From Belgravia basements to Dubai skyscrapers, these are the fitness spaces that make us genuinely want to work out.
We are going to be honest with you: the era of a hotel gym being a single treadmill wedged between a fire exit and a mini fridge is over. In its place, a new category of fitness space has emerged, one where the Technogym equipment is museum-quality, the recovery suites have cryotherapy chambers and infrared saunas, and the personal trainers have coached Olympic athletes. Membership fees at some of these places run north of £15,000 a year. Others come included with a hotel stay that costs £2,500 a night. Either way, the experience on the other side of the door is genuinely extraordinary, and the standard excuse of “the gym at my hotel was terrible” is no longer going to wash.
The global luxury fitness market has shifted decisively in the past few years, and these twelve spaces, spanning standalone members’ clubs and hotel fitness floors across London, Dubai, New York, Bali and beyond, represent its highest expression. Some will take your money and leave you alone. Others will map your mitochondria. All of them will make your local gym feel like a different, sadder sport. We’ve done the research. Pack your trainers.
At a glance:
Best hotel gym in the world: SIRO One Za’abeel, Dubai
Best luxury gym in London: Surrenne at The Emory, Belgravia
Best members-only gym in the US: Equinox Hudson Yards, New York
Best gym with a view: SHA Wellness Clinic, Alicante
Best for serious athletes: The Houstonian Club, Houston
Best boutique gym experience: Third Space, London
Surrenne at The Emory, London
The most ambitious reinvention of the health club in London, and we will stand by that. Hidden across four subterranean floors beneath The Emory in Belgravia, Surrenne is what happens when Maybourne Hotel Group (the people behind Claridge’s, The Connaught and The Berkeley) decide to apply palace-hotel logic to fitness. Nearly 2,000 square metres are devoted entirely to health, movement and longevity, designed by Remi Tessier with the kind of considered restraint that makes you feel calmer the moment you walk in.
The 22-metre pool has a sound system built into it for in-water meditation. The gym floor runs Technogym, Woodway, Hydrow and Peloton. The yoga and Pilates studio takes a maximum of six people at a time, which is either perfectly intimate or a nightmare to book, depending on how organised you are. There is a recovery studio, a Longevity Clinic, and Tracy Anderson’s only UK studio running her method classes on-site. Dr Lara Devgan handles the facials. The membership fee is £10,000 a year plus a £5,000 joining fee, and the application process asks for nationality, occupation and a photograph. No, we are not sure what they do with the photograph either. Named World’s Best Private Members’ Club Spa by the World Spa Awards two years running. Guests of The Emory and The Berkeley get complimentary access, which is frankly the best hotel amenity in London right now.
Membership: £10,000/year + £5,000 joining fee. Free for hotel guests.
SIRO One Za’abeel, Dubai
The world’s first hotel designed entirely around fitness, and it shows in every single decision, from the anti-gravity chair in your room (for spinal decompression post-workout, not a gimmick) to the minibar stocked with ginger shots, coconut water and protein balls in place of the usual miniatures and Toblerones. Kerzner International, the group behind One&Only and Atlantis, built SIRO with the thesis that a generation of travellers now prioritises the gym over the infinity pool, and Dubai is the right city to test that theory.
The Fitness Lab occupies its own floor in the vertiginous One Za’abeel tower, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the skyline. Functional training zones, a 176sqm movement studio for yoga and stretching, a dedicated Pilates studio, and group classes designed in partnership with AC Milan and Olympic boxer Ramla Ali. If the group dynamic isn’t your thing, book a Fitness Suite, which comes with a treadmill, exercise bike, punching bag, weight bench and dumbbells already in the room. The Recovery Lab, on a separate floor entirely, runs cryotherapy, infrared saunas, cold plunges, INDIBA treatments, acupuncture and IV drips. An in-house nutritionist handles meal planning, macros and all. The minibar, again, has no wine in it. Even committed sceptics tend to come home from a SIRO stay a little chastened, and measurably fitter.
Rooms from around £370 per night.
Equinox Hotel Hudson Yards, New York
Equinox went and built a hotel, and it is exactly as rigorous as you would expect from a brand whose gyms already had a cult following and a waiting list. The Hudson Yards flagship spans 60,000 square feet and includes a 25-yard indoor salt-water pool, an outdoor leisure pool, a dedicated performance recovery centre, and the E by Equinox concept, a private club within the club for those who find standard Equinox insufficiently exclusive. The personal training here is genuinely at a different level: nationally accredited coaches, entirely personalised programming, and the kind of focused attention that outside of professional sport you simply don’t encounter. The hotel rooms are, predictably, set up for performance too. The minibar has nutritional supplements. The eucalyptus towels are standard issue. Vitamin infusions are part of the offer. Annual membership runs to around $25,000, which is a number that requires a certain relationship with your own disposable income, but the facility justifies it in a way that very few places at this price point do.
Membership from around $25,000/year.
SHA Wellness Clinic, Alicante
Not a gym in the traditional sense, and all the better for it. SHA Wellness on the Altea Hills above Alicante is one of the most medically serious wellness destinations in Europe, and its fitness programme follows that logic absolutely: your workout here is prescribed by a physician following a full health assessment, not something you choose from an app on your phone. The architecture alone is worth the trip: a cascading series of white volumes built into the Mediterranean hillside, every training and treatment space oriented around the sea views toward Ibiza. It is the kind of place where you arrive thinking you’ll get some nice movement in and leave with a different relationship to your own body, because the SHA team has spent a week showing you things about your physiology you didn’t know. Technogym equipment throughout, Pilates and yoga studios, hydrotherapy pools, altitude simulation, neurofeedback and longevity medicine all integrated into a single programme. One of the few places on this list where the gym is genuinely the least interesting thing on offer.
Stays from around £800 per night.
The Houstonian Club, Houston
Set on an 18-acre wooded estate in the heart of Houston, The Houstonian operates at a scale that makes most luxury gyms look bashful. Eight tennis courts. Three resort-style pools. Over 180 weekly group exercise classes. A rock climbing wall. A boxing gym. An equipment inventory that visiting professional sports teams have been known to specifically request. The initiation fee runs to $45,000; monthly membership adds $330 on top of that. For that, you get something that functions more like a private country club for people who take their physical training as seriously as their handicap. The four on-site restaurants serve gourmet health-focused cuisine, so nobody is leaving on an empty stomach. This is fitness taken seriously in the way that only Texas, with its particular relationship to scale, could quite produce.
Membership: up to $45,000 initiation fee + from $330/month.
Third Space, London
London’s answer to Equinox, and in several respects its match. Third Space has multiple locations across the capital but the Canary Wharf site, London’s largest luxury health club space, is where the brand makes its most compelling argument. Hypoxic altitude training chambers. Medical-grade wellness assessments. A full spa with hot and cold therapy pools. An aquatics centre with a pool that would embarrass most hotel offerings. A fitness floor where the equipment is current, extensive and always maintained. The instructors are consistently excellent, which matters more than any single piece of kit. At around £3,800 a year, it is considerably better value than most of the competition on this list, which either says something about Third Space’s positioning or something about the audacity of everyone else’s pricing. No application form. No photograph required. You simply have to afford it, which is its own filter.
Membership from around £3,800/year.
Pillar Wellbeing at Raffles London at The OWO
Beneath the grand Whitehall corridors of the former Old War Office, now Raffles London, Pillar Wellbeing operates on the principle that movement, nutrition and recovery are not three separate conversations. The space brings all three together: a 22-metre pool, a gym and movement studio, a Guerlain spa and a restaurant, occupying interconnected rooms that feel genuinely serene despite sitting directly under the centre of Westminster. The design leans into the Victorian bones of the building rather than fighting them, all original stonework and considered low lighting, and the effect is of a private facility rather than a hotel amenity you happened to find. Membership is open to non-residents, with hotel guests getting access included. For a city-centre gym housed in one of London’s most architecturally dramatic buildings, with one of its most storied addresses, the combination has a strong case for being the most atmospheric workout in the capital.
Access included for hotel guests. Membership available.
Six Senses Douro Valley, Portugal
A gym with a view of vineyards tumbling toward the Douro river, with a 19th-century quinta as its setting and Six Senses running the programme. The fitness offering is excellent: Technogym equipment throughout, personal training, yoga and Pilates studios, a Dão stone-walled spa that takes the concept of post-workout recovery rather seriously. But what distinguishes the Douro Valley property is the way movement is integrated into the wider landscape, which is something a mirrored urban gym simply cannot replicate. Morning yoga on the estate terraces. Guided hikes through the vines. Biking routes that drop down to the river and require a certain commitment to get back up again. The Six Senses Sleep programme, which combines biohacking technology with integrative medicine and has a proper physician behind it, means most guests leave feeling measurably better rested than when they arrived. That, in the end, may be the most genuinely useful thing any wellness property in the world can offer.
Rooms from around £400 per night.
Kamalaya, Koh Samui
At the highest point of this hillside Thai resort, above a former monk’s cave that still anchors the property’s spiritual identity, Kamalaya’s open-air 25-metre lap pool and newly constructed fitness centre sit at the intersection of genuine athletics and something more contemplative. Dedicated cardio, stretching and free weights areas are housed in architecture open on every side to the jungle and the sea beyond, which makes even a routine cardio session feel like a rather different proposition. What distinguishes Kamalaya from the more technology-forward entries on this list is the depth and seriousness of its wellness programming: naturopathy, Ayurveda, Chinese medicine and life enhancement retreats running alongside the purely physical, all staffed by practitioners who have done this for long enough to know what they’re talking about. The food programme is extraordinary. The yoga pavilion, cantilevered above the sea, is one of the finest places we have ever been told to breathe. Go for longer than a weekend. You will be annoyed at yourself if you don’t.
Rooms from around £300 per night.
Clinique La Prairie, Montreux
One of the oldest and most medically serious wellness institutions in Europe, Clinique La Prairie on the shores of Lake Geneva is not where you go for a spin class and a green smoothie. It is where you go when you want a team of physicians, geneticists and movement specialists to look at your body comprehensively and design a programme around the results, which is a different thing entirely. Founded in 1931, the clinic has spent nearly a century refining a model that combines preventive medicine with physical conditioning, and the fitness facilities reflect that heritage: entirely current, beautifully designed, staffed by people who treat exercise as clinical prescription rather than leisure activity. The setting does the rest. Floor-to-ceiling windows open onto the Alps and Lake Geneva from every training and treatment space, and the combination of that view, that light and that air does something to a workout that no urban gym can quite match. It costs a significant amount of money. By most accounts that have reached us, it is worth it.
Programmes from around £8,000 per week.
Revivo Wellness Resort, Bali
Set among the rice terraces of Nusa Dua in southern Bali, Revivo understands something that a lot of luxury gym designers forget: the best fitness space is the one you actually want to enter. A yoga barn with a proper bamboo roof. A Pilates studio. A fitness room with serious Technogym equipment that doesn’t feel like an afterthought. A 50-metre lap pool with lanes wide enough to actually swim in. And a 500-square-metre outdoor exercise park surrounded by tropical planting, with the sound of water running through it, that makes the idea of working out feel less like obligation and more like the obvious thing to do with a morning in Bali. The integration is the point: personal training, wellness consultations, nutrition guidance and the setting all considered together, rather than bolted on separately. Most guests spend far more time at the outdoor park than they anticipated. Nature does something that a mirrored room cannot. We know it sounds obvious. It bears saying anyway.
Rooms from around £280 per night.
Equinox Fitness Club, Toronto
The most underrated entry on this list, and one that does not get its due in the international conversation about luxury fitness. Toronto’s Equinox delivers the full brand formula in a market that tends to underestimate itself: private changing cabanas that are genuinely private, elite personal training with coaches who have real credentials, exclusive class studios with programming that matches anything New York produces, and a pool that is actually good. The spa services run above the standard you might expect from a gym membership. The locker rooms alone would qualify as a treat in most other cities. For those who work out seriously and want a space that treats that seriously in return, without the application form and eye-watering joining fee of a London private members’ club, Toronto makes a quiet, confident case for itself. Worth knowing about.
Membership from around $25,000/year (global Equinox access included).
