Home Gyms Hit Their Stride During Covid
Some homeowners are vowing to ‘never go back’ to the gym after building their own fitness spaces.
3 min
Before the pandemic, Tracy Tutor was a regular at the Dogpound, a boutique gym in Los Angeles popular with celebrities. It’s where she met her boyfriend, personal trainer Erik Anderson. But when Covid-19 forced gyms to shut down, the couple found themselves without a place to exercise.
“When there was nothing to do but eat and drink and workout and sleep, we got this wild hair: Why don’t we turn the garage into a home gym?” says Ms. Tutor, a real-estate agent with Douglas Elliman and star of Bravo’s “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles.”
Within a month, they converted the detached garage of their Beverly Hills home into a mirror-wrapped fitness centre, spending close to US$100,000 transforming the 21-foot by 22-foot space. The biggest challenge was sourcing the equipment, including free weights, a squat rack, a bench press, an exercise bike and a pilates reformer. “One day, Erik drove three hours to get a set of dumbbells,” Ms. Tutor says.
Once fully equipped, the gym gave Mr. Anderson a place to safely meet with clients and provided Ms. Tutor with a convenient space to workout. “I don’t think I’ll ever go back to a gym again,” she says.
Ms. Tutor is not alone.
Interest in Garage Gym Reviews, a website and social community that helps people create home gyms, has exploded since the pandemic’s onset. Site owner Cooper Mitchell says that its “diehard” Facebook group grew from 15,000 members to more than 100,000, while website traffic and YouTube subscribers increased fivefold.
“Gyms are reopening, but we’re not seeing a drop off,” Mr. Mitchell says.
The National Association of Home Builders found that 47 percent of homebuyers in 2020 considered a home gym essential or desirable.
“People are reevaluating their homes to be more inclusive to take care of themselves,” Ms. Tutor says.
Jason Friedman, a realtor with Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty on Long Island, says that home gyms have become a deciding factor for a lot of buyers. “We did have multiple instances where one home having a gym was the final push the buyer needed to transact on that property as opposed to other options without one,” he says.
Designers and architects are seeing similar demand. In the last 18 months, each of Chicago-based dSPACE’s 10 residential projects has included a dedicated fitness area. They range from 100-square-foot workout areas with smart equipment like Pelotons or Tonals to full-blown professional gyms with basketball courts. The spaces cost anywhere from $15,000 to well over $100,000, depending on the size and amenities included.
“A home gym becomes a lifestyle,” says Kevin Toukoumidis, dSPACE’s principal architect. “It offers more freedom.”
Acoustics and lighting are the top priorities for any exercise room, Mr. Toukoumidis adds, so the space is comfortable and noise is not disruptive to the rest of the home. Natural daylight is best when possible, but mirrors and a warmer temperature light can evoke a daytime feel.
Vancouver-based interior designer Stephanie Brown likes to add texture, like grasscloth or linen wallcovering, and warm materials like hardwood floors or panelled walls. She also suggests adding artwork and a statement piece of furniture, like a console table below a television. “Stack fitness magazines on top and stock bottled water to make it feel more like you’re at a hotel spa gym rather than a basement,” she says.
When it comes to gym equipment, Mr. Mitchell advises to buy “less and better,” and expect to spend around $1500 to $5,000. Choose pieces that you’ll actually use, even if it means spending more money. A Peloton, for example, will cost at least around $2200 before the membership. “But it’s worth it because it’s going to motivate you to actually use it,” he says. “Whereas a regular stationary bike may just end up being a coat hanger overtime.”
For one of Ms. Brown’s Maui-based clients, that meant indulging in a full line of products from Pent, a high-end exercise equipment company based in Poland. The pieces are made from carved walnut and brass, and a single 8-pound kettlebell costs US$396, while a full set of 20 dumbbells with a stand goes for US$18,680. “They look like jewelry,” Ms. Brown says. “Even if you’re not feeling the draw to workout, it makes it a more pleasant experience.”
Roxanna Kennedy, a member of Garage Gym Reviews from Florence, Ky., “refused to workout at home” prior to the pandemic, opting for in-person kickboxing classes instead. But after the birth of her second son last year, she didn’t have that option when she was looking for a way to lose weight. A personal trainer helped her choose the right weightlifting equipment, plus a heavy bag for boxing, and she turned a sunny corner of her basement into a gym. She’s down 43 pounds.
She has kept her membership to a commercial gym, but rarely uses it. With two children under the age of four, “childcare is a major barrier” for her. “I wake every morning at 5:45 and get a full workout completed, before I even wake up the kids and go to work,” Mrs. Kennedy says. “I wouldn’t have that option if I didn’t have a home gym.”
Reprinted by permission of Mansion Global. Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: August 30, 2021
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Terrible commutes. Expensive child care. Employees explain why they will keep working from home.
4 min
What’s still keeping American workers out of the office?
At a time when restaurants, planes and concert arenas are packed to the rafters, office buildings remain half full. Thinly populated cubicles and hallways are straining downtown economies and, bosses say, fragmenting corporate cultures as workers lose a sense of engagement.
Yet workers say high costs, caregiving duties, long commutes and days still scheduled full of Zooms are keeping them at home at least part of the time, along with a lingering sense that they’re able to do their jobs competently from anywhere. More than a dozen workers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal say they can’t envision returning to a five-day office routine, even if they’re missing career development or winding up on the company layoff list.
Managers say they will renew the push to get employees back into offices later this year. The share of companies planning to keep office attendance voluntary, rather than mandatory, is dropping, according to a survey released in May of more than 200 corporate real-estate executives conducted by property-services firm CBRE, one of the largest managers of U.S. office space.
A battle of wills could be ahead. The gap between what employees and bosses want remains wide, with bosses expecting in-person collaboration and workers loath to forgo flexibility, according to monthly surveys of worker sentiment maintained by Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who studies remote work.
Escalating expenses
One reason workers say they’re reluctant to return is money. Some who have lost remote-work privileges said they are spending hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of dollars each month on meals, commutes and child care.
One supercommuter who treks to her Manhattan job from her home in Philadelphia negotiated a two-day-a-week limit to her New York office time this year. Otherwise, she said she could easily spend $10,000 a year on Amtrak tickets if she commuted five days a week.
Christos Berger, a 25-year-old mortgage-loan assistant who lives outside Washington, D.C., estimates she spends $2,100 on child care and $450 on gas monthly now that she is working up to three days a week in the office.
Berger and her husband juggled parenting duties when they were fully remote. The cost of office life has her contemplating a big ask: clearance to work from home full time.
“Companies are pushing you to be available at night, be available on weekends,” she said, adding that she feels employers aren’t taking into account parents’ need for family time.
Rachel Cottam, a 31-year-old head of content for a tech company, works full time from her home near Salt Lake City, making the occasional out-of-town trip to headquarters. She used to be a high-school teacher, spending weekdays in the classroom. Back then, she and her husband spent $100 a week on child care and $70 a week on gas. Now they save that money. She even let her car insurance company know she no longer commutes and they knocked $5 a month off the bill.
Friends who have been recalled to offices tell Cottam about the added cost of coffee, lunch and beauty supplies. They also talk about the emotional cost they feel from losing work flexibility.
“For them, it feels like this great ‘future of work’ they’ve been gifted is suddenly ripped away,” she said.
Parent trade-offs
If pandemic-era flexible schedules go away, a huge number of parents will drop out of the workforce, workers say.
When Meghan Skornia, a 36-year-old urban planner and married mother of an 18-month-old son, was looking for a new job last year, she weeded out job openings with strict in-office policies. Were she given such mandates, she said, she would consider becoming an independent consultant.
The firm in Portland, Ore., where Skornia now works requests one day a week in the office, but doesn’t dictate which day. The arrangement lets her spend time with her son and juggle her job duties, she said. “If I were in the office five days a week, I wouldn’t really ever see my son, except for weekends.”
Emotional labor
For some, coming into the office means donning a mask to fit in.
Kenneth Thomas, 42, said he left his investment-firm job in the summer of 2021 when the company insisted that workers return to the office full time. Thomas, who describes himself as a 6-foot-2 Black man, said managing how he was perceived—not slipping into slang or inadvertently appearing threatening through body language—made the office workday exhausting. He said that other professionals of colour have told him they feel similarly isolated at work.
“When I was working from home, it freed up so much of my mental bandwidth,” he said. His current job, treasurer of a green-energy company, allows him to work remotely two or three days a week.
Lost productivity
The longer the commute, the less likely workers are to return to offices.
Ryan Koch, a Berkeley, Calif., resident, went to his San Francisco office two days a week as required late last year, but then he let his attendance slide, because commuting to an office felt pointless. “I’m doing the same video calls that I can be doing at home,” he said.
Koch, who works in sales, said his nonattendance wasn’t noted so long as his numbers were good. When Koch and other colleagues were unable to meet sales quotas in recent weeks, they were laid off. Ignoring the in-office requirement probably didn’t help, he said, adding he hopes to land a new hybrid role where he goes in one or two days.
Jess Goodwin, a 36-year-old media-marketing professional, turned down an offer to go from freelance to full time earlier this year because the role required office time and no change in pay.
Goodwin said a manager “made it really clear that this is what they’re mandating right now and it could change in the future to ‘you have to be back in five days a week.’”
Goodwin, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., calculated that subway commutes to Midtown Manhattan would consume more than 150 hours annually, in addition to time spent getting ready for work.
Goodwin’s holding out for a better offer. She said she would consider a hybrid position if it came with a generous package and good commute, adding: “And I would also probably need something in my contract being like, ‘We’re not going to increase the number of days you have to come in.’”
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
