A 20,000-square-foot Bathhouse opened November 5 at The Park in Berkeley Heights, N.J., marking the NYC-based social wellness brand's first location outside its home state and Pennsylvania. The facility sits inside District Drive, the 60-acre walkable downtown core of a $500 million mixed-use campus repositioning, where it joins a curated roster of restaurants and bars including Boschetto, Grain & Cane, Emberside Brewery, Rosa Azul, and BASH's MODO Hi-Fi Listening Bar.

The Facility

Spanning four levels, Bathhouse Berkeley Heights houses four indoor pools—salt, hot, cold, and neutral—plus two saunas and a steam room. The footprint extends outdoors to a year-round Nordic spa-style deck with a rooftop sauna and three additional outdoor pools. The design formula mirrors what the brand has refined since its 2019 debut in Williamsburg: purpose-built contrast therapy environments that target both dedicated sauna enthusiasts and the broader lifestyle hospitality market. The venue is open daily from 8 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. and is accepting reservations now.

Operator Implications

For hospitality operators and restaurateurs watching suburban mixed-use development, the Berkeley Heights opening underscores a widening trend: wellness destinations functioning as anchor tenants in the same role once reserved for large-format fitness clubs or department stores. Shane Connell, Executive Vice President of The Connell Company, framed the fit directly — "Bathhouse is a perfect fit alongside the diverse mix of dining, hospitality, fitness and entertainment concepts coming to The Park." That positioning suggests wellness venues are increasingly being used to drive foot traffic that benefits neighboring F&B operators, a dynamic worth tracking as similar campus-style developments expand across the Northeast.

Co-Founder Jason Goodman described the brand's underlying thesis as making "sauna culture an accessible part of everyday life," pointing to The Park's walkable campus as the kind of built environment where that pitch resonates with commuters, hotel guests, and residents alike. The campus already includes a 176-room Embassy Suites Hotel and a 112,000-square-foot Life Time Fitness center, giving Bathhouse a captive audience that skews toward the health-and-hospitality consumer segment. Our hospitality industry coverage has documented the growing overlap between wellness programming and food-and-beverage destination strategy at similar mixed-use properties.

With six locations now operating — Williamsburg, Flatiron, Atlantic Avenue, Philadelphia, and two New Jersey openings — Bathhouse is building a regional network dense enough to support loyalty across markets. For the F&B operators co-locating at District Drive, that network translates to a recurring wellness visitor who, per the brand's social positioning, is likely to extend a visit into dining and drinking. Operators considering anchor partnerships or outpost concepts in mixed-use environments would do well to study how contrast-therapy venues are reshaping dwell time and per-visit spend — a pattern our restaurant industry analysis has covered in the context of experiential hospitality growth.

Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.