Othership Signs a Third NYC Bathhouse on the Upper East Side
Futurestudio, the Toronto design firm behind Sant Roch and every existing Othership location, confirmed a fifth site on the Upper East Side opening in 2027. The move tests whether social bathing works beyond downtown creative neighborhoods.
An Othership guided session. Photo: Othership.
Othership, the Toronto-born social bathhouse operator, is planning a fifth location on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, its design firm confirmed to AN Interior 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 year and a half.
Futurestudio, the Toronto-based firm led by Ali McQuaid Mitchell that has designed every Othership location to date, told AN Interior’s managing editor Isabel Ling that the Upper East Side outpost is expected to open in 2027. Neighborhood outlets placed the space at 14,000 square feet at 201 East 86th Street, near Third Avenue, though neither the address nor the square footage has been confirmed by Othership or a public filing.
Key Facts
- Operator: Othership (Toronto, founded pandemic-era by Robbie Bent and Myles Farmer)
- New location: Upper East Side, Manhattan, opening 2027
- Reported address: 201 East 86th Street, near Third Avenue (unconfirmed)
- Reported size: 14,000 square feet (unconfirmed)
- 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)
- Capital raised: $20.6 million
- Visitors served: More than 160,000
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 across every location: cedar carried from the sauna room through the entire reception area, custom river-stone floor tiles cut from real stones, and light fixtures with hand-painted filters to emulate candlelight. 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 placed Othership inside a wider run of 2026 NYC wellness leases on July 10, alongside 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 has raised $20.6 million and served more than 160,000 visitors across its existing locations. A fifth location in 2027, if it opens on schedule, would give the company three Manhattan addresses inside roughly two years of entering the New York market. No other social bathing operator has scaled that quickly in a single US city.
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 the clearest 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 make it the first operator to test that thesis on one of Manhattan’s most traditional residential corridors, backed by the same design firm that built France’s largest sauna.
Arlene Scott
Senior Wellness Correspondent & Hospitality Consultant
Arlene Scott brings over fifteen years of reporting and consulting experience across energy infrastructure, sustainable design, and thermotherapy-focused hospitality.
Full byline
Arlene Scott is a Senior Wellness Correspondent for SaunaNews.com, bringing over fifteen years of experience at the intersection of energy infrastructure, sustainable design, and thermotherapy. Her work focuses on the physiological benefits of passive heat therapies and the sustainable integration of sauna culture into modern wellness routines.
Arlene's background is rooted in the clean energy transition. She was a founding writer at MicrogridMedia.com, where she covered the technical and economic viability of desalination projects, microgrid deployments, and distributed renewable energy systems. During the mid-2010s, she was a regular contributor to Greentech Media (GTM) during its independent era — prior to the Wood Mackenzie acquisition in 2016 — reporting on the early integration of thermal energy storage and sustainable infrastructure.
Transitioning her focus from macro-energy systems to human-scale wellness, Arlene now applies her technical background to the hospitality sector. She operates as an independent consultant, advising boutique hotels and eco-resorts on the design, energy efficiency, and historical authenticity of commercial sauna and thermal spa installations. Her consulting work ensures that high-end wellness facilities balance traditional Nordic bathing principles with modern sustainable engineering.
Arlene holds a specialized certification in Applied Thermic Wellness from the Nordic Institute of Passive Heat Studies (NIPHS) and is a recognized associate member of the International Sauna Association (ISA). When she isn't reviewing the latest innovations in infrared technology or consulting on a new resort project, Arlene can be found tending to her own traditional wood-fired sauna in the Pacific Northwest. You can read her complete archive of essays on energy, wellness, and sustainable living at www.arlenescott.com.
