Equinox is finally coming to Georgia, and it chose Buckhead Village.
The New York luxury fitness company announced in June that it has leased a 44,000-square-foot, ground-level space on the south side of the Buckhead Village District, near Pharr Road, next to fashion retailer COS. The club is scheduled to open in 2027. It will be Equinox’s first location in Georgia and its seventh in the Southeast.
“Atlanta has long been one of the most important markets on our growth roadmap,” said Andy Subervi, Equinox’s head of development, in the announcement. The company is designing the club with New York architecture firm Goodrich, and plans call for training floors, group fitness and Pilates studios, personal coaching, a full-service Spa by Equinox, and the brand’s own food and beverage program.
Adam Schwegman, who leads retail leasing for Jamestown, the district’s owner, called Equinox a category-defining addition and said the brand fits the roster the company is building for the neighborhood.
That’s the news. The more interesting story is the business model behind it — because Equinox is not really in the gym business, and the company has been surprisingly open about what business it is actually in.
In a recent Wall Street Journal video — part of the paper’s “The Economics Of” series, available on YouTube — Equinox executive chairman Harvey Spevak sat down to explain, step by step, how the company’s economics work. It’s six minutes long and worth watching in full.
The Journal’s headline framing gets right to it: Equinox charges around $350 a month, and members keep coming back. Standard memberships run roughly $200 to $400 a month, depending on the market and club access, before initiation fees. Add a little personal training, and the Journal puts the typical member’s tab at about $4,000 a year.
But the monthly dues are just the entry point. The video walks through the company’s playbook in four moves: grow fast, make the membership “sticky,” drive up what each member spends, and then sell an even more exclusive tier above it all.
The spending part is where Equinox separates itself from every other gym. Personal training runs $150 to $250 a session in major markets. Then there’s the spa, the recovery services, the apparel shop, the juice bar, and Equinox Hotels, which opened its first property at Manhattan’s Hudson Yards in 2019. Each one gives a member another way to spend, and according to the Journal, the company’s stated plan is to push average member spending to roughly $6,000 a year.
The most revealing part of the strategy sits at the very top. In 2024, Equinox launched Optimize, a longevity program that includes personal training about three times a week, nutrition and sleep coaching, monthly massage, a health concierge, and twice-a-year testing of more than 100 biomarkers through a partnership with lab company Function Health. All in, it costs about $40,000 a year.
It has a waiting list. Speaking with CNBC earlier this year, Spevak said more than 1,000 people are in line for Optimize, and he summed up the company’s entire thesis in five words: “Health is the new luxury.”
Spevak practices what he sells. In the WSJ feature, he describes himself as a “human guinea pig” for health and wellness treatments — body scans, infrared saunas, and, by his own account, a $10,000 procedure to have his blood cleansed of toxins.
Whatever one makes of that, the numbers say the market is real. Equinox operates about 115 clubs today with roughly 40 more planned — Atlanta now among them, alongside Nashville, Charlotte, Toronto, and South Florida. The company is private and doesn’t disclose financials, but Spevak told CNBC that 2025 was a record year and he expects 2026 to be bigger.
The model explains the address. Equinox doesn’t sell workouts; it sells a daily routine to people with high incomes and higher expectations, and it needs a setting that matches the price tag. A walkable luxury district — with Hermès, Patek Philippe, and Le Bilboquet as neighbors, and the St. Regis and Waldorf Astoria minutes away — does half the brand’s marketing for it.
For Jamestown, the logic runs the other way. Since buying the struggling development then known as The Shops Buckhead Atlanta in 2019 and renaming it the Buckhead Village District, the Ponce City Market developer has been steadily reworking the tenant mix — and as we reported in our 2023 interview with Jamestown director John Wilson, the strategy has been deliberate from the start. “We invested in Buckhead Village from the standpoint of creating a community center that brings people together and gives people a reason to gather,” Wilson told us then.
The leasing numbers back the approach. Jamestown has reported district same-store sales running well above pre-pandemic levels, with luxury fashion sales up more than 60 percent over 2019, and the past year has brought a run of first-in-Georgia arrivals: LoveShackFancy, British womenswear label ME+EM, Hill House Home, and Anthropologie’s standalone Maeve concept, with Jeffrey Kalinsky’s famed Jeffrey boutique returning to Atlanta at 3070 Bolling Way this August. Jamestown has also proposed a 19-story mass-timber residential tower at 309 Buckhead Ave., the current home of Fetch Park, which would put roughly 300 more households within a block of the new club.
A boutique gets visits; a gym gets routines. Equinox members show up several times a week, before work and after, which is exactly the kind of repeat foot traffic every restaurant and retailer in the district wants next door. That, more than any single lease, is what makes this deal matter: it converts the Village from a place people go into part of how thousands of people organize their week.
Membership pricing for the Atlanta club has not been announced. Based on the company’s other markets, don’t expect it to be cheap — and based on the company’s track record, don’t expect that to slow it down.
For years, the surest sign that someone in Buckhead was throwing a dinner party was a car idling in the cramped Andrews Square lot, hazard lights blinking, while its driver dashed into Lucy’s Market for a gift basket, a casserole, a bottle of wine, and three stems of something beautiful. That little parking lot has always asked something of its regulars — and, if Kim Wilson is right, a big part of the reason her beloved market is about to move.
“My customers tell me, ‘Kim, I don’t even come anymore because it’s such a hassle to get in there,'” Wilson told the Atlanta Business Chronicle, “and the last woman I told we were moving said, ‘Oh, thank goodness, because I’ve hit my tire rims so many times in this parking lot, it drives me crazy.'”
So Lucy’s is moving. After a decade tucked into Andrews Square at 56 East Andrews Drive, the market will decamp for a larger, free-standing building at 3402 Piedmont Road NE — a two-story landmark directly across Piedmont from Atlanta Tech Village. “Lucy’s has always been about creating an experience our customers can’t find anywhere else,” Wilson told the Buckhead Paper. “This new location gives us the space to continue growing while preserving the personality, service, and sense of discovery our customers have come to love. We’re grateful for the continued support of our community over the years, and we’re excited for this next chapter as we welcome both longtime customers and first-time visitors, making even more memories in our new home.”
Lucy’s market is, by now, a piece of Buckhead folklore. Wilson, a former advertising sales executive with a passion for her own backyard vegetable garden, became what she has called an “accidental entrepreneur” in 2009, when she took over an abandoned gas station on Roswell Road and began selling produce she hand-picked at the farmers market before dawn each morning. She would set the fruits and vegetables out on the corner, chat with customers all day, pack up what didn’t sell, and start over the next morning.
The stand became a store. The store moved, and moved again — four times in its first decade — before landing in 2017 at Andrews Square, where it blossomed from a farmers market into one of the city’s go-to destinations for locally prepared food, fine wine, fresh produce, flowers and gifts. Named for the two Lucilles in Wilson’s life — her grandmother and her 33-year-old daughter — Lucy’s has become a “Buckhead Betty” staple, the kind of place where a shopper ducks in for a tomato and leaves with the makings of a party.
Much of the business today is in gifting. Wilson caters to an upscale clientele with personalized baskets that range from $100 to more than $1,000, shipped nationwide and assembled by hand for clients who include some of Atlanta’s biggest firms.
The current Andrews Square space runs about 10,000 square feet, and Wilson’s team of more than 20 employees, as she put it to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, “need every inch.” The new home on Piedmont Road will exceed 16,000 square feet across two floors: office space, gift-basket assembly and storage below, with retail taking over the entire top floor.
And then there is the matter that has bedeviled Lucy’s shoppers for years. The new location offers more than 70 free parking spaces — a near-unimaginable luxury after the tight, in-and-out crush of Andrews Square, in one of the densest corners of Buckhead Village.
The building itself has a history. The address at 3402 Piedmont Road most recently housed Blue Martini Lounge, the Florida-based upscale martini bar that opened its first Atlanta location on October 30, 2020, in an 11,000-square-foot space with three distinct bars, a live-entertainment stage, a dance floor, and a covered patio, and has since closed. Owned by Selig Enterprises — the family-owned Atlanta real estate firm founded in 1918, with a portfolio of more than 15 million square feet spanning more than 250 properties across the Southeast and a deep bench of Buckhead holdings — the roughly 16,400-square-foot structure sits in the Buckhead Forest pocket, near where Piedmont bends toward Lenox Road and just across the street from Atlanta Tech Village at 3423 Piedmont. Shaun Weinstock of Weinstock Realty & Development LLC, a boutique tenant-representation firm, led Wilson to the Selig-owned property.
Lucy’s is not moving to a quiet stretch. The Piedmont Road corridor has become one of Buckhead’s busiest retail corridors, and the market will land amid a wave of new and relocated neighbors.
The corridor is also getting a ground-up makeover of the roadway itself. Since 2024, the Buckhead Community Improvement District — working with the City of Atlanta, GDOT and the Atlanta Regional Commission — has been rebuilding this entire stretch of Piedmont as a “complete street,” widening it from five lanes to seven while laying a 10-to-12-foot multi-use path for pedestrians and cyclists on the west side, adding landscaping, new signals and signage, and burying the overhead power lines. The long-planned project, first envisioned in a 2008 transportation study and funded through the City’s Renew infrastructure program along with GDOT, regional and CID dollars, runs from Peachtree Road to Lenox Road — the exact blocks where Lucy’s new home sits. It has been under construction for more than two years and, after a pause during the summer 2026 FIFA World Cup, is slated for completion by the end of 2026, meaning Lucy’s should arrive just as the torn-up roadway settles into its new, more walkable form.
A short distance up the road, the shopping center once known for the legendary “Disco Kroger” has been reborn as Buckhead Landing, anchored by a new, roughly 54,000-square-foot Publix — replacing the Kroger that closed at the end of 2022 after nearly 50 years — and stocked with fresh arrivals. Among them is the Michelin-starred Omakase Table, which earned one star in the 2024 Michelin Guide Atlanta and relocated from 788 West Marietta Street in West Midtown, opening in Buckhead in March 2025. Its chef-owner, Leonard Yu, called the move a homecoming: “Omakase Table originated as a pop-up in Buckhead, so this neighborhood is where it all started and is very special to me.” Buckhead Landing has also drawn Andover, Massachusetts-based Burtons Grill & Bar, the Mediterranean favorite Aviva by Kameel, the Atlanta-based children’s retailer Carter’s, and Handel’s Homemade Ice Cream. Just down Piedmont, Rreal Tacos and Twin Peaks have filled the former Farm Burger spot. Lucy’s new home also sits near Sunday Brunch ATL.
Taken together, it reads less like a neighborhood losing a fixture and more like a corridor gaining momentum — the same evolution that has drawn other shops toward this revamped stretch of Piedmont. Lucy’s leaves behind an Andrews Square that remains a jewel box of Buckhead retail, home to neighbors like Boxwoods and the Australian eatery Isla & Co. It is not a retreat so much as a graduation.
Wilson has laid out a careful transition. Starting in September 2026, Lucy’s begins its move. A sale — “mainly of home goods” — begins the week of August 24, followed by a brief closure. The new location is set for a soft opening on October 3, with a grand opening about a week later.
And then comes the season Wilson lives for. Holiday plans at the new store are, characteristically, over the top: a gondola running through the store and a Ferris wheel perched atop the produce.
“I blow it out,” Wilson told the Atlanta Business Chronicle. “It’s about creating memories with things you can’t find anywhere else.”