Bathhouse, the New York wellness company built around communal sweating and cold water, opened its first Philadelphia location on September 25 inside The Bellevue.
The main experience occupies roughly 31,000 square feet across multiple levels. A planned 7,000-square-foot outdoor terrace will eventually bring the full project to about 38,000 square feet.
Inside are three thermal pools, three heat rooms, a steam room, massage rooms and a café. Everything is coed, swimsuits are required and day passes start at $29, although prices rise depending on the day and time.
For first-timers, the process is intentionally simple. Bathhouse provides a locker and towel. After changing, guests can move between the pools and heat rooms at their own pace, book a massage or stop for food and a drink.
The pools are set to 104 degrees, 98 degrees and a bracing 50 degrees. The traditional banya reaches between 185 and 195 degrees. There is also a dry sauna, a lower-temperature infrared sauna and a steam room.
Bathhouse co-founder Travis Talmadge has his own post-work circuit down to the minute.
At 5:30 p.m., he spends 15 minutes in the banya, jumps into the cold plunge and makes the 6 p.m. Aufguss, a guided sauna session involving essential oils, music and a sauna master waving a towel to circulate the heat.
“It feels like a hard restart from any challenges of the day,” Talmadge said.
Early visitors have been a little less polished than the company’s launch campaign.
One detailed review posted to the Philadelphia subreddit described the locker rooms as clean and well-stocked and said the writer would return. Another visitor liked the pools and saunas but wished someone had provided a tour or a map, saying the different spaces were not clearly labeled.
Others questioned whether the experience justified higher peak-hour prices.
One Reddit commenter asked whether it was “for beautiful people only.” A visitor responded that they saw a range of ages and body types. Another offered a more concise review: “I am a hideous lump and I went. No one bothered me.”
Bathhouse is also entering a city that can be suspicious of anything arriving with a New York pedigree. Talmadge said the company anticipated that skepticism.
“We didn’t build Bathhouse as a cookie-cutter franchise that you just copy and paste into a new zip code,” he said.
The Philadelphia location was designed around The Bellevue itself, a 1904 landmark currently undergoing a large-scale revival. Bathhouse retained architectural details including the lower level’s exposed brick rather than recreating one of its New York locations room for room.
The larger space also gave the company a chance to address lessons learned in New York, particularly around crowding and movement between pools, saunas and rest areas.
The outdoor terrace, scheduled for 2027, will add another pool, sauna and lounge overlooking Walnut Street.
The harder question is whether Philadelphians will accept a New York wellness brand as an everyday gathering place.
Talmadge does not want Bathhouse to operate like a silent hotel spa where everyone arrives alone, whispers for an hour and leaves. He sees it as something closer to the historical bathhouse: a place to recover, but also to spend time with other people.
“Wellness shouldn’t have to be an isolating or overly serious endeavor,” he said. “You can get the benefits of high-performance recovery, but you can also hang out with friends, meet new people, share a meal or have a drink.”
He expects the Philadelphia crowd to include athletes recovering from workouts, office workers escaping for an hour, couples on dates and friends attempting to recover from the week.
In other words, almost anyone willing to spend part of the day sitting in a 195-degree room before voluntarily entering 50-degree water.
Bathhouse Philadelphia
1418 Walnut Street
Open daily, 8 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.
Day passes start at $29
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Really surprised no mention of the huge private equity investment or crypto mining. Decent conversation on this going on over on reddit