How health and happiness is becoming big business in property
Buyers don’t just want somewhere to live, they want a property that will make them feel good as well
5 min
Wellness lifestyle real estate is building momentum as a property category, adding up to a staggering $275 billion annual spend globally. And the feel-good factor is only set to grow to around $580 billion by 2025. Calculated by the Global Wellness Institute (GWI), a non profit organisation educating public and private sectors about preventative health and wellness, the group ranks Australia as the third largest market for wellness lifestyle real estate at $16.54 billion.
However “wellness” in the 2020s goes far beyond a token pool or dinky gym in the basement of a residential block. Today, health and wellbeing is being woven into the bricks and mortar of new buildings from the foundations of biophilic design to sophisticated facilities.
A pandemic-induced push for wellness
Australians are a healthy bunch, ranking sixth out of 150 economies in GWI’s Global Wellness Report 2021, with a per capita wellness spend of $5239 a year. As a result, developers down under are sitting up and taking notes.
While this wave of wellness was brewing before COVID, the pandemic is credited with super charging the phenomenon turning medium density buildings into holistic vertical villages where residents can work rest and play, all under one roof.
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Julian Sammut, COO of Sammut Group which is currently selling Vue in Cronulla and Coast on the Gold Coast, says across their residential and commercial projects, wellness has taken a front seat.
“With more of us working from home people don’t want to venture to as many different places to get what they want,” Sammut says. “Our projects are a one-stop shop where everything is integrated into the one building.”
Sammut says the shift to wellness has also been shaped by the type of buyers looking for property.
“Many of our purchasers into these luxury products are downsizers. They’re coming from large houses with lots of personal amenities,” he says, adding that the category of buyers are often facing a lifestyle trade off when moving.
“We wanted to address these compromises and slowly started, even before COVID, to implement wellness into our projects with things like break out areas, pools, spas, ice baths, saunas, massage and Pilates rooms, as well as meditation spaces.”
In addition to physical facilities, Sammut says the group identified the desire for optional services.
“We’re trying to go a step above by allowing purchasers to feel they’re on holiday in their homes every day,” Sammut says. “So you can jump on the concierge service and book in a personal trainer for the gym, or use the service to deliver your groceries. We’ll even stock the fridge and open up your apartment to make sure there’s a nice breeze and a sense calm in the space when you arrive home after a weekend away.”
And developers such as Sammut are looking at the big picture, beyond individual apartments and developments by carefully curating each project’s surroundings.
“At Vue we’ve got a Harris Farm supermarket underneath ensuring residents have direct access with the ease of heading back upstairs to unload their groceries in their apartment,” he says.
“And at Coast, one of the main reasons we bought the site was because it’s next door to the Northcliffe Surf Club and adjacent to a public park that we’re upgrading with child-friendly equipment.”
Getting the green light
Toby Long, Mirvac’s general manager of residential developments for NSW says one of the company’s current ambitions is to achieve a WELL Certification from the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) for their latest project in Sydney’s Green Square — a first for an Australian developer.
The Frederick and The Portman Collection buildings have a range of features which aim to hit the 11 WELL principles: air, movement, mind, water, thermal comfort, community, nourishment, sound, innovations, light and material.
“If achieved, WELL Certification for a residential apartment building will enable Mirvac to offer a new standard of luxury living,” Long says, adding that in recent years wellness and self-care had risen to the top of Australians’ house hunting wish lists.
“The pandemic, bushfires, and flooding have increased awareness of health and wellbeing. Australians are demanding higher sustainability standards and are rethinking how they live and work.
“With more people working from home, it is crucial to create homes that prioritise health and wellbeing.”
Long says the Frederick and Portman Collection will offer bespoke air conditioning, including a filtration mechanism to improve internal air quality.
“Good design will ensure thermal comfort in your apartment. We’ve achieved this by incorporating dual-aspect apartments that benefit from natural breezes and optimal sunlight,” Long says.
“The design encourages the natural circadian rhythm to support good sleep quality, mood, and productivity with access to natural light and an option to upgrade to tuneable white-to-warm light fixtures, supporting a more natural dawn-to-dusk lighting experience.”
To address the growth in working from home, Long says Mirvac has also created The Business Studio, a co-working lounge with communal spaces, study nooks, WIFI, and AV connectivity for work-life balance.
“It’s a space for residents to work, socialise, and collaborate, bridging the gap between work and home.”
The great outdoors
Although residential developers are champions of the built environment, many are now realising the important role mother nature plays. Mark Hosking, associate director at Fortis, says while the group has a long history of working in the wellness space, they are taking it next level.
“At 8 Brighton Street in Richmond we created what I think is the best rooftop amenity in any residential project in Melbourne,” Hosking says. “We’ve got an outdoor yoga room where we’ll be putting on classes for residents, then an amazing sauna overlooking the bay, with an ice showers.
“On the mental wellness side, we’ve got bookable function spaces to host guests, socialise, and build that sense of community.
“This includes a working from home area so rather than working from your apartment every day, you can go on rooftop to a private co-working space with desks and lounges. It’s next to the communal gardens where people can also farm their own herbs and vegetables while meeting their neighbours.”
Contemporary design principles are also front and centre of Fortis’ present and future projects, according to Hosking.
“At our recently completed project in Brighton, Pillar + Tide, we’ve taken a biophilic design approach where we’ve brought vegetation into people’s lives with really large outdoor spaces so people can exercise and enjoy fresh air at home,” he says.
“We see wellness as equal parts physical health and mental health. There’s a lot of great research that talks about how a connection to nature and access to green space driving people’s mental happiness.
“So we try to overlay landscaping into the biophilic design concept because it not only has to look beautiful, but people are happier when they have that connection to nature within their own home.”
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Weary of ‘smart’ everything, Americans are craving stylish ‘analog rooms’ free of digital distractions—and designers are making them a growing trend.
5 min
James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.
The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.
Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.
The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.
But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.
Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.
New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.
And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”
Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.
“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.
From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.
Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.
Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.
In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.
A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.
“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.
Screen-Free ‘Escapes’
“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”
Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.
Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.
“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”
A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.
Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.
Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.
“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.
As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.
“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”
Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.
The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.
When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”
Analog Accessories
Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?
“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.
Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”
More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.
For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.
Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.
Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.
“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.
In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.
Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.
The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.
Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.
The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”
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