Spa trek
The health and leisure centre is coming of age. The past three years alone have seen a large number of well appointed, multi-million pound centres springing up in hotels, offices and the public sector.
Well appointed no longer means having two cycling machines instead of one. It means a serious investment in design and quality, marble floor tiles in place of lino, cherry wood lockers rather than formica and the creation of imaginative, pleasant spaces instead of purely functional ones.
Three years ago, the Turnberry hotel opened the doors to its marble and granite health club, with direct views on to the Scottish coast from its swimming pool. Since then, we've seen Birmingham's Swallow hotel develop an award-winning health spa and the Athenaeum hotel in London refurbish its basement office areas into a luxurious leisure space.
In the private sector, US bank First Boston opened a lavish leisure centre in its Canary Wharf offices at London Docklands, where £75,000 was spent on the hi-fi system alone. And health club operator Livingwell's Westminster gym went the extra mile with a Japanese pool surrounded by hand-painted lanterns.
The only way for leisure design is up. Peter Inston, designer of the Athenaeum's new health centre as well as the one at the Swallow, adds: "The old days are gone of communal showers and grout falling out of the tiling. Now the quality of the materials and finish is of the highest standard."
Riding high on the crest of this high-specification leisure wave is the Academy, a new leisure development in the handsome spa town of Harrogate, North Yorkshire. Proprietor Mark Silver intends it to be the best facility of its kind in the UK. To that end, he has equipped it with four indoor tennis courts, three outdoor tennis courts, an outdoor running track, a 4,000sq ft gym, a dance and aerobics studio, pro shop, swimming pool, whirlpool and splash pool, a café-bar and lounge area, a restaurant, a large crèche, sauna and steam rooms and extensive spa treatment rooms.
Silver is the first to admit that he had no experience of this sector. "It started out with me wondering, as a Harrogate resident, what I had to do to get a decent tennis court. Initially, I thought of building one, and charging people to use it from a tin shack on the side."
Luckily, his taste for finer things prevailed, with the help of a small family fortune from the sale of his father's paint firm, Kalon, plus profits from two or three years of property investment.
After a couple of years spent travelling the world to see "all the health and leisure clubs that people talked about", he arrived back in Harrogate, determined to "blend the best of other people's ideas into one place". He knew he'd need expert help. So he recruited restaurateur Michael Gill as quality controller and man in charge of the "ethos" and the catering operation. He recruited Penny McGarry, the woman who launched the Turnberry's leisure facilities, as manager, and evolved the spa with Champneys' former managers Tanya and Allan Wheway. Leisure design specialist Mark Plumtree of Paragon Design Group in Tadcaster, was taken on to make sure that the Academy looks at least twice as expensive as its £4m budget.
On entering the Academy you are greeted by a turnstile - but that's where any comparison with other health or leisure centres ends. The turnstile is made from cherry wood and beaten steel, next to a reception desk of perforated steel curves and polished pale wood. To the left is a large, airy bar and restaurant.
Ceilings of at least 40ft, and windows almost as tall in the bar, give the impression the centre is a converted warehouse. In fact, it has been built into the remains of an electricity training centre.
Although throughout the building there is a Japanese-inspired simplicity and naturalness, the bar area is more Californian. A deep-terracotta ceiling and lemon sherbet walls bring a splash of sunshine into the two-tiered room. The bar area features large, comfy sofas, tables and chairs for drinks and bar snacks, attractive mosaic tiling around the verandah walls and large windows looking south onto the lawns and tennis courts. Corporate colours of yellow, terracotta and deep blue dominate.
It was important to Silver that the food element was first class - to keep people in the building, and attract those from outside. He chose Gill as overseer, because he knew that rather than go for wholefood and bland salads, Gill would tailor his fine food to more healthy requirements.
Says Gill: "We give them the choice of healthy, or naughty but nice." There are few salads on the café or restaurant menus, which instead feature gourmet fresh fruit cocktails, fresh pasta, wholesome sandwiches, home-made fish cakes, and - shock horror - chips. "This is a leisure club, not just a sports club," adds Gill.
As a gesture towards health or weight-watchers, the restaurant menu includes a breakdown of fat content, calories and carbohydrates for each dish, with a credit-card-sized calculator at the bottom of the menu card for calorie reckonings. A good selection of wines are sold by the glass.
The restaurant, upstairs from the café-bar, is more Japanese inspired, with malt-coloured, cedar wood slatted blinds over windows that provide a perfect vantage point for watching tennis matches. Cherry wood screens with opaque white windows enhance the oriental element. Flooring on both levels is oak parquet.
Part of the Japanese ethos is the use of natural materials throughout. Wood is everywhere but luxurious touches come with more unusual materials. Shower cubicles are lined with soft green/grey mosaic tiles and Chinese slate, which has a rusted, marbled patina.
The spa area is the pièce de resistance. On a separate level, it features the same parquet flooring and Chinese tiling, but an ingenious solution to storage space gives the individual treatment rooms character. Wall cupboards for storing towels are transformed with a sliding Japanese screen door, which reveals white, fluffy towels neatly rolled and stacked in triangles, both decorative and functional. Lighting is on dimmer switches, for mood control.
Aerobics studio
A soft touch is employed in the aerobics studio, which has been designed with six wooden beams radiating out from the centre and draped with white fabric sails. Cobalt blue downlighters add colour.
The crèche, also, is a delight. Rather than being a stuffy back-room, it is a large, airy space with cheerful paintings by the kids themselves covering the walls and soft fawn-coloured carpeting. French doors lead on to a good-sized, rubber-floored outdoor play area. All care has been taken to make it attractive to and suitable for youngsters - all the wooden fixtures and fittings have rounded edges.
Equal care and attention has gone into the nuts and bolts of the equipment and facilities as into the design. Tennis coach Chris Paraskos enthuses about the quality of the indoor tennis courts, carpeted to the Queen's Club specification.
"The lighting is brilliant. With most courts with artificial lighting, you get spots before your eyes from the bulbs. But not with this one."
Low-level fluorescent strips across the court give an even spread of light. The pool area offers a 17.5m, four-lane pool for serious swimmers, a splash pool and a whirlpool. The efficient-looking gym area is filled with generous amounts of the latest equipment.
It does seem as if Silver and his consultants have thought of everything. But how did he justify the expense? He's not charging premium rates, compared with an equivalent London facility (£180 joining fee plus £680 full adult membership). Why not just go for the tin shed next to a decent tennis court?
"In a way it's easier to try to be the best," he says. "You can't cut corners. In the long run, if you start off with the right quality and stick to it, you'll still be around in 10 or 15 years time."
