By Nathaniel Pitchon-Getzels, Founder, The Getzels Group at Christie's International Real Estate
Most Saturdays, my daughter and I have a ritual: we get in the car, and we go find matcha. Sometimes it's a five-minute detour to a Ktown spot like Damo Tea House, sometimes it's a proper Culver City pilgrimage to Maruwu Seicha for the ceremonial-grade pour, and sometimes it's whatever new shop just opened with a line out the door and a very specific shade of green in the window. It sounds like a small thing, a father-daughter coffee run, basically. But it's not really about the matcha. It's about the ritual, the twenty minutes of undivided attention, the sense of doing something intentional for how we feel, not just what we're drinking.
I bring this up because that same instinct, choosing rituals and spaces that make you feel better, not just look richer, is exactly what's driving the rise of wellness luxury real estate across Los Angeles right now. For most of my career, "luxury" meant square footage, a great kitchen, a pool, a view. Today, the clients walking into $8 million homes in Calabasas or $20 million estates in Bel Air are asking a different first question: where's the wellness wing?
Wellness Is No Longer an Amenity. It's the Business Model.
The numbers back up what I'm seeing on the ground. The Global Wellness Institute reports that the wellness real estate market, homes and communities intentionally designed around health, reached $584 billion globally in 2024 and is on pace to roughly double to $1.1 trillion by 2029, growing at nearly 20% a year, several times faster than global construction overall. That's not a niche category anymore. That's one of the fastest-growing segments in all of real estate.
And it pays. According to research cited by the National Association of Realtors, homes and communities designed around wellness are commanding resale premiums of 10% to 25%, while wellness-focused commercial buildings are seeing rental premiums of roughly 4.5% to 7.5% per square foot. NAR's America at Home Study, which surveyed 6,000 consumers nationwide, found wellness is now the number one purchase motivator for buyers, ahead of school districts, ahead of commute times. Buyers ranked clean water systems, clean air filtration, and energy efficiency among their top priorities, and a meaningful share said they'd trade square footage, even give up a garage, for a home that genuinely supports their health. On the listing side, Zillow data shared via Instagram shows listings mentioning wellness features rose 33% year over year.
Put plainly: the home that used to sell itself on marble and square footage now has to answer a harder question. Does this house help me live longer, sleep better, and recover faster? If the answer is no, it's competing on price. If the answer is yes, it's competing on waitlists.
The Private Club World Is Making the Same Bet, Loudly
If you feel like you've read a version of this story about Soho House twice in the past year, you're not imagining it. That's not a coincidence, it's a strategy. Soho House quietly refreshed its 180 House location with a new Soho Health Club concept: a gym, its first classical Pilates studio, infrared saunas, ice baths, and a marble steam room. Now it's doing something far bigger a short drive from most of my clients' front doors.
Soho House's fifth Los Angeles location, and its most wellness-forward yet, is coming to Venice Beach in summer 2027. It's taking over the roughly 23,000-square-foot space near Market Street and Pacific Avenue vacated by NeueHouse Venice, steps from Abbot Kinney Boulevard and two blocks from the sand, following West Hollywood, Downtown, Malibu, and Holloway House as the brand's fifth outpost in the city. The Hollywood Reporter and the Santa Monica Daily Press both confirm it as LA's second-largest concentration of Houses after London. Applications for Every House membership are already open.
What's notable isn't just that they're opening a fifth House. It's what they're building. This is being pitched as a two-story House for "community and collaboration" among wellness-minded members who value discretion, deliberately not the late-night lounge model Soho House built its name on. The top floor is the classic House: indoor club space and an outdoor terrace serving food and drinks. The lower floor is entirely new territory for the brand. No big nightclub. No screening room being highlighted. The stated focus: eat, drink, connect, unwind, and recover.
The location choice is deliberate too. Abbot Kinney is boutiques, galleries, and artisan retail, a creative-meets-wellness Venice crowd, not a WeHo scene. For a brand that has never had a proper foothold on the Westside, this is a very intentional play: wellness as the membership magnet.
The Headline: A Full Health Club, Not a Gym Corner
Soho House is putting a complete Soho Health Club on the first floor, alongside its first-ever Health Club Cafe: a nutrient-rich menu of smoothies, matcha, soups, and broths designed to eat in or take away. (My daughter would approve.) The club itself includes:
A communal 50-person contrast suite with hammam, sauna, and cold plunges
A private contrast suite with sauna, cold plunge, and minibar
Cryotherapy and a dedicated ice bath room
A movement studio with daily programming
A fireside relaxation lounge
As the Hollywood Reporter put it, describing the sauna alone as roomy enough for more than 40 members at once, Soho's global director of health clubs, Caroline Curry, and CEO Andrew Carnie are betting that "communal suffering in extreme temperature swings," hammams, cold plunges, ethereal-music-scored recovery lounges, is the new social currency. Think less velvet banquette, more contrast therapy and matcha.
Soho House isn't alone. Equinox's ultra-premium "Optimize" tier reportedly has more than 1,000 people on its waiting list, with CEO Harvey Spevak telling Vogue bluntly that "people will pay anything for longevity." New clubs are folding in contrast therapy, IV drips, and hyperbaric chambers alongside strength training. Six Senses has built an entire branded-residences business, including a Dubai Marina tower engineered around biophilic principles and feng shui from the ground up, on the premise that the home itself should function like a wellness resort. Casa Cipriani has added full spa-and-wellness floors to its private clubs in New York and Milan. Even London's members'-club export, The Ned, anchors its clubs around a 20-meter pool, one of Europe's largest hammams, and an underground "wellness palace." The message from every direction is the same: exclusivity used to mean access to a party. Now it means access to recovery.
What This Looks Like Inside the Home
Private clubs are simply following their members home, and their members are Los Angeles's luxury buyers. In the estates I show across Calabasas, Woodland Hills, Beverly Hills, and Bel Air, the features that used to be considered aspirational upgrades are now baseline expectations. We wrote about several of these in detail in Top 5 Wellness Amenities in Luxury Homes, and in Calabasas: The Hidden Luxury Enclave of Los Angeles, and the request list keeps growing:
Contrast therapy rooms: infrared saunas paired with cold plunge pools, often built directly into the primary suite rather than tucked into a basement
Cryotherapy chambers and ice bath rooms, once found only in professional recovery clinics
Circadian and human-centric lighting, programmed to a home's exact Los Angeles coordinates to mimic the sun's natural progression from energizing morning light to melatonin-friendly evening amber
Whole-home air and water filtration, cited by NAR's own buyer survey as a top-five wellness priority nationally
Movement and Pilates studios with the same tower-and-reformer setups clubs like Soho House are now installing
Biophilic design: indoor-outdoor healing gardens, hydroponic herb walls, saltwater lap pools, and forest-style landscaping that architects increasingly treat as a health feature, not just a design choice
None of this is theoretical for buyers here. It's the actual floor plan conversation happening inside The Oaks in Calabasas, in the canyon estates above Beverly Hills, and behind the gates of Bel Air Crest.
Wellness Luxury Real Estate: How It's Redrawing the Map of Los Angeles
This is where it gets interesting for anyone thinking about where to live, not just how to live.
Beverly Hills and Bel Air remain the gold standard for privacy and scale. This is where you'll find subterranean spa lounges, cold-therapy rooms, and eucalyptus steam chambers built into $40 million-plus estates, often with a dedicated "wellness level" that rivals a boutique hotel spa. Buyers here are paying for discretion first, wellness infrastructure second, but increasingly, the two are the same conversation.
Calabasas and Woodland Hills are where wellness has become a lifestyle system rather than a single room. Gated communities like The Oaks and The Estates at The Oaks are being built with private wellness suites, smart-home systems, and canyon-adjacent land specifically because buyers want space for yoga platforms, meditation gardens, and organic gardens, not just a home gym. Woodland Hills' luxury median has climbed to roughly $2.18 million as of mid-2026 (see our full Woodland Hills home value breakdown), and wellness-forward listings are a consistent driver of the fastest sales in that tier.
Thousand Oaks and the surrounding Conejo Valley offer something the Westside can't: genuine retreat-enclave living. Communities around Lake Sherwood and Westlake Village, anchored by private clubs like Sherwood Country Club and resort-caliber wellness infrastructure at the Four Seasons Westlake Village's Center for Health and Wellbeing, give buyers a full country-club-and-spa ecosystem minutes from home, with the acreage to build a private contrast suite of their own. For buyers priced out of a coastal address but unwilling to compromise on square footage or serenity, this is quickly becoming the answer.
Across all four submarkets, the underlying shift is the same: buyers are choosing neighborhoods based on proximity to wellness infrastructure, private clubs, hiking trails, clean-air canyon settings, spa culture, the same way earlier generations chose neighborhoods based on proximity to schools or freeways.
What This Means for Home Values
For sellers, this is the part that matters most: wellness design is one of the few renovations that reliably outperforms its cost. The Global Wellness Institute's 10% to 25% residential price premium, drawn from a review of more than 300 academic and independent studies, isn't a marketing claim. It's an aggregated market finding. In practice, that means a wellness-forward primary suite or a properly built contrast-therapy room isn't a sunk cost; it's underwriting a faster sale and a stronger comp.
It also means the calculus on new construction has changed. Developers building spec homes in Calabasas, Bel Air, and Beverly Hills are no longer treating a home gym as an afterthought staged for photos. They're commissioning actual wellness architects, the same way they'd commission a chef's kitchen designer a decade ago. In a market where luxury supply is genuinely scarce, a home engineered around recovery, sleep, air, and water quality is simply going to out-appreciate one that isn't, and buyers, having just experienced what a premium club membership buys them at places like Soho House, know exactly what that infrastructure is worth.
The Personal Case for All of This
I'll be honest, none of this is abstract for me. Between running showings across Calabasas and Beverly Hills and hosting my weekly real estate show, health and wellness isn't a footnote in my life; it's the thing that makes the rest of it sustainable. That's part of why the matcha runs with my daughter matter to me more than they probably should. It's a small, repeatable ritual that resets both of us. Multiply that instinct across a few hundred thousand affluent Angelenos, and you get exactly what we're seeing: private clubs building cold plunges instead of dance floors, and homebuyers asking about air filtration before they ask about the pool.
Luxury used to be about what a home or a club could show you. Increasingly, it's about what it can give back to you: better sleep, faster recovery, cleaner air, a longer life. Whether that shows up as a Soho Health Club membership in Venice or a contrast suite in a Calabasas primary bath, the direction is the same. Wellness isn't decorating luxury anymore. It is luxury.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is wellness real estate actually worth more?
Yes. The Global Wellness Institute found that homes and communities designed around wellness carry resale premiums of 10% to 25%, based on a review of more than 300 academic and independent studies, while wellness-focused commercial buildings see rental premiums of 4.5% to 7.5% per square foot.
What wellness features are buyers asking for in LA luxury homes?
The most requested features include contrast therapy rooms (infrared sauna paired with cold plunge), cryotherapy and ice bath rooms, circadian lighting systems, whole-home air and water filtration, private movement or Pilates studios, and biophilic design such as indoor-outdoor gardens and saltwater pools.
Where in Los Angeles is wellness-driven luxury real estate strongest?
Beverly Hills and Bel Air lead on privacy-focused wellness estates, Calabasas and Woodland Hills lead on lifestyle-system homes built around wellness suites and gated land, and Thousand Oaks and the Conejo Valley (Lake Sherwood, Westlake Village) lead on retreat-enclave living anchored by country-club wellness infrastructure.
What is Soho House opening in Venice, and what does it signal for the area?
Soho House is opening its fifth Los Angeles location in Venice Beach in summer 2027, built around a full Soho Health Club with contrast suites, cryotherapy, a movement studio, and a Health Club Cafe rather than the brand's classic nightlife model. It signals that wellness, not nightlife, is now the primary membership draw for luxury private clubs, and it reinforces the Westside's emergence as an LA wellness hub.
Is this wellness shift a short-term trend or a lasting one?
The data points to a durable shift. The Global Wellness Institute has tracked wellness real estate as the fastest-growing segment of the wellness economy every year since it began measuring the category in 2013, and projects the market will nearly double again by 2029.
Nathaniel Pitchon-Getzels is the founder of The Getzels Group With Sarah Anderson at Christie's International Real Estate based in Calabasas, specializing in luxury homes across Calabasas, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Woodland Hills, and the greater Los Angeles area. For a private consultation on wellness-forward luxury properties, contact The Getzels Group at (818) 535-5337.