World Spa’s Big Bet Is Authenticity at Scale

Brooklyn’s 50,000-square-foot World Spa is not trying to be the slickest two-hour contrast club in New York. It is trying to be something harder to build and harder to copy: a full-scale urban bathhouse where Russian banya, Finnish sauna, Moroccan hammam, Turkish hammam, clay-and-hay heat, Japanese-style onsen pools, snow-room cooling, dining, events, and private rentals all live inside one three-story operating system.

Leonid Khanin, World Spa’s co-founder and design director, recently described the project less as a replica of the bathhouses he knew growing up and more as a correction to them. In a webinar with Cedar & Stone Nordic Sauna, he recalled older post-Soviet bathhouses as culturally powerful but often hard to enjoy. World Spa’s answer was to widen the door: keep the ritual, improve the hospitality, and make the experience legible to first-timers without flattening the traditions that inspired it.

That positioning matters because the U.S. bathhouse boom is splitting into distinct lanes. Some operators are building event-led, nightlife-adjacent formats. Luxury hotel groups are treating thermal suites as primary draws rather than spa add-ons. World Spa sits in a third category: the large-format urban thermal destination, where the moat is not just programming or a single hero room, but breadth, dwell time, and the ability to serve multiple use cases under one roof.

Video context: This Finlandia Foundation panel includes Leonid Khanin of World Spa and was published on YouTube as part of National Sauna Week programming.

A Bathhouse Built Like a Museum

World Spa’s official story starts with scale. The project transformed a disused Brooklyn parking lot into a 50,000-square-foot, three-story wellness facility after nearly a decade of work by BK Developers and RYBAK Development. The mandate, according to the company, was total authenticity, with materials and equipment sourced directly from the traditions being interpreted.

Khanin’s design background helps explain why the place reads differently from a typical American day spa. In the webinar, he framed the goal as building something interactive—an experience people would not just understand intellectually, but feel with their bodies and with their skin. His museum and immersive-design background shows up in the way World Spa organizes the property as a sequence of rooms, each with its own material language, thermal profile, scent palette, and sonic identity.

The official room list makes the argument concrete. World Spa includes a Grand Banya and Petite Banya, an Event Sauna, Clay & Hay Sauna, Infrared Sauna, Aroma Sauna, Moroccan Hammam, Turkish Hammam, Snow Room, Himalayan Salt Room, hydrotherapy pool, vitality pool, onsen pools, cold plunge, private hammam rooms, and private Venik Platza rooms. That is a broad catalog, but it is not random. Each room is given a specific heat and humidity logic, which helps turn “world cultures under one roof” from a branding line into a real operating framework.

The Materiality Is the Message

Many U.S. operators talk about authenticity. World Spa appears to have spent real money on it. The company says it imported handmade Moroccan and Turkish tiles for its hammams, Kelo pine from Northern Europe for its saunas and banyas, and equipment from European manufacturers specializing in thermal environments.

That sourcing strategy is especially visible in the Grand Banya. World Spa describes it as operating at 176°F to 194°F and 60% humidity, and says the room is built from rough kelo wood. The room copy also calls it the largest banya in the US, a claim that, if nothing else, signals the scale of the bet. Nearby, the Event Sauna runs at 160°F to 194°F and 10% humidity and is built around group aufguss programming rather than solitary use. The Clay & Hay Sauna pushes in another direction, using handmade adobe-style walls, a custom German heater, and a scheduled herbal bucket ritual to create a very different sensory profile.

This is the most interesting part of the World Spa story. The project is not purist in the narrow sense; it is translational. In the webinar, Khanin described wanting the environments, materials, and craft of the source cultures, but also a level of beauty and welcome that would make the rooms work for Brooklyn now, not just for insiders who already know the code. That is a subtle but important distinction. World Spa is not pretending to be Sanduny transported whole into Midwood. It is building a hospitality version of authenticity: recognizably rooted, but deliberately staged for a wider audience.

The Circuit Is the Product

What standalone bathhouses often understand better than hotel spas is that the real product is the circuit, not the treatment room. World Spa’s official site repeatedly nudges guests toward sequencing: heat, cool down, rest, repeat. The Snow Room is positioned as a gentler alternative to cold plunging; the onsen trio spans 52°F, 101°F, and 104°F; the Event Sauna is paired with nearby experiential showers; the hammams are framed as part of a broader hot-cold journey.

That logic matters commercially. Design for Leisure, which worked on the project, has argued for years that hydrothermal circuits are a differentiator not only because guests want them, but because self-service thermal areas can produce stronger returns than labor-heavy treatment rooms that sit idle. The Global Wellness Institute’s hydrothermal standards make the same point from the other side: these spaces are technically demanding, capital intensive, and unforgiving if underplanned, but when done correctly they are no longer optional side amenities. They are the core experience.

World Spa seems built around that thesis. Treatments are layered on top of the circuit, not the other way around. The property offers 70-plus treatments, but it also has a lounge, a members club, private event lodges, cabanas, and private rental formats that turn a visit into a four-hour-or-longer occasion instead of a 50-minute appointment. On its private-events page, the company pitches everything from corporate meetings to birthdays, wine tastings, and product launches. That is not spa logic. That is destination logic.

Why the Format Is Working

In the Cedar & Stone webinar, Khanin said World Spa is approaching 200,000 visits and employs about 170 people, with a large food-and-beverage component attached to the business. He described the audience as more local than tourist, drawing heavily from Brooklyn and Manhattan, and said roughly 70% to 75% of guests are women. He also emphasized that return visits are strong, which may be the most important signal in the entire story: once guests learn the circuit, they come back for the circuit.

That repeat behavior fits the broader market story. The Global Wellness Summit has identified social saunas and bathhouses as emerging third spaces, partly because younger consumers are looking for healthier, alcohol-light places to spend time together. World Spa shows that the third-space idea does not have to look like a breathwork party or a hotel thermal suite. It can also look like a very large, very literal bathhouse.

The key is that World Spa does not sell only one mood. It can handle the solo recovery guest, the first-time tourist, the bachelorette group, the private business event, the regular local who knows exactly how long to stay in each room, and the couple who want dinner built into the day. That flexibility is what big-footprint operators are really buying with extra square footage.

The Real Lesson for Operators

The most valuable part of Khanin’s webinar was not the design talk. It was the warning. He argued that many consultants still think like hotel-spa planners, where the thermal area exists to support room nights rather than to stand on its own P&L. If you build a bathhouse as though it is a hotel amenity subsidized by guestrooms you do not actually have, he said, the model can break quickly.

That warning lines up with current hydrothermal planning guidance: seek specialist advice early, avoid cutting corners in wet areas, understand audience fit, and account for plant-room, maintenance, water-egress, and acoustic realities before final layouts are locked.

World Spa’s own timeline reinforces that point. The project was in motion years before opening, and Khanin said the hardest parts included pandemic-era delays, technical sourcing, direct manufacturer relationships, staffing, and navigating local approvals. In other words, the glamorous part of global bathing culture in Brooklyn sits on top of a very unglamorous mountain of logistics.

Harder to Copy Than It Looks

New York’s bathhouse market is getting crowded, and Khanin said directly that he welcomes that competition. His argument was that the operators are not really building the same thing. Some are optimized for shorter, class-based visits. Some lean harder into sleek social programming. Some minimize amenities. World Spa has chosen the opposite path: more room types, more dwell time, more back-of-house complexity, more food and beverage, more event capacity, and more cultural references.

That makes the venue expensive to build and operationally harder to run. It also makes it harder to clone. A stripped-down contrast club can be copied relatively fast if the neighborhood and capital stack are right. A 50,000-square-foot bathhouse built around imported materials, multiple thermal identities, dining, rentals, and a full-day guest journey is a different proposition.

World Spa’s story, then, is not just that Brooklyn got a giant bathhouse. It is that one operator decided the best answer to a growing sauna-and-spa market was not to simplify the category, but to enlarge it. In a U.S. sector still figuring out what a modern bathhouse can be, that may turn out to be the boldest move of all.