Strange noises are building in a Mayfair basement. There is the whirr of a treadmill, which David Sadkin, an elite running coach, is cranking up every minute by 1kph. There is the pounding of shoes. And then there is me, panting as I try to suck in more oxygen through the breathing apparatus that is clamped to my face.
‘Drive, drive, drive! Come on!’ Sadkin shouts as I enter the 16th minute of a test of my oxygen-consuming abilities. I’m told the results will give me a solid indication of my health and longevity (assuming I don’t have a heart attack right now, which feels increasingly plausible).
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Sadkin has told me to keep running until I can bear no more. As he ups the machine another notch to 20kph, I decide I’m done and pull my burning legs off the treadmill. My chest heaves as I wait for Sadkin’s laptop to crunch my data.
I’m at Hooke London, a Mayfair health clinic riding a wellness wave that is sweeping through the world’s smartest postcodes and travel destinations. In a marriage of the private healthcare and luxury real estate and hospitality industries, plush new clinics and highly evolved spas are meeting the demands of HNW health nuts.
‘As a market, it’s just exploded,’ says Kate Woolhouse, CEO of Hooke London, which opened in a stuccoed townhouse just off Grosvenor Square in early 2023. It was founded by her father Lev Mikheev, a Russian-born London hedge fund manager. ‘Even two years ago, I had to explain to potential clientele what longevity is and why they should be interested in it. But now people come looking for it.’
Where wealthy folk were once content to throw money at health problems as they presented themselves, now they want to optimise their every function, collecting data as benchmarks with the goal of enjoying longer and more active lives. Even if they’re content with an average life expectancy, they want to extend their ‘healthspan’, or healthy years.
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‘These are people who used to work so hard that by the time they got to the point at which they could do whatever they wanted, their mind and body started to let them down,’ says Harry Jameson, a personal trainer to the stars (as well as Boris Johnson when he was prime minister). Jameson is the co-founder of Pillar Wellbeing, a luxury private health club that opened in 2023 inside The OWO, the new Raffles Hotel on Whitehall in central London.
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Mikheev, a former physicist who retired from finance in 2017, came to the same realisation 12 years ago after reading the influential 2004 book Younger Next Year by Henry Lodge. It challenged cultural assumptions about ageing and ‘slowing down’ in later life. Mikheev set about transforming his own health, becoming a keen runner and cross-country skier. ‘I’m 61 and my generation has been locked into this reactive medicine model,’ he says. ‘Whether you call it longevity or proactive healthcare, we’re saying you need to invest now.’
I’ve come to Hooke for a taste of the kind of diagnostic testing that new members undergo. They pay up to £54,000 per year, or up to £15,000 for a one-off full day’s investigation without membership. It includes a nutrition consultation, a full-body MRI (typically performed at the nearby OneWelbeck clinic), a bone density scan, an ultrasound of vital organs and a CT heart scan.
My treadmill torture will reveal my VO2 max, a metric that was until recently of concern only to elite athletes. A measure of the maximum volume of oxygen I can consume, it will effectively reveal the size and efficiency of my engine. The more oxygen I can inhale, the healthier I am and the longer I ought to be able to keep ticking over.
I’ll also have my brain scanned while undergoing fiendish cognitive tests (in one, I must draw a line between numbered dots as fast as I can). And I’ll meet a doctor in a consulting room that feels more like the treatment room of a high-end spa to discuss the results of tests on my blood.
Woolhouse, who’s 40 and quit a law career to run Hooke, expected that most members would be in their fifties. ‘We were targeting people who had had successful careers and were starting to take an interest in their wellbeing,’ she says. ‘But there’s been a real generational shift and younger people are much more exposed to wellbeing coverage and have a more proactive view. Our average age is now about 45.’
She thinks Covid partly explains the shift away from the last pervading trend in high-end wellness, the ‘Goop decade’ of yoga and green juice detoxes. ‘It really highlighted how integrated all of our health systems are,’ she says of the pandemic. ‘You could see that people with diabetes or other comorbidities had worse outcomes.’
Covid also fuelled and coincided with advances in health tech and drug development, as well as consumer appetite for health data. Thanks to tracking and monitoring devices including the Oura ring, which Mikheev is wearing as we talk, as well as the Whoop wristband and the increasingly sophisticated health apps on phones, we now seek to quantify everything from our sleep to our glucose levels.
‘During Covid there was also this big shift towards digital experiences,’ says Jameson. Peloton rode that wave. ‘Now we’re seeing a huge shift back towards this hyper-personalised, one-to-one coaching and healthcare at the luxury end of the market.’
Pillar Wellbeing, which has a second branch at the Fairmont Doha and plans to expand further, is less clinical than Hooke but offers far more than the average five-star hotel spa, including nutrition coaching, talking therapies and an assessment that also includes VO2 max (although I’m rather envious to learn that Pillar’s test involves lying down with a matchbox-sized VentriJect heart monitor on the chest. It records arterial vibrations to estimate oxygen consumption).
Highly sophisticated medi-spas are of course nothing new. But by bringing them into a more urban and aspirational luxury hospitality environment, Pillar is recognising shifting demands, says Jameson.
‘These were places that you would go to once a year for your seven-day MOT,’ he says of traditional medi-spas. ‘You know, “I’m going to eat nothing and have a colonic every day, have a lot of biometric testing, thank God I’m not dying and then go back to rolling the dice every year.” Now we’re seeing it as something I visit three or four times a week.’
Hooke and Pillar (where membership costs up to £25,000) are part of a huge growth in hospitality. In the US, prominent life coach Tony Robbins is partnering with LA hotelier Sam Nazarian to launch The Estate Hotels & Residences. They are pursuing what Nazarian describes as a ‘hub and spoke model’ that will initially combine 10 urban longevity centres with 15 luxury resorts, starting in St Kitts and Nevis in 2026. Membership to the centres will cost $35,000, with hefty hotel rates on top.
‘The urban outposts are where you’ll draw blood or have your cryotherapy or hyperbaric chamber sessions, or whatever you want to continue your longevity journey,’ Nazarian tells me. ‘Then at the properties you can relax or work, but also do some hormone therapy or laser treatment in a luxury environment.’
Nazarian, 49, says an app bridges the experiences and provides clients with a full health portal. The app is by Fountain Life, a Florida-based preventative medicine company that Robbins co-founded in 2019. It also provides the Estate’s diagnostic and therapeutic offerings. In another sign of where the market is going, the app is powered by AI, allowing members to interrogate any aspect of their current health simply by asking a question.
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Nazarian, who is responsible for the Mondrian brand, among others, got an unexpected taste of the new model in preventative medicine while trying out his own product. In October he had a brain scan as part of a diagnostic consultation at a Fountain Life clinic in Orlando.
‘I got called within three days with the news that they’d seen an aneurysm,’ he says. ‘I’d never had a brain scan, which is crazy when you think about the access I had up to that point to all the best doctors.’ He quickly had surgery to remove the bulge. ‘They estimated that within 24 months it might fully rupture. It saved my life.’
Estate, part of Nazarian’s SBE group, has also joined forces with Clinique La Prairie (CLP), the Swiss resort founded in Montreux in 1931. The partnership is part of CLP’s own response to the new wellness wave. ‘For us, it’s a way to be present where the client is now,’ says Simone Gibertoni, CLP’s CEO. ‘Once they go back from the clinic, they have a place where they can go every day.’
Gibertoni is committed to doing more than following the trend. In October he travelled to CLP’s new longevity hub in Dubai to announce a longevity fund, with initial plans to raise €300 million to invest in innovators in ageing and health science. ‘We want to focus not only on medical innovation, but nutrition and movement technology,’ he adds. Whether the global wellness industry is worth a mere $1.8 trillion (as McKinsey says) or $6.3 trillion (as the Global Wellness Instutute claims), there is no question that it is a burgeoning market.
CLP has also partnered with Kerzner International, which in February 2024 opened its first Siro hotel in Dubai, with plans for more across the Middle East, as well as in Mexico and Montenegro. Its fitness and recovery ‘labs’, developed in consultation with AC Milan football club, are stacked with tech and treatments. There are cryotherapy chambers and ice baths to aid muscle recovery and reduce inflammation; an MLX i3Dome, a kind of mobile sauna, uses infrared light to treat sore muscles and boost metabolism.
‘The times when you could build a gym in the basement with air-con blowing at 19°C and three green apples as an amenity are over,’ says Philippe Zuber, CEO of Kerzner, which has also opened a CLP longevity hub in the Dubai branch of its One&Only luxury resort group. He strikes a note of caution on data, meanwhile: ‘For so many years we’ve been in the hands of doctors, but now we know more than them because we’re in control of our data. But that needs a safety check.’ Clinics with doctors on staff help to provide this, he argues.
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Back in London, Oliver Zolman, a doctor and longevity researcher who was instrumental in creating the health regime followed by tech tycoon and longevity guinea pig Bryan Johnson, is about to open a clinic in Belgravia. Founders Health pools the skills of four doctors who specialise in rejuvenation and preventative care.
Zolman has developed ‘biological age clocks’ to separately assess and ascribe notional ages to 81 ‘organ types’, including the heart, bladder, tendons and skin. In an advance on the wider trend of calculating overall ‘bio ages’ for people, based on their health and performance relative to demographic averages, he then creates organ-specific protocols, including gene therapy, to try and bring those ages down.
Zolman sees a bright future in the use of AI at the diagnostic level. It’s already being used to detect potential abnormalities in heart scans.
At Hooke, my results are coming in thick and fast, and are later sent to me in a 30-page report. My VO2 max turns out to be the highlight, with a 54.9 reading that places me in the ‘superior’ category. It’s a welcome boost to my confidence as I otherwise slightly creak through my early forties.
My strength and balance are less impressive and would require work with Hooke’s trainers. My brain is basically fine, and the almost 70 biomarkers established by my blood test, from iron to haemoglobin, cholesterol and LDH (an enzyme that can indicate the presence of some cancers), are within normal ranges. Except one: vitamin D.
‘The vast majority of the UK population is really low on vitamin D,’ Dr Ummer Qadeer, a GP specialising in longevity at Hooke, tells me in the consulting room. He says my
levels will be lower still by the end of winter, when sunlight is too weak. I order a bottle of extra-strong pills as soon as I get home, counting myself lucky that, for now at least, the cost of my own shot at longevity is currently £15.
This feature first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 94. Click here to subscribe.
