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.
The $4,000-a-year habit
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 top of the ladder
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.
Why Buckhead Village
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.
