The Gym Has Never Looked This Good
The most talked-about fitness interiors in America are no longer content to look like gyms. In New York, Pilates studios borrow the openness of downtown lofts, while Miami’s moodier spaces resemble private clubs with reformers. From Dior’s latest wellness accessories to American brands rethinking the humble hand weight, the design of movement has become a story about the objects and rooms we choose to live with.
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The Gym Is Having Its Design Moment
The old visual shorthand for a gym was easy to recognize: mirrored walls, rubber floors, fluorescent lighting and equipment arranged for efficiency. What has changed is not the need for those practical decisions but the ambition surrounding them. The best new studios now treat a workout as an experience shaped by architecture: how you enter, where you wait, what the materials feel like, and whether the room is worth spending time in before or after class.
The American expression of this shift is anything but uniform. New York’s clubs draw on the city’s lofts, hotels and social spaces; Miami’s studios experiment with saturated color, intimacy and ritual. Both offer a useful counterpoint to the internet’s familiar beige, arched version of wellness design.
It is visible in the equipment as well. The once-anonymous dumbbell now arrives in considered colors and shapes; a timber reformer can resemble a piece of contemporary furniture. Fashion houses are entering the category, but smaller American companies have been just as influential in making fitness objects desirable to own and display.
This is not simply a story about expensive memberships. It is about a changed expectation: rooms devoted to movement are being designed with the same seriousness as restaurants, boutique hotels and homes. The interesting question is what survives when the novelty of the photograph wears off.
Image credit: @ninamayainteriors
New York: The Fitness Club as a New Kind of Social Space
New York’s luxury fitness clubs increasingly borrow the grammar of hospitality. At Equinox NoMad, the four-level plan uses a central stair to create a sense of theater, while its ground-floor lounge gives the club a social dimension. Deep greens, dark gray, natural stone and expressive fabrics move the setting away from the anonymous, all-white gym.
At Hudson Yards, the connection between exercise and hospitality becomes even more explicit. The Equinox club offers training, recovery and pool facilities within a larger environment that also includes the Equinox Hotel. Rockwell Group’s hotel interiors and Joyce Wang Studio’s work on the club and spa show how movement, rest and regeneration can be translated into an architectural language rather than a list of amenities.
The most successful clubs do not disguise the demands of training. They give the hard-working spaces a considered setting: light where it is useful, robust materials where equipment requires them, and quieter areas that allow members to recover or simply spend time.
Image credit: Bedrock at Moss, New York
Miami Is Making Pilates an Interior Design Event
If New York has refined the fitness club, Miami is offering some of the most interesting experiments in the Pilates studio. Its new generation of spaces is less concerned with appearing clinical than with creating a complete sensory environment. Color, lighting, scent, hospitality and recovery have become part of the design brief.
At 727 Pilates in Little River, the founder, an interior designer by training, has created an intimate studio in maroon, taupe and gold. The reformer room features chandeliers and a long runner rug, while a separate mat studio, an infrared sauna and a cold plunge extend the experience beyond the class. It is a persuasive rebuttal to the idea that Pilates design must always mean pale wood and beige plaster.
In Edgewater, Revive Pilates frames itself around luxury wellness, keeping classes small so the reformer room feels personal rather than crowded. The ambition is not merely to make a room photogenic, but to shape how it feels to enter, move and recover.
Miami-based JETSET Pilates, meanwhile, has linked its flagship ambitions to the hospitality-inflected setting of Mr. C Residences in Coconut Grove. It reflects a wider shift: Pilates is no longer always an isolated storefront activity, but increasingly part of a neighborhood’s residential and lifestyle infrastructure.
Image credit: 727 Pilates Studio, Miami
Five American Fitness Interiors Worth Looking At
727 Pilates, Miami — A moodier alternative to neutral wellness design. The chandeliers, maroon palette and integrated recovery experience give the studio the intimacy of a private club.
New York Pilates SoHo, New York — Designed with Brion Isaacs of Rivington Design House, the studio pairs wide-plank maple floors and white brick with an open, light-filled plan. Its restraint is architectural rather than decorative.
Equinox NoMad, New York — A multi-level club with a theatrical central stair, rich color and a social lounge; useful evidence that luxury fitness can be urban, layered and energetic.
Revive Pilates, Miami — An Edgewater studio built around small classes and a luxury-wellness approach to the reformer session.
Equinox Hudson Yards, New York — The clearest example of fitness, recovery and hospitality sharing an architectural identity, with spaces that respond to the city rather than retreat entirely from it.
Together, these projects reveal the range within American wellness design: expressive Miami interiors, pared-back downtown Pilates and New York clubs that embrace the energy of the city. The strongest spaces have a point of view beyond the familiar neutral palette.
Image credit: Equinox Downtown, San Diego
When Luxury Fashion Entered the Workout
Luxury fashion has begun designing not only what people wear to exercise, but what they exercise with. Dior’s collaboration with Italian equipment maker Technogym in 2022 applied the house’s identity to treadmills, benches and exercise accessories. Celine’s 2024 Pilates collection brought wood, leather and polished metal into the category, making reformers and smaller objects look almost like collectible furniture.
In 2026, Dior’s Haute Wellness collection pushed the idea further through Pilates rings, wrist weights, yoga mats and other accessories finished in its Cannage motif. Louis Vuitton has explored monogrammed fitness accessories, while Prada’s yoga mat and Saint Laurent’s brass dumbbells show how even simple exercise objects can become expressions of fashion-house design.
These are not necessarily the most practical or accessible ways to equip a home gym. Their importance lies in what they signal: exercise equipment has become a category in which materials, silhouette, branding and display value are considered alongside use.
The latest Dior Haute Wellness collection, designed by Cordelia de Castellane, is particularly telling: its blue-and-ivory Cannage pattern appears across yoga accessories, resistance bands and weights, alongside products for sleep and recovery, presenting exercise as part of a wider domestic ritual.
Image credit: Hôtel Plaza Athénée Spa, Paris
The American Brands Making Equipment Worth Displaying
In the US, Bala made the case that a small piece of exercise equipment could be immediately recognizable without sacrificing its purpose. Its rounded wrist and ankle weights, hand weights and coordinated color palette belong to a world of fashion imagery as much as to a workout. Its success helped make the accessory itself a visual statement.
Pvolve takes a more functional, less decorative route: compact resistance and mobility tools designed for training in a living room rather than a dedicated fitness suite. Balanced Body, a California-based Pilates equipment specialist, represents another side of the market, where reformer engineering and professional training needs take priority over the appearance of a lifestyle object.
The distinction matters. A sculptural machine and a well-designed piece of training equipment are not automatically the same thing. European names such as NOHRD and PENT. use timber, leather and precision metalwork to make large machines visually compatible with residential interiors; WaterRower has long explored the same territory through wood construction. Technogym brings industrial design to a more technological category. The common thread is an effort to resolve the tension between performance and appearance, not to replace one with the other.
Image credit: Bala's Retail Store, New York
Why These Rooms Look So Different
There is no universal luxury-gym palette. In New York, existing buildings often do the heavy lifting: daylight, exposed brick and generous ceiling heights create a sense of ease without much ornament. In Miami, where boutique hospitality and nightlife are part of the city’s visual culture, a Pilates studio can be darker, richer and more theatrical. The contrast is more useful than a list of fashionable finishes. It shows that the new fitness interior is responding to its city rather than following a single global formula.
The Home Gym Comes Out of Hiding
In American homes, the shift is especially visible where square footage is limited or rooms need to work harder. A spare bedroom in Brooklyn, a sunny Miami apartment or a larger suburban house may accommodate fitness in very different ways, but the design problem is similar: how to make equipment feel intentional without compromising its function.
A good home gym starts with circulation and the exercise itself. A reformer needs room to move around it, weights need stable storage and appropriate flooring, and a mirror should help with positioning rather than merely enlarge the room in photographs. Good ventilation, layered lighting and easy-to-clean surfaces matter more than the color of the accessories.
For most homes, the better idea may be a carefully planned corner rather than a miniature commercial gym. A compact equipment collection, a well-placed mirror and closed storage can share space with ordinary furniture. The design goal is not to make the room look like a Pilates studio; it is to let movement belong naturally in the home.
Image credit: @sabraballon
When Wellness Becomes Set Design
There is an obvious risk in a trend this photogenic: the room becomes a backdrop before it becomes a place to train. Pale plaster, sculptural arches and immaculate reformer rows are now so familiar on social media that they can feel like a visual template. Attractive images alone tell us little about acoustics, durability, instructor sightlines or the comfort of the people using the space.
The best American examples resist that flattening. At 727 Pilates, deep maroon and intimate lighting make a more distinctive argument than another all-beige room; New York Pilates draws its character from the building’s loft-like volume and generous daylight. Different aesthetics, but the same lesson: design should clarify how a space is used rather than simply signal that it is fashionable.
SHS Verdict
The real achievement of the new fitness aesthetic is not that a designer label can be printed on a yoga mat. It is that studios are beginning to be judged as interiors, with attention to proportion, atmosphere and the relationship between the body and the room. New York’s loft-inspired Pilates spaces and Miami’s expressive wellness studios show that there is no single look to copy. At home, the lasting idea is simpler: choose equipment that works, give it room to function, and let the surrounding design feel like an extension of the rest of the house.
The SHS Edit: The New Home Gym
A considered workout space is built as much from its surroundings as from its equipment. Our edit focuses on pieces that support storage, changing, stretching and recovery without compromising the safe use of the room.
1. Sculptural full-length mirror
Image credit: Casa Símera, Mexico City
2. Equipment and storage sets
Image credit: 25 Park Row, New York
3. Storage furniture
Image credit: Zara Home
4. Upholstered occasional bench
Image credit: Botanica Pilates Studio, Saint Petersburg
5. Woven basket
Image credit: Botanica Pilates Studio, Saint Petersburg
6. Architectural wall light
Image credit: Lean Barre Studio, Madrid
7. Pendant lamp
Image credit: Our Pilates, Sorrento, Australia
8. Floor-to-ceiling curtains
Image credit: Unfold Studio, Berlin
9. Wall art
Image credit: Good Day Pilates, Brooklyn
10. Coordinated cotton towels
Image credit: Zara Home
11. Rolling fitness cart
Image credit: Free People
12. Compact sculptural stool
Image credit: Our Pilates, Sorrento, Australia
13. Luxury gym equipment
Image credit: Moss