The Private London Gym That’s Become a Celebrity Safe Haven
How many people does it take to get actor Harris Dickinson’s abs in “The Iron Claw” or Jonah Hauer-King’s prince-like strength in “The Little Mermaid”?
The answer is a small village — of trainers working out of a basement in West London.
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The Lighthouse Club, a private gym and wellness space, is fast becoming a celebrity playground that hosts actors, musicians and other high-profile people. There, stars can train and potentially catch their next big break over a pint of beer (kept on tap).
Membership is referral-only, with a firm vetting process, and starts at 200 pounds per month.
The newly opened space is the brainchild of college friends George Ashwell, David Hastie and Josh Betteridge, who previously operated personal training business Before the Lights (now closed).
“After university, I went straight into a personal training gym environment. My best friend, who is one of our investors and also an actor, started sending me young actors to get in shape with very little budget, then his agent started doing the same,” says Ashwell, who convinced Hastie and Betteridge to join him when they returned from living in Melbourne, Australia, for two years.
“Then it turned out that some of those actors we worked with ended up being very, very famous — so we started getting more jobs and we snowballed into becoming trainers for actors,” he adds.
It would be easy to mistake the trio for club members. They’re as attractive as Hollywood types, and dress in subdued Levi’s jeans and NoTwoWays sneakers.
“We don’t want to turn up in tight T-shirts and flex — it can put people off sometimes and exercising is quite hard if you haven’t done it. We have clients who don’t like exercising, we’re just here to put structure into their lives,” Hastie says.
The cofounders don’t talk about their clients, but some are featured on their podcast, “The Lighthouse Presents: Before the Lights.” Big names include James Norton, Joe Dempsie, Kaya Scodelario, Dominic Cooper, Maisie Williams, Olivia Cooke, Paapa Essiedu, Nicholas Hoult and more. They have no personal training qualifications, but put their college physiotherapy degrees to work instead.
Hoult, Essiedu and Cooke are also investors in the club.
The name of their business is an ode to the rallying cry of “lights, camera, action” on set. They now know better than anyone else what happens before the lights come on.
Stepping into The Lighthouse Club feels like walking into a wing of a mansion. The large black doors at the bottom of the dark staircase lead to a spacious hangout space equipped with sofa booths; a tea and coffee station; a small fridge stocked with ginger shots and juices; a kitchen with an island and two smoothie blenders; a fridge with fresh food from Kaffeine café, and a beer tap for a post-workout treat.
The club has tapped Dalston-based artist Shem to curate the walls with his paintings, which are inspired by the Neo-expressionism movement.
Next to the kitchen is a small study area with desk lamps and a bookcase. The cofounders have asked their clients to donate their favorite books.
Around the corner, there’s a roomy breakout area for guests to use before their training begins, which will also be used for social events in the coming months.
“This place needs to feel like our clients are at home. They can go to the fridge and grab something without asking permission,” Hastie says.
“We realized quite quickly that a lot of the people we’ve got to know come from really normal [backgrounds], and then all of a sudden they’ve been pulled into a different environment. It’s quite exhausting to always have a feeling of like, ‘Am I allowed to do that?’ or ‘Is someone else supposed to do that for me?’” Betteridge adds.
The training rooms don’t look like workout spaces, and with the right lights, they could easily be turned into Berlin’s Berghain. The amenities are luxurious, with two ice baths, two dry saunas, a hidden terrace and a reformer pilates room run by Georgia Canavan, the club’s head of wellness.
The Lighthouse Club also doubles as a working space. Many of the actors and musicians asked the cofounders to create a space where they could record tapes for auditions or voiceovers for upcoming projects.
So the owners asked clubgoer Dominic Cooper and his brother if they wanted to put a mini version of their boutique recording studio, Fiction Studios, inside the club.
The studio is the only facility that’s available to nonmembers of The Lighthouse Club, and adds a quirk to the overall experience. It has red floor-to-ceiling interiors and a stacked vintage bookshelf, which includes a first edition of a Fyodor Dostoevsky novel for the more cerebral guests.
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