobody lingers and why the gym never becomes a reason people stay in the building.
Local rhythm is its own design input. I was on the floor at 6:30am and there was not a soul in the building. The crowd did not start arriving until around 8:30. Peak hours and class timetables shift more from country to country than people expect, and if you program a gym off American assumptions you will get the staffing, the studio schedule and the equipment counts wrong.

Love & Miss

Love: That design, not budget, is what makes a gym feel expensive. This club charges something in the region of 40 euros a month. It has a supermarket for a neighbor and not a scrap of marble in it. It still looks better than fitness floors I have seen inside five-star hotels, because somebody actually made decisions: commission the artists, pick one equipment brand and commit to it all the way through, and theme each room so it has a character of its own. The transferable point for a developer is uncomfortable and simple. The reason your fitness amenity feels cheap is almost never the budget. It is that nobody was ever asked to design it. It gets handed to whoever is already doing the corridors, with a layout copied off the last property and an equipment list from whichever rep called first. Spend a fraction of your FF and E on a real point of view for the gym and it will beat a room that cost three times as much.
Miss: Honestly, I dug hard for a miss here and did not really find one. The flow works and the layout works. If anything they carry more redundancy than they need across the popular stations, chest press, pec fly, leg extension, leg press, cables. That is the good version of the problem, though. It means nobody is queuing at 6pm, and most operators err hard the other way. The closest thing to a knock is the dark, esoteric vibe. It is an artsy room sitting inside a commercial gym, and it will not be for everybody. I do not really hold it against them, because it is obviously deliberate. It picks an avatar and it talks to them. I like it when people pick a lane. The gyms that try to be for everyone are the ones that end up feeling like they are for no one.