Othership Signs a Third NYC Bathhouse on the Upper East Side
By Arlene Scott
Senior Wellness Correspondent & Hospitality Consultant
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Othership plans a fifth site, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, for 2027, AN Interior reported in its interview with Futurestudio, the Toronto design firm behind Sant Roch and every existing Othership location. The move tests whether social bathing works beyond downtown creative neighborhoods.
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Othership, the Toronto-born social bathhouse operator, is planning a fifth location on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, AN Interior reported on June 22. The space would be Othership’s third in New York City, joining the Flatiron and Williamsburg locations that opened over the past two years.
Futurestudio, the Toronto-based firm led by Ali McQuaid Mitchell, has designed every Othership location to date. Introducing managing editor Isabel Ling’s interview with McQuaid Mitchell, AN Interior said the Upper East Side outpost is expected to open in 2027. Othership told Patch in December 2025 that the space will be 14,000 square feet at 201 East 86th Street, on the corner of Third Avenue, and Commercial Observer reported a 10-year lease there the same month.
Key facts
- Operator Othership (Toronto; co-founders include CEO Robbie Bent and Myles Farmer; first bathhouse opened in 2022)
- Capital raised about $18 million across seed, Series A and SAFE rounds, per The Logic and Athletech News
- New location Upper East Side, Manhattan, opening 2027
- Address 201 East 86th Street, at Third Avenue
- Size 14,000 square feet, on a 10-year lease
- Design firm Futurestudio (Toronto), led by Ali McQuaid Mitchell
- Total footprint Five locations across NYC and Toronto
- NYC locations Flatiron, Williamsburg, Upper East Side (2027)
The design system, not just the brand
What makes this expansion worth tracking is the firm behind it. Futurestudio has not only designed all four existing Othership locations but has recently completed Sant Roch (billed as France’s largest sauna), a social wellness club called Re in Dubai, and Umvelt in Montana. McQuaid Mitchell, whose background is in restaurant and hotel design, told AN Interior that the firm’s guiding principles for Othership are materiality, lighting, and flow.
“We didn’t look at spas for inspiration,” McQuaid Mitchell said. “We looked more toward nature, hospitality, and even the cinematic worlds of atmospheric films.”
The result is a consistent design language: custom floor tiles sliced from real river stones in every location, light fixtures with hand-painted filters to emulate candlelight, and, in the first location, cedar carried from the sauna through the reception area. That shared vocabulary means Othership is less a chain of bathhouses than a design-and-programming system being exported city by city, which is harder for competitors to replicate than a room full of saunas and cold plunges.
A demand-geography signal
Othership’s first two NYC locations landed in neighborhoods with existing creative and nightlife infrastructure: Flatiron and Williamsburg. The Upper East Side is a different bet. It is one of Manhattan’s most affluent residential corridors, where the customer base skews older and the competitive set runs toward legacy wellness (Equinox, SoulCycle) rather than social bathing. The Real Deal’s July 10 report on wellness-driven leasing named Othership among the sauna concepts that have opened in Manhattan. The quarter’s two largest leases, per the JLL data it cited, went to Chelsea Piers (76,000 square feet at the Seaport) and Life Time (71,000 square feet in North Williamsburg).
The move suggests the Othership model, built on $58 guided sessions and group breathwork in a nightlife-adjacent atmosphere, has enough pull to test uptown. If 14,000 square feet on East 86th Street fills, it would confirm that social bathing works beyond the downtown-creative demographic that adopted it first.
What to watch
Othership runs four locations today, two in Toronto and two in New York. It has raised three rounds: a $1.3 million seed round and an $8 million Series A in January 2023, according to The Logic, and about $8.5 million through a SAFE in 2025, according to Athletech News, or about $18 million in all. A fifth location in 2027, if it opens on schedule, would give the company three New York City locations within about three years of opening in Flatiron in July 2024.
The open question is whether the Upper East Side model will look different. McQuaid Mitchell told AN Interior that new rituals “are formed in these types of projects,” pointing to Othership’s recent additions of stand-up comedy and live performances alongside its core sauna-and-ice-bath programming. Whether the UES audience wants the same late-night energy that works in Williamsburg will shape how far the format can stretch.
Why it matters
Othership is a live test of whether social bathing works as a repeatable, multi-market operating model rather than a single-hit venue. The jump from downtown creative neighborhoods to the affluent Upper East Side is a demand-geography signal: if the model holds uptown, it can hold almost anywhere. The Futurestudio through-line, connecting Othership to Sant Roch, Re, and Umvelt, makes this an exportable design system, not just a brand expansion.
The bottom line
Othership is betting that the social bathhouse is not a downtown phenomenon. A 2027 opening on East 86th Street would test that thesis on one of Manhattan’s most traditional residential corridors, backed by the design firm behind Sant Roch, which AN Interior called France’s largest sauna.
Updated September 28, 2026: photography refreshed with views of existing Othership locations. The Upper East Side opening remains planned for 2027.
