South Korean Culture Is Inspiring The Next Wave Of Apartment Amenities

Pop music and skincare aficionados, move over: Real estate wants in on South Korean culture, too.

Americans seeking to delay aging have spent the past few years swapping barbells for biohacking, which encompasses everything from diet changes to using baby teeth to encourage stem cell regeneration. Now, demand for longevity-focused wellness — a hallmark of East Asian culture for generations — is seeping into apartment buildings.

“It used to be apartment buildings had a party room, which was a multifunctional social room, and a gym,” said Nancy Ruddy, founding partner of architecture firm CetraRuddy. “The world has gotten much more sophisticated.”

Korean pop culture began filtering into American tastes in 2012, when Gangnam Style reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and paved the way for dozens of other K-pop songs to later crack U.S. charts. Since then, its influence has spread to health and beauty: K-beauty brands have taken over Times Square billboards and planted flagship stores in SoHo and Union Square.

Ruddy and John Cetra, her husband and partner at their eponymous architecture firm, have repeatedly seen longevity-focused wellness treatments offered as standard during vacations to East Asia. Now, they’re starting to see U.S. developers tweak amenity space designs to cater to holistic wellness programming, ranging from mindfulness to fitness amenities beyond treadmills and high-intensity interval training studios.

“South Korea, in their aesthetic wellness and their stress release — and Asia in general in stress release — is so far ahead of us in understanding mind-body connection,” Ruddy said. “The wellness of both is so important.”

Developers are trying to emulate holistic treatments, like the hot springs found at South Korean spas, with hot-cold plunge pools, Ruddy said. Demand for the pools already exists and could benefit developers hoping to attract health-conscious renters: Their popularity has surged thanks to the cardiovascular health benefits some science points to.

And as longevity gains cultural heft in the U.S., CetraRuddy has designed scores of Korean-inspired amenity concepts in other apartment buildings.

It designed private treatment rooms at 200 Amsterdam, a 112-unit Upper West Side condo tower developed by SJP Properties and Mitsui Fudosan America, and is designing a dedicated relaxation room and sauna at GFP Real Estate’s office-to-residential conversion at 222 Broadway.

It also worked on GFP’s 25 Water St., a 1,320-unit luxury apartment building in Lower Manhattan with 100K SF of amenities, including a state-of-the art gym, an indoor lap pool and a rooftop pool. But the property also has holistic wellness elements such as a Himalayan salt room, a dry and infrared sauna, and sensory showers.

“When people talk about health these days, it's not necessarily everything that's like working out,” GFP Development Executive Managing Director Angela Tsai said. “There's also a continued interest in how you repair and recover. We're hoping that those amenities and those spa rooms help people to do that.”

Some offerings are subtler, like more plants in common areas to embrace the concept of biophilic design or building rooms that contain audio libraries with soundtrack choices intended to de-escalate stress.

At one underway development, CetraRuddy is working on an immersive mindfulness room where residents can play with light, temperature, sound and scent to simulate the Amazon rainforest or the Ganges. 

Other developers are experimenting with newer, bolder trends, Ruddy said. She has worked on rooms for red-light therapy, which is thought to help with skin conditions, hair growth and even short-term pain mitigation.

She is also in conversations about designing quasi-medical office rooms where licensed nurses can offer nutrients and supplements as injections rather than in pill form, which studies suggest offers more effective absorption. Others are thinking about spaces where aestheticians can offer Asian alternatives to Botox, like microneedling.

“Health and wellness is clearly the tail that's wagging the dog,” Ruddy said.

Some of the trends are hit-and-miss.

Developers working with CetraRuddy have been interested in designs for shorter pools that can be used for exercise classes, as opposed to only for lap swimming, Ruddy said. But GFP had limited success on the exercise classes it ran in 25 Water’s lap pools with an external provider.

“It was programmed to some Broadway musical,” Tsai said. “Some people thought it was cheesy, but other people loved it.”

Still, developers are betting that public appetite for health and wellness services isn’t likely to die down anytime soon — and that people will pay handsomely for services that have some scientific health benefits.

At One High Line, a luxury Chelsea building where condos have sold for as much as $59M, high-end longevity services provider Atria Health and Research Institute is offering MRIs and genetic screening across five floors of retail space.

“If you have some disposable income, where will you spend it?” Tsai said. “Who doesn't want to live a longer, healthier life?”