Local Remedy: Rethinking Hotel Wellness

I have spent most of my working life inside hotels, often long before the first guest arrived. I have stood over plans trying to imagine how a place would feel, walked through unfinished rooms with concrete underfoot and wires still hanging from the ceilings, and returned months later to find those same spaces filled with people, luggage, flowers, food, noise and all the unpredictability of a working hotel. Over the years, I have watched ideas that seemed perfect on paper change once real people began living and working inside them. This is where any conversation about how to design a wellness hotel has to begin.

I first began to understand this in New York, working with Dr Pratima Raichur after training with Dr Vasant Lad. I began as a therapist, but Pratima soon realised I spent far too long with each guest and moved me to the front. From there I began to see the whole space differently. Pratima arrived each morning in her sari, placing the traditional mark at her third-eye point, yet the interior felt more like a 57th Street office than somewhere that reflected the world she inhabited. The treatment rooms felt clinical too. I began bringing in softer touches and the colours of India, while looking at how therapists and guests actually moved through the space. New York was New York; people arrived carrying the speed and stimulation of the city, and we wanted somewhere they could become grounded and quiet. One room was too small for treatments, so Pratima had the idea to surround it with rudraksha beads. It became our Shirodhara and meditation room, where I began leading meditations. The environment mattered, and the treatment began before someone reached the treatment bed.

I encountered the same idea differently at Maroma on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. Maroma is a clear example of what a wellness hotel can really be. There, the landscape was already telling us what the experience could be. The heat, plants, land and local materials were not ideas we needed to import. They belonged to the place before the hotel did. Wellness began before anybody entered the hotel, through their relationship with the landscape, climate and culture around them. I remember the day beginning at sunrise on the beach, with our local healer blowing the ceremonial conch shell. A fire was lit and kept burning throughout the day, feeding the copal incense carried through the property and preparing the coals for the Temazcal that evening. By sunset, guests gathered at the heart of the property, coming together after the day’s experiences. What they experienced that evening had already been unfolding since sunrise, rooted in the land. 

In Hong Kong, at Four Seasons, the same principle appeared through Feng Shui. It was not something we could add at the end as a design reference; it shaped how the place itself was understood. The treatment rooms faced water, either Victoria Harbour or the pool, and the treatments themselves moved through water: foot washing, spiritual baths, steam and rain showers. The wet areas had one of the best flows I had experienced. The local staff also introduced me to Bai San. Every full moon, quietly and away from the guests, we would face the harbour and make offerings for abundance in the spa. It was a private ritual, part of the life of the people working there rather than something created for a treatment menu.  I became interested in smaller rituals too. A foot washing is a simple act, water, hands, feet, but it changes the moment. Someone has been travelling or coming out of a stressful city and now they are being received. I began paying more attention to these transitions between movement and stillness, travelling and arriving. Moments like those are often where hotel wellness truly begins.

Kyoto asked for another kind of attention. Four Seasons Hotel Kyoto sat beside the centuries-old Shakusui-en garden, on a site with its own history, and my instinct was not to arrive with a list of wellness programmes. I wanted to understand what was already there. I remember sitting in the garden with a geisha who poured tea while reciting poetry as I drank. The pace of it stayed with me - the tea, the words, the garden and the time given to each of them. So much of what we were trying to create was already there; our job was to notice it. Hotels are not always very good at this. We arrive with brand standards, mood boards and ideas collected from other successful properties. It is surprisingly easy to create something beautiful that could, with a few changes, be almost anywhere. 

Today, before deciding what a wellness centre needs, I want to understand how the place is going to move. How does someone arrive? What happens on the way? Do they step suddenly from a busy corridor into a spa, or has the transition already begun? Where does the light change, the sound change, the pace change? And once inside, how do guests and practitioners actually move through the space? These questions are where hotel wellness design really starts. 

I notice these things because I spent so many years working around the treatment bed myself. I know when there is not enough room to move properly around it. I know the frustration of a facial tray positioned beautifully on a drawing but too far away when you are actually working, or lighting that creates atmosphere but cannot become bright enough when you need to see someone’s skin. I think about the way the door swings and where to put the clean and used linen, whether a therapist can reach what they need without breaking contact with the guest, and how a room returns to complete calm before the next person enters. None of this is glamorous, but it is design. A concept is not successful because it is beautiful. It has to survive operations. Hotel wellness lives or dies in these details. At Maroma, we designed part of the treatment-room cabinetry as a mobile caddy. Closed, it looked like part of the cabinet; pulled out beside the treatment bed, it brought power, hot towels and the products needed for a facial or massage within reach, allowing the therapist to maintain contact with the guest. It was a simple solution born from knowing what it actually feels like to work around a treatment bed, and I have carried it into every design since.

 

This is where I wonder whether we have put ourselves into too small a box by calling all of this wellness. The wellness centre can be the heart of a hotel, but a heart matters because of what flows from it. What happens there should continue into the bedroom, garden, restaurant, corridors and the way someone moves through the property. Sleep and morning light are part of it, as are acoustics, food, bathing, movement, landscape and the materials beneath our hands and feet.

I have always experienced hotels through the senses. Perhaps that is why I am interested now in the conversations around clinical approaches to music and neurofragrance. There is new language around how sound and scent shape our experience, but hospitality has understood some of this intuitively for a very long time. In that sense, sensory design is nothing new for hotels. What worries me is when that knowledge becomes another formula. I do not want a fragrance intended to create calm to make a hotel in Mexico smell like one in Kyoto. I want, whenever possible, to smell something of where I actually am.

Plants tell us where we are too. They tell us about climate, food, medicine, memory and the people who have lived in a landscape. Ritual can do the same, although hospitality borrows ritual very easily. Temazcal, Ayurveda, hammam, meditation and tea ceremony can become things to put on a treatment menu once separated from the people and places that gave them meaning. Pratima taught me that a tradition can travel. It does not have to remain in its country of origin to be real. But there is a difference between carrying something that you live and borrowing it because it fits an idea of wellness.

After all these years, I no longer think the interesting question is where wellness belongs in a hotel. I think it is how wellbeing moves through the whole place, and whether the design, operations, people, rituals and sensory experience are connected to somewhere real. When somebody asks me about wellness trends for the new year or what hotel wellness concept will fit a new property, I do not want to begin with the spa, a treatment menu or the latest idea that worked beautifully somewhere else. I want to know where I am.  

Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong. A treatment and bathing space opens directly to Victoria Harbour, connecting the wellness experience to the city beyond it.