Robb Report Luxury Home: Body of Work
January 1, 2008
Q: How did you get into custom gyms?
A: I always loved sports—I grew up playing baseball, tennis and basketball. I also loved design and art and wanted to be an architect, and when I was in high school I became interested in mechanical engineering. After blowing out my knee playing tennis, I got really interested in human anatomy while I was rehabbing. In 1984 I started my own private training business. As my clients got busier, I began to train them at their homes. I noticed that a lot of the home gyms were junk. Most trainers may have a good background in anatomy, but not design or architecture. Most architects have the background in design but not anatomy—I was filling a niche market. I now have a staff of 15, and we do everything from guiding clients to the best equipment for their lifestyle to creating custom equipment that coordinates with their home.
Q: How are home gyms different today than they were 10 years ago?
A: Ten years ago, home gyms didn’t really exist. If anything, people turned a spare bedroom or part of the garage into a makeshift gym, but people weren’t building dedicated spaces. Now it’s more about the space itself than it is any one piece of equipment. My clients see the gym as an investment for their health as well as for the value of their home. Realtors have told me that gyms raise the value of a home more than a theater.
Q: What mistakes do people make when they try to design a home gym themselves?
A: No matter how large the home or the budget, the space is almost always too small. Architects and interior designers don’t think about gyms in the same way they think about entryways or kitchens. The first thing I ask for is a client’s wish list for a gym space. More often than not, they won’t be able to fit everything into the room, and we need to expand. If a husband and wife are going to work out together and they both run, they are going to need two treadmills.
Another mistake is that people think that everything they see at their local gym will translate to the home. If you put thick rubber mats inside your house, the rubber smell will never go away. There’s an issue with construction, too. If your gym is next to a room where your family watches TV, you have to make sure there’s enough soundproofing so they don’t hear you pounding on the treadmill or slamming the weights. People also don’t realize that they need higher ceilings to accommodate tall machines and a lot of electrical outlets on the floor so that you aren’t tripping over cords. Air circulation is important. You might not want cold air-conditioning blowing on you, but you will want some kind of air recirculation from either a fan or window.
Q: What keeps people interested in their home gyms?
A: I do a personality profile on the people using the space. I like to find out what kinds of activities my clients would do if they had the time, and I work around that. For instance, one client told me that he would rather be kayaking and mountain climbing. So we built him an oversize swim-in-place pool large enough to fit a kayak and an indoor mountain climbing wall with a video screen at the top so he felt like he was climbing Everest. A room shouldn’t just be a result of what you can find in a store. I turn it into a fun space—a playroom for grown-ups.
Q: What is the biggest misconception people have about buying gym equipment?
A: Everyone seems to think that the elliptical is the answer, but since it’s not a natural human movement, it doesn’t train as effectively as some of the other cardio machines. Rowing machines are great—if you do it right, you can tone your entire body.
People also get confused when they buy top-dollar equipment and it feels nothing like the equipment at their health club. Gym machines are designed for frequent use with heavier steel and stronger weight stacks—individual homeowners can’t get those same commercial-grade products. When you’re working out at home, you don’t have the distractions that you do at a health club, so everything is magnified, and you notice the quality of the equipment a lot more.
The equipment at resorts and health clubs is not necessarily the best, but it’s what people see the most, so they think it’s the best. We end up creating a lot of custom equipment not just because it looks better but because it performs better.
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