Every room in Recess is a different material. In Montreal's Griffintown, Future Simple Studio lines the Aesop-partnered bathhouse as a 75-minute hot-cold circuit through steel, glass block, marble and pine.
Recess sits below street level in Griffintown, a formerly industrial quarter of Montreal. It is the work of a wellness brand of the same name, with Aesop signed on as product and amenities partner and Future Simple Studio handling the interior. The route is fixed, a 75-minute journey that moves the body through heated and chilled rooms, a circuit built to push the circulatory system between extremes. The design, the studio says, draws from ancient bathing traditions distilled into an elemental, contemporary vocabulary. A different material governs each zone, so the palette itself does the wayfinding.
Arrival is the brightest moment in the building. A counter of raw cold-rolled steel, blue-grey where the metal has been left untreated, stands offset from a lower basin where guests rinse their hands with Aesop soap. Behind it a gridded lattice of glass blocks glows amber, the Recess name spelled vertically in paired letters near the top corner. The same aluminium grid runs overhead as a ceiling, and a wall of stainless steel shelving carries the retail, its clinical sheen close to a pharmacy's.
From there a ramped tunnel descends, its walls washed in dappled light meant to read as water before any water appears. It empties into all-gender changing rooms detailed simply: slate floors, olive metal locker doors, open oak shelving, linen curtains. Beyond the lockers, benches cut from rough marble slabs mark a place to slow down, quarry faces left raw beneath tops worn smooth, plaster walls lit by the soft globes of Bocci sconces.
The sauna is the set piece. It is round, its slatted pine benches tiered in a full ring around a central steel drum that holds the coals, a band of light behind the seat backs throwing a warm line around the ring. Above the coal pit an oculus opens in the domed ceiling and pours down a diffused glow, so the fire is lit from below and the room from above. A brass gong hangs on the far wall. Sit long enough and the pine and low light strip the space back to something almost primal.
Then the temperature drops and the colour follows. The hot rooms are neutral and sand-toned; the cold plunge is a cavern of blue, its twin pools lit from within to a glacial cyan against painted brick and frosted glass. The pool takes twelve people at once, turning the usual solitary shock of cold water into something shared. A wall moulded to look like raw rock partly screens the showers, where cove lighting rakes long shadows across dark tile. The suggested rhythm holds it together: twenty minutes in the sauna, two in the cold, then a pause to talk.
What Future Simple Studio has built is less a spa than an argument about how a bathing sequence should feel from step to step, restraint pushed to the point where marble, steel and pine carry the brand in place of signage. Recess reads as bathhouse and flagship at once, a place where the old business of getting hot and then cold has been rebuilt around a single, unbroken idea of surface.
