It was my good luck that on the same day I was touring Love.Life – a new luxury health centre conceived by John Mackey, co-founder of US supermarket chain Whole Foods Market – I was also nursing a gym injury. It felt promising, if not surreal, to arrive at the doorstep of an establishment with nearly every treatment I could think of under one roof: diagnostic tests, rejuvenating therapies as well as fitness and nutrition plans to stave off future health problems.
Love.Life’s lobby was blindingly bright, with porcelain floors and mod furniture in peppy colours. There was a spacious cafe on one side and a futuristic gym on the other, animated by various blinking screens.
Around the corner were what looked like red-white-and-blue space pods. What they were for, I had no idea. “Hi there,” said a receptionist at a clinically simple desk.
Was I in the lobby of a boutique hotel? A doctor’s office? Or was this an astronaut training centre? Or all of the above? The idea for this lavish temple of wellness had been swirling in the back of Mackey’s brain for almost four decades. After co-founding Whole Foods in 1980, and growing the natural and organic foods store into an international network of more than 460 outlets, Mackey and company sold the publicly traded company to Amazon in 2017 for US$13.7 billion.
Mackey left Whole Foods in 2022 but had already started working on plans for the club a year earlier. Over the last three years, he and his Love.Life co-founders – Wh.