Surrenne: Feature Gym

A 100-member longevity club four floors below Belgravia, with a 72-foot skylit pool and one idea per floor, that sold out in about eight weeks.

London’s most exclusive gym is buried four floors underground, and odds are you can’t get in. Surrenne sits beneath The Emory, Maybourne’s new hotel in Belgravia, and it is built around a single idea... longevity. Not a spa with a treadmill in the corner. A members’ club with a real medical clinic, a 72-foot pool, and Tracy Anderson’s first London studio, stacked one on top of the other. Around 100 memberships, reportedly gone within eight weeks of opening. We worked with the team on this one, and there is a real allure to a gym tucked this far below the street.

What's inside

Woodway
Technogym
Watson
PENT
Hydrow

What they got right

Four floors, one idea per floor. Instead of cramming everything onto one level, Surrenne stacks it. Pool and thermal on one floor, the gym and studios on another, the spa and longevity clinic above that, and Tracy Anderson’s method gets a floor of its own. Each floor is its own world.
The pool is the centerpiece. A 72-foot lap pool, several floors below the street, lit from above through a skylight, with a sound system that pipes meditation through the water while you swim. Pulling daylight down to a subterranean pool is the hardest move in the whole building, and it is the one they nailed.
The building is tuned to your body clock. The lighting dims and brightens with the time of day, and the soundtrack is engineered so it never repeats. Little things, but they are the gap between a nice spa and a place actually built around how the body works.
The gym is small and curated on purpose. Technogym, Woodway and Watson on the floor, a recovery studio with a cushioned floor and massage machines, and intimate movement studios, one of them capped at six people. Low numbers everywhere you look.
Scarcity is the product. Around 100 members, reported at £10,000 a year plus a £5,000 joining fee, and every spot was gone in about eight weeks. Guests of The Emory and its sister hotel The Berkeley get in as part of their stay. Everyone else applies and waits.

Love & Miss

Love: The discipline. Most operators try to make one room do everything and end up with a muddle. Surrenne gave each experience its own floor and let the building tell one clear story, top to bottom. And the idea and the engineering actually agree with each other. A longevity club that installs circadian lighting, a soundtrack that never repeats, a skylit pool and a real medical clinic is doing the work, not just printing the word wellness on a brochure. The real lesson is density. Around 100 members and a six-person studio means everyone gets an enormous amount of space and attention, and at this level that is the product. Space and low numbers are what people pay for.
Miss: Ceiling height is one of the easiest things to overlook when you are deciding where a gym goes, and one of the hardest to fix once you are in. I think the team did about as well as you can with the space we had, but a little more height and open room would go a long way here. It is the same story in most hotel gyms, where low ceilings and tight footprints come with the territory.