The Palm Heights lodge, a Caribbean vacation spot that appears blessed by year-round solar, opened in Grand Cayman in 2019. It’s the flourishing hospitality challenge based by artistic director Gabriella Khalil, who has created a sanctuary of beachy, glamorous Seventies Italian design blended with North African influences.
This month, the lodge formally opens its spa, The Backyard Membership, a years-in-the-making operation that blows out of the water any pre-existing notions of what a easy trip therapeutic massage could run to.
Palm Heights lodge spa: what to anticipate
Crops kind the crux of the structure: tropical hedges making up a labyrinth of verdant ‘residing partitions’ information visitors across the expansive 60,000 sq ft of sound rooms, saunas, swimming pools, ice rooms, in addition to movement-focused areas (a part of the additionally new Palm Heights Athletic Membership) comparable to Pilates studios, coaching tracks, spin studios, fitness center areas and extra.
Khalil’s imaginative and prescient ‘at its most elementary degree was to supply beneficiant, related wellness areas that offered sanctuary, an setting for gathering and harnessed the plush island setting in an knowledgeable method; drawing as a lot as potential from circumstance and the pure setting‘.
To do that, she turned the effectively trodden spa mannequin on its head, rejecting usually solitary experiences and as a substitute leaning into ‘historic international wellness tradition from Turkey, Korea, Italy to South Africa, which largely display two commonalities: wellness as a social apply and an emphasis on bathing and cleaning rituals in a social setting’, says Khalil.
Six plunge swimming pools, 4 outside ritual baths and a staggering yellow marble outside hammam place the emphasis on bathing, which was ‘naturally very becoming because of the significance of water visually and culturally on the islands’, says Khahlil.
Realising the dream
Khalil enlisted architect Dong Ping Wong of structure apply Meals New York to collaborate on the challenge and realise her aspirations, after being drawn to his strategy to social and group areas, comparable to his radical Plus Pool challenge: a public swimming pool that cleans East River water for bathing, and a analysis challenge for a well being centre for a post-Covid metropolis. ‘Quite a lot of synergies began to emerge with conversations with Dong – throughout group, utilising the pure setting as a part of the design course of, sustainability, how area will be socially inviting – and knowledgeable references naturally developed from these conversations,’ says Khalil.
‘Loads of bathhouses are designed to be very unique to solely a really choose few –hidden away in basements, with a number of layers of check-ins to go by means of – and we needed this to really feel the other,’ Wong explains of the open-air ethos. ‘On the identical time, we needed to create a various set of intimate areas. Areas for everybody. Locations you possibly can uncover and make your personal and really feel protected in.’
Leaning into the temperate local weather, Wong envisioned an ethereal and free-flowing setting, its structure outlined largely by native vegetation – a maze of palms and tropical crops that may lead you from one space of the spa to the subsequent. One of many many challenges this posed was planning for a constructing that ‘you’d should always backyard and prune and water’, he says. However they persevered, sourcing all of the crops by means of native professional Whit Connors: ‘He works with all of the nurseries on the island and helped with every thing from sourcing to craning bushes into place, waterproofing, drainage particulars and caretaking,’ says Wong. The travertine stone and distinctive yellow marble and black marble had been sourced in Italy by Palm Heights’ personal architect, Giorgio Paolini, who hails from a small city on the east coast the place the supplies are plentiful.
Costa Brazil: a permanent partnership
Since its opening, the lodge has partnered with Francisco Costa of magnificence and way of life model Costa Brazil to outfit the luxurious zellige-tiled loos with toiletries. Now Costa has developed a menu of unique therapies for The Backyard Membership – the primary location exterior of Brazil to supply therapies and rituals by the model – such because the Sol and Lua physique therapies, which function shimmering elixirs and contain breathwork, plus sound remedy as a part of the latter. ‘Breathwork is one of the best and most effective option to really feel balanced and to get up, fairly actually, the physique, thoughts and soul,’ says Costa. Nutrient-dense elements kaya and cacay, together with soothing breu resin (which Costa encountered within the Amazonian rainforest), are additionally used within the customized recipes.
Different magnificence and wellness collaborators embody Biologique Recherche, iS Scientific, magnificence specialist Nikki DeRoest, and lymphatic therapeutic massage professional Anna Zahn of Ricari Studios.
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