This article is part of our Design special section about new design solutions for healthy living.
A New Spot for a Hot Sweat and a Cold Plunge
Tapping into a growing enthusiasm for contrast therapy, the practice of exposing the body alternately to hot and cold temperatures, Lore, a bathing club, opens in September in Manhattan. Adopting a membership-only model that caters to frequent users, the spa will occupy a 6,200-square-foot space in NoHo designed by Studioilse in London, with an emphasis on natural materials like clay brick, travertine, white oak and lime-wash plaster. The design was executed by Ringo Studio in New York.
Lore will feature a dry-heat alderwood sauna that can accommodate up to 50 members, as well as a 15-person infrared sauna with a glass wall that looks out on the brick vaults of a disused subway station. A 16-foot-long, chest-deep pool will hover between 48 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit — chilly, for sure, but “you can get in and still be able to talk to someone else,” said Adam Elzer, a restaurateur and cold-plunge devotee, who founded Lore with James O’Reilly, an entrepreneur.
“Instead of meeting somebody for a cocktail on a Tuesday, we see people choosing to do this,” Mr. O’Reilly said of the club. “We are setting it up as an everyday luxury.”
Lore will offer an $89 single-week trial pass. After that, unlimited access will cost members $200 per month, with a $25 surcharge on weekends. Sessions must be booked in advance and are capped at 75 minutes, though there will be options to pay for additional time.
Frequency, the two men noted, is key to unlocking the physical and emotional benefits of hot-cold therapy. Studies have linked regular sauna use to lower rates of fatal cardiovascular and all-cause mortality events, Mr. O’Reilly said. “Plus,” he added, “taking a moment for yourself is a radical act of kindness.” Lore is at 676 Broadway, New York; lorebathingclub.com — STEPHEN WALLIS
Delving Into the Exploits of Obsessive Collectors
The prizes and methods of collectors have changed since the first century B.C., when Gaius Verres was prosecuted for plundering the Roman province of Sicily, where he was magistrate, heaping up artworks, furniture and wrought precious metals out of uncontrollable greed. But throughout history, collectors have generally been considered unhinged obsessives, says James Delbourgo in his new book, “A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting From Antiquity to Now.”
Mr. Delbourgo, a historian at Rutgers University, sorts through the world of object lust with much the same spirit of acquisitiveness as his subjects. Displayed in his metaphorical gallery are medievalists who vacuumed up the purported anatomical remnants of saints for spiritual sustenance; explorers who scoured the earth at their peril to gather flora and fauna that unlocked nature’s mysteries; bibliomaniacs who stuffed their libraries with books that they would never have time to read; romantic aesthetes who sublimated their sex drives into the quest for beautiful objects (or so Freud would have diagnosed them); and, on the far shores of pathology, serial killers both real (like Jeffrey Dahmer) and fictional (like Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs”) who sought to merge with their ghastly objects of desire by ingesting or wearing them.
“Dark tales of the twisted exploits of mad collectors have always done two things,” Mr. Delbourgo concludes. “They’ve served as a warning about the personal and social perils of excessive passion; but they’ve also dramatized the cause of being oneself.” wwnorton.com — JULIE LASKY
An Inclusive Refuge From a Hectic City
Visitors to Manhattan’s Seaport District this fall may notice something out of the ordinary. Sitting near a sheltered pickleball court on the block along Fulton Street between Pearl and Water Streets will be a temporary installation that will attempt to transform one small patch of the hectic Wall Street area into an experiential refuge for neurodivergent New Yorkers.
“We’re testing a prototype for how you can change streets,” said Lindsay Harkema, the project’s architect. She is a founder of WIP Collaborative, a female-led design group (the titular initials stand for both “Work in Progress” and “Women in Practice”) that is dedicated to exploring urban solutions for marginalized communities.
Scheduled to open on Sept. 16, the installation, “The Neurodiverse City,” builds on workshops that have been conducted since 2023 with a range of neurodivergent individuals, most of whom were 18 to 30 years old.
At Fulton Street, the group documented aspects of their surroundings that they believed needed improvement and designed ad hoc interventions. Among them were canopy-like structures created from yarn that lent the corner a softer, more sensorially pleasing appearance.
Sponsored chiefly by the nonprofit Design Trust for Public Space, “The Neurodiverse City” will create what Ms. Harkema described as a “room-like space,” with “built elements for open-ended uses like seating, laying, leaning,” meant to invite passers-by to rest in an atmosphere of playful tranquillity. The hope, she said, is to demonstrate what a more neuroinclusive city could look like, and discover ways that designing for neurodiversity could improve life for everyone.
“It’s a way of responding to this broader need for welcoming, comfortable, meaningful and ultimately more diverse environments,” she said. — IAN VOLNER
Household Gadgets That Promoted Well-Being
Household objects with power over human health are filling a gallery at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in its newly reinstalled displays of decorative arts and design that open on Sept. 13. Rachel Gotlieb, the reinstallation’s guest curator, said that she aimed to create “a visual feast,” emphasizing that “well-being is not just a luxury, but a right.”
The room opens with a “Sitzmaschine” (sitting machine), a bentwood reclining armchair from the early 1900s designed by the Viennese tastemaker Josef Hoffmann. Especially suited to health-care facilities, it has smooth contours that helped to minimize crannies where germs could gather. The museum has surrounded the Sitzmaschine with similarly streamlined works by Hoffmann’s fellow modernists, such as Henry Dreyfuss’s steel vacuum cleaner from 1935 and R. Buckminster Fuller’s prefabricated Dymaxion tin bathroom from 1936.
Tools for personal hygiene, including 15th-century earthenware medicine jars painted with roaring lions, are juxtaposed with vessels for self-indulgences, from ancient striated glass bottles for perfume through a tobacco pipe from the 1940s, which has Art Deco fins on its wooden burl bowl. There is also a strong showing of products conceived in Canada. Elaborately engraved silver snuffboxes were made around 1800 by a Paris-trained metalsmith in Quebec City. A spiky walnut armchair from the 1880s is emblazoned “bien-être”— “well-being”; it was used by artisans in Montreal who helped one another cover health-care costs. — EVE M. KAHN
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