A procession from the street to a cellar bathhouse: in New York, MV-LLC sends guests through a wood-paneled reception down to The Altar, where saunas and cold plunges ring a granite atrium.
The Altar occupies a former Gap on New York’s Fifth Avenue, two disjointed units split between the ground floor and the cellar below. Its founders, Henrique Castro, Sheba Jafari and Stuart Winecoff, wanted a health club that worked as a social hub. “They wanted it to also be a social gathering hub where people can actually talk and where there’s music,” said Wallo Villacorta, who founded the studio with Cyril Marsollier. The layout draws on both ancient bathhouses and nightclubs.
Entry starts at the slanted wood-paneled reception on 17th Street, where a sloped ceiling leads the eye into a narrow corridor. Bush-hammered granite runs underfoot as the corridor gives onto a stairwell capped by an oculus, and the stair drops through subterranean vestibules toward the central atrium. The pre-existing basement columns, which support the city above, anchor the whole plan.
The granite-clad atrium is the destination, a square room ringed with stone seating that faces a bush-hammered basin and its custom metal faucet, where guests draw water between sessions. Oversized columns clad in small stone tile ground the geometry and recall the hypostyle hall. Saunas, cold plunges and showers are placed around the atrium in precise symmetry, and the radial plan sets guests facing one another.
Material choice stays restrained, each room given over to wood or to stone. The sauna is clad and constructed in cedar planks, its terraced benches holding a capacity of fifty for the Aufguss ritual around the stone-clad ovens. The cold-plunge room holds four basins within a wood-clad volume under fabric light suspensions, while the IV Drip Lounge, a wood-clad cylinder beside the hyperbaric chambers, seats up to nine for treatment and music. “It’s the experience of compression, release, different geometries, different lighting; it’s seductive,” Marsollier said.
Lighting carries the mood. MV-LLC (Marsollier Villacorta) designed the ceiling installations over the cold plunge, the IV lounge and the showers, along with the large oculus above the stairwell, while Pedro Ávila added accent sconces and worked on the atrium centerpiece. Illumination stays indirect and dim, filtered through tan-colored FRP panels, backlit fiberglass and fabric, a layered quality that alludes to nightclub sensibilities. The studio frames The Altar as a new typology of urban bathhouse, sanctuary and stage at once, made as much for collective gathering as for individual renewal.
