{Some people at the office go to the gym during lunch - not me though. But here’s a designer g

{Some people at the office go to the gym during lunch - not me though. But here’s a designer gym if there was one. Designed by William Sofield, boy is this gym decorated! There’s smoky mirrors, mood lighting, chandeliers and wall coverings, and a fainting lounge (kinda cheeky for a gym no?). It’s more nightclub than gym, but is that a good thing?} Sofield proposed the “bat cave” concept for the men’s locker room in the subbasement, where contractors ultimately removed truckloads of useless pipe and outmoded electrical equipment before painting some of the old brick foundation bronze and other parts brown. Both the men’s lockers and the women’s, on the next basement level up, are walnut-veneered and arranged in bays with vermillion-gelled fluorescents washing the ceiling and a tribal motif on the carpet. The glamour of onyx counters “undercuts the sleaze,” he notes. Wherever possible, he avoids plain painted plasterboard. Asked for a boxing area, he instantly thought: flocked wall covering. “David smiled immediately,” he recalls. The fuzzy black-and-white brocade pattern also covers walls in the adjacent corridor, where a niche frames a life-size lawn sculpture of Michelangelo’s David. Flooring in most of the corridors is engineered wood with a surface of carbonized larch brushed to reveal virgin springwood. The same planks extend into the basement Pilates studio that Sofield describes as a “Zen dungeon.” The David isn’t the only kitsch trophy. Almost all Barton’s gyms have a DJ booth, and Sofield suggested housing it inside a giant disco ball. “I don’t know why I never thought of that,” Barton replied. “I’ve got one in storage.” This relic of the Tuesday parties that his wife, “Queen of the Night” Susanne Bartsch, used to host at the Happy Valley dance club turned out to be the perfect size to park on a stagelike platform left over from the gym’s predecessor, Barnes & Noble. The platform is roughly in the center of the wedge-shape top level, by far the largest of the four. One corner, the former children’s reading room, now features the bench presses and free-weight circuits that Barton calls the “clanking iron of World War III.” He explains that the steel ballet bar around the perimeter keeps the action a safe distance from the antique heating system set below the huge old windows: “So someone doesn’t sit on a hot radiator pipe or fling a dumbbell out.” Down the middle of the floor marches a row of structural columns supporting colossal mirrors with charred-looking Goth frames. Anyone standing in front of the mirrors benefits from theatrical spots that highlight every bulge, whether muscle or fat. “If you can’t see it, you can’t isolate and move it,” Sofield argues. Gelled fluorescents, meanwhile, imbue the ceiling with the mystery of black light, even though the actual paint colors are aubergine and smoky cocoa. He chose high-gloss ultramarine for the ceiling in the lofty lobby. You might not immediately guess that the point of departure for the lobby’s industrial beaux arts aesthetic is the Park Avenue Armory, featuring interiors by Stanford White and Louis Comfort Tiffany. However, reverence didn’t stop Sofield from wrapping the lobby’s columns­ in hardware-store sisal rope or handing workers circular saws to widen gaps between 10-inch-wide oak floorboards reclaimed from a Virginia army barracks. Furnishings include an ornate­ antique sideboard from the Black Forest and a turn-of-the-last-century grandfather clock surmounted by a Russian vintage Father Christmas in a flowing red cloak. Year-round.  -- source link

More pics about