Lanserhof at The Arts Club

Lanserhof, with the founders of The Arts Club · Mayfair, London

Our assessment: Gold · 86%

The one thing

Six floors on Dover Street holding a privately owned 3 Tesla MRI scanner, a movement analysis laboratory and a cryotherapy chamber that runs to minus 110 degrees, and not a drop of water to bathe in anywhere in the building. It was billed at opening as the world's first medical gym, and seven years on very little in London has caught up with it.

The verdict

Start with what is not here, because it saves everybody time. There is no pool. No sauna, no steam room, no hammam, nothing to plunge into and nowhere to lie in the warm. Six storeys of Mayfair building and not one of them is wet. If a spa day is the plan, this is emphatically not it, and the people who run it would say so first.

What is here is a joint venture between Lanserhof, the Austrian and German medical wellness house whose clinics have been treating people on the Tegernsee and above Innsbruck for decades, and the founders of The Arts Club, the 1863 institution across the road. Lanserhof brought the method and The Arts Club brought the membership and the manners, and the result opened in 2019 on the site where Dover Street Market used to be.

The building is by ingenhoven associates and the idea driving it was a bronze clad core running the full height, a cube of circulation opening onto a lobby on every floor, white walled and timber lined within. Materials were chosen against health criteria rather than for effect. The first floor lounge nods to the panelled warmth of the club opposite, and then the building becomes steadily less social as it rises, changing rooms and studios giving way to consulting rooms and imaging suites, until the upper floors are simply clinical.

That gradient is the argument. Downstairs is a gym, and a very good one, Technogym's most recent machines with the load, resistance and range of motion set by a trainer rather than by a pin in a stack, and classes kept deliberately small, taking in reformer Pilates, yoga, HIIT and aerial yoga. Upstairs is a Care Quality Commission registered medical practice with a medical director, consultant GPs, radiographers and a nursing team, which is a genuinely different proposition from a spa with a wellness menu attached. The two floors are meant to talk to each other, and the whole method rests on the idea that training without measurement is guesswork.

The measuring is where it turns unusual. The MRI is a 3 Tesla scanner owned by the house, which almost nothing else in London can claim, and around it sit cardiology, blood, gut and micronutrient panels, sleep diagnostics, and a movement laboratory doing postural and pedographic analysis, muscle testing, gait, EMG and force plate work. A whole body scan is £2,950. The longevity screening runs over two days, with the results discussed a week later and a health coach picking it up from there.

The house rules tell the rest of the story. No guests, ever. No photography, no cameras on view, no press, and member identities kept confidential. Nobody under eighteen through the door. No alcohol on the premises at all. It reads severely written down, and in practice it makes for a very calm building, brushed steel and muted tones and a great deal happening quietly behind white doors.

The water

There is none, and it is worth saying twice. No pool, no sauna, no steam room, no experience showers, no hydrotherapy, nothing outdoors.

What stands in its place runs cold instead of hot. The cryotherapy chamber is medical grade rather than the recreational sort, holding somewhere between minus 60 and minus 110 degrees for no more than three minutes at a time, and it is used for recovery but also, under supervision, for rheumatic and inflammatory conditions and for some skin conditions. A first session is £50, which makes it the cheapest way anybody can walk in off Dover Street and try the place. Beside it sits an intermittent hypoxic therapy room, thinning the air to something like altitude and training the body against it.

Cold and thin air rather than heat and water. That is genuinely the offer, and it suits the building.

Treatments

The menu reads more like a clinic's than a spa's, and the good part is how much of it is open to people who have not joined. Physiotherapy, osteopathy, chiropractic and craniosacral work sit alongside sports therapy, acupuncture, dry needling, shock wave and ultrasound guided injections, and there is massage too, fifty minutes for £130 as a non member. Infusion therapy runs deep, from vitamin drips through to NAD courses, and psychotherapy, pain management, nutrition and naturopathy all have their own consultants.

The programmes are the real signature. LIFE Fasting is medically supervised and built on Lanserhof's own method, running seven, fourteen or twenty one days with daily treatments, consultations and checks folded in, which is the Lanserhof cure translated into a city that goes home in the evening. The Longevity Screening takes two days of consultations and diagnostics including a biological age measure. NESA therapy runs as a five week course of ten to twelve sessions. None of these are afternoons out, and that is rather the point.

Augustinus Bader is the one product house in the building, with its own ground floor treatment space and a pair of duet experiences that pair an infusion with a facial, or cryotherapy with a body treatment and a salt foot bath. Facial aesthetics come in separately through a visiting oculoplastic consultancy. At weekends the four London Serenity packages open the place up properly, from £290 with breakfast, an infusion and a class.

Getting in

The membership is the front door and it is an old fashioned one. Applications go on a form with a photograph, the membership team meet every candidate in person, and election is by committee and unanimous, with one vote against enough to end it and no reason ever given either way. Renewal is reviewed each year rather than assumed. Full membership is £6,500 a year with a joining fee of £1,500, an overseas membership £4,000, a young person's £4,000 with a smaller joining fee, and an executive membership £15,000. Existing Arts Club members pay no joining fee. What that buys is the gym, the classes, the changing rooms and the lounge, and almost everything else is charged on top.

The part most people miss is that the clinic asks for none of it. Consultations, screenings, scans, physiotherapy, infusions, massage and cryotherapy are all bookable by anyone at a published non member price, and the weekend packages are sold to members and non members alike. The door is narrower than it looks from the street, but it is not shut.

Medical appointments go through the clinic on +44 (0)20 3967 6969 or by email, with a registration form and a health questionnaire completed beforehand and arrival fifteen minutes early. The club opens at half past six on weekday mornings and the clinic at eight, with Saturday hours as well and the club open on Sundays. Cancellation is free beyond forty eight hours. The clinic floors are reached by lift from the ground.

What to know before you fall in love

• There is no wet spa at all, no pool, no sauna, no steam room and nothing to plunge into, so the only temperature experience in the building is a cryotherapy chamber.
• The gym, the studio classes, the changing rooms and the members lounge belong to members alone, and members may not bring a guest.
• Membership is an annual commitment with a joining fee, elected by committee, and renewal is reviewed each year rather than automatic.
• Almost everything beyond the gym, the classes and the lounge is charged separately, so the subscription is the beginning of the cost rather than the whole of it.
• Nobody under eighteen is admitted to the building, and alcohol is not served anywhere in it.

Best for

Anyone who would rather have their body measured properly and then trained on the evidence. Solo visitors above all. International members wanting a London base for the medical side of their year.