What is “wellness travel” and why are luxury resorts scrambling for this title?
" You cannot claim to be a wellness retreat if you have not designed the building with intentional wellness design decisions"
_____
What does it mean to call yourself a “wellness resort”? That is the real question.
You offer green juices and a vegan menu, does that mean you can slap the title “wellness” onto your resort and wait for the yogi’s to descend?
As we are all aware, the health and wellness trend is well and truly here and thank god – it is about time one should be able to travel and get more than a coke and a soggy tomato roll from a hotel – but what does it truly mean to call yourself a wellness retreat?
As a wellness architect, I find it a little hard to swallow if you pay attention only to the services you provide, and not the environment you provide them in.
Want a relaxing detox massage with aromatic oils? Lovely... However, the room you will be treated in will be poorly ventilated with no fresh air circulation and the walls will be clad in a material that is leeching VOC’s into the air, all while the lighting levels do nothing to help balance your circadian rhythm. Still sound lovely?
You cannot claim to be a wellness retreat if you have not designed the building with intentional wellness design decisions.
You cannot serve green juice, offer yoga on the deck and run daily gym classes if you resort has been constructed with no consideration to material selection, you have terrible fluorescent lighting that messes with the bodies circadian rhythm and your do not filter your air nor water. That is just like having a cheap manufacturer in china make your clothing (again from synthetic materials) and sticking your ‘green’ label on it and calling it “sustainable”.
Wellness is the new trend, I get that – but there is more to a wellness destination than some products and services. It starts with the environment you provide them in and that needs to be considered before the footings are laid.
Wellness is not something you can just fake.
There are real ramifications from living and working in poorly designed spaces and we are only just scratching the surface of what a well (or WELL) designed environment can do on mood, productivity and health.
I cannot wait to see the WELL Building Standard become standard design. As designers we should care about how our buildings affect the internal users, rather than the ego of aesthetics.
So enough of the “Wellness Resort” tag line unless you have truly, deeply considered all aspects of your resort, all the way down the selection of pain and the substrate of your closets.
