The Gym Has Never Looked This Good

The Gym Is Having Its Design Moment

The gym was once one of the few interiors where appearance could be dismissed as secondary. Its visual vocabulary was predictable: rubber flooring, hard lighting, mirrored walls and equipment arranged for maximum capacity. The best new fitness spaces are challenging that assumption, not by making exercise less serious, but by treating the room around it as a design project.

London offers an especially revealing cross-section. At one end are expansive clubs borrowing from hotel and members’ club design; at the other, compact Pilates studios where the architecture is expressed through a single curved opening, a well-placed mirror or the rhythm of reformer beds. Across Europe, designers are testing richer colours and more theatrical spaces rather than accepting the now-familiar palette of pale plaster and beige.

There is a parallel change in the objects themselves. A Dior-branded Pilates ring, a walnut rowing machine or a set of precisely crafted wooden dumbbells is not simply a piece of sports equipment. Each asks to be considered as something visible within a room. The question for interiors is no longer only where to hide the gym; it is what happens when exercise becomes part of a home’s design language.

That shift deserves scrutiny as well as admiration. An extraordinary photograph cannot tell us whether a studio has good acoustics, safe circulation or equipment that suits the people using it. The most convincing examples succeed on both counts: spaces designed to be experienced, not merely seen.

From Workout Space to Lifestyle Destination

At Equinox Bishopsgate, Woods Bagot gives a five-level London club a distinctive material identity through stained oak, grey stone, black metal and concrete. Glass partitions and carefully planned circulation connect training with spaces for recovery and socialising. The result feels less like a conventional fitness facility than a hospitality interior with a rigorous athletic purpose.

Third Space represents another version of the same ambition. Across its London clubs, specialist training, swimming, recovery and changing facilities form part of a wider experience. What members buy is not just access to equipment, but the ability to move between exertion, restoration and everyday life without leaving the building.

This is why reception desks, cafés and changing rooms matter so much to the new gym aesthetic. They are no longer merely functional thresholds. Like a hotel lobby or a well-designed restaurant, they establish the mood before the main activity begins. Fitness has become a spatial experience as well as a physical one.

Pilates Has Changed the Way Fitness Looks

Pilates has supplied a different visual vocabulary. Where the large luxury gym often uses scale and material richness, the reformer studio works with repetition, proportion and the relationship between bodies and machines. The long horizontal profile of a reformer can make even a modest room feel unusually composed.

Studio Anatomy in London Fields is a useful example. DEDRAFT’s design relies on curved openings, natural light and restrained finishes rather than decorative excess. The studio’s calm is architectural: it comes from the way spaces connect and from how the equipment sits within them.

But the influence of Pilates is broader than a single minimalist look. Its popularity has made softer finishes, residential lighting and more deliberate storage part of the fitness conversation. The challenge is to retain the practical clarity of a working studio while resisting a formula in which every space begins to look like the same pale, photogenic room.

Inside the World’s Most Beautiful Fitness Studios

Studio Anatomy, London — DEDRAFT’s curved openings and controlled light give a compact studio a distinctive architectural rhythm.

E by Equinox St James’s, London — a more intimate luxury-club reference than the larger Bishopsgate project.

New York Pilates, SoHo — maple floors, white brick and an open plan respond to the character of downtown New York, offering a compelling contrast with London’s more discreet interiors.

Paris Pilates Society, Paris — Bertina Minel Architecture’s expressive use of colour and café component challenge the assumption that wellness interiors must be quiet or neutral.

Annette K Montparnasse, Paris — Maison Sarah Lavoine’s textured, hospitality-oriented interiors show how training, recovery and social life can be designed together.

These rooms are not interchangeable examples of “luxury”. Their differences are the point: the strongest studios respond to a building, a city and a particular way of moving. The emerging trend is less a single aesthetic than a new level of attention to the spaces in which we exercise.

When Luxury Fashion Entered the Gym

Fashion has long dressed the body for sport. It is now increasingly interested in designing the objects around the body, turning mats, weights and exercise machines into extensions of a house’s visual identity.

Dior’s 2022 collaboration with Technogym made that ambition explicit, bringing the codes of a couture house to treadmills and training benches. Celine’s 2024 Pilates collection moved in a more furniture-like direction, using natural wood, leather and polished metal. Louis Vuitton has also experimented with monogrammed fitness accessories, treating familiar exercise objects as luxury goods.

Dior returned to the category in 2026 with Haute Wellness, a collection of smaller accessories including Pilates rings, wrist weights, mats and resistance bands dressed in the Cannage motif. Prada’s designer yoga mat and Saint Laurent’s earlier brass dumbbells belong to the same broader story, although their visual approaches are very different.

It would be easy to dismiss these collections as branding exercises, and some are. Their importance to interior design lies elsewhere: they reveal a growing expectation that the objects used for exercise should be as visually considered as the furniture beside them. That does not make an expensive mat a better mat. It does change what designers and shoppers imagine a home workout space can look like.

When Homeware Brands Started Designing Gym Equipment

The most interesting change may be happening outside fashion altogether. Zara Home has introduced gym accessories in the familiar materials of domestic interiors: oak, steel and leather, alongside storage that does not immediately announce itself as sports equipment. It is a small but telling move. Fitness is becoming a homeware category.

British maker Paragon Studio takes a more bespoke approach, creating equipment in hardwood, leather and metal that can be specified with an interior in mind. PENT. pursues a similarly crafted language in weights and training systems, while NOHRD’s wooden equipment gives the mechanics of exercise an unusually warm, furniture-like presence.

At a different price point and scale, Bala has made compact weights instantly recognisable through soft forms and confident colour. WaterRower’s timber construction and Ciclotte’s circular exercise bike offer two more approaches: one quiet and architectural, the other overtly sculptural. These objects should not be presented as interchangeable. They demonstrate how varied design-led fitness has become.

The real test is whether the design survives use. Equipment still needs to be durable, safe, comfortable to handle and appropriate for the exercise. The best makers treat those demands as part of the design brief rather than as inconveniences to disguise.

The Home Gym Comes Out of Hiding

For years, a home gym often meant a spare bedroom or garage filled with the visual language of a commercial club. That model is being replaced, at least in design-conscious homes, by more integrated spaces: a reformer near a window, timber storage built around exercise accessories or a rowing machine chosen as carefully as a chair.

The starting point should be the activity, not the aesthetic. Strength training needs safe clearances and suitable flooring; Pilates and stretching need unobstructed floor space; a cardio machine may require ventilation and attention to noise. Once those requirements are resolved, cabinetry, lighting and materials can make the space feel continuous with the rest of the home.

In smaller British homes, the most persuasive solution may be a workout corner rather than a dedicated room. A properly positioned mirror, discreet storage for mats and weights, and lighting that works for both exercise and everyday life can make a meaningful difference. Heavy equipment should never be treated as a decorative prop or stored in furniture not designed to carry it.

This is the distinction between a home gym that looks good in a photograph and one that earns its place in daily life: the latter can be used, cleared away and lived alongside without friction.

SHS Verdict

The most interesting luxury gyms have not invented a single new look. They have persuaded architects, designers and homeware makers to take exercise spaces seriously as interiors. London’s clubs, intimate Pilates studios and the growing market for design-led equipment all point to the same change: movement is no longer treated as visually separate from everyday life.

For the home, the lesson is selective rather than extravagant. Start with the activity and the room it requires. Then choose lighting, storage, a mirror and, where appropriate, equipment whose form and materials work with the surrounding interior. A coordinated designer collection is neither necessary nor a substitute for good planning.

The beige Pilates studio may eventually lose its grip on the mood board. What should endure is a more useful idea: spaces for fitness deserve the same intelligence, individuality and care as the rooms in which we rest, work and gather.

1. Sculptural full-length mirror

2. Timber Storage Cabinet

3. Open oak shelving

4. Upholstered occasional bench

5. Woven basket

6. Architectural wall light

7. Pendant lamp

8. Floor to Ceiling Curtain

9. Abstract wall art

10. Coordinated cotton towels

11. Rolling fitness cart

12. Compact sculptural stool

13. Luxury Gym Equipment