New wellness facility granted special use permit
Deliberately Fit owners to create ‘Taos Mountain Wellness’
Taos County is set to get a new wellness facility in the coming years, as Deliberately Fit owners Brannon and Rosa Badeaux plan their new facility at the Quail Ridge Taos complex off State Road 150. The complex, called Taos Mountain Wellness, will offer a new “congruent care” model of fitness, specializing in all aspects of physical care, including multiple kinds of exercise, massage, physical therapy and acupuncture. Along with a new exercise facility, the campus will contain an outdoor pool with a retractable cover, dining areas, a 28-room hotel and more.
Overall, the new Taos Mountain Wellness campus will take up 7.5 acres of Quail Ridge’s property and the 0.9 acres that currently contains Venado Plaza.
After an appeal by local condo owners at Quail Ridge Taos disputing some of the language in the special use permits pertaining to Taos Mountain Wellness’ wastewater access, both the homeowners and Taos Mountain Wellness reached an agreement. On Tuesday (Dec. 1) the Taos County Commission voted to give the company the go-ahead to purchase the property and eventually start phase one of their development. Taos Mountain Wellness received special use permits for the Venado Plaza property as well as the Quail Ridge property.
The Badeauxs now look forward to creating a vision that has been decades in the making. At Deliberately Fit, they began to craft their vision of “congruent care,” but ended up being limited by the size of the building. “It’s been our dream at least for 20 years to have a much larger wellness facility to
accommodate a lot more people and a lot more ideas and really just to have a team of practitioners working together to accommodate any given individual more than we’ve ever been able to,” said Rosa Badeaux.
Badeaux explained that the idea of congruent care has long been a passion of hers, and that the end vision will contain a full circle of care that includes exercise, physical therapy, massage, salt treatments, acupuncture, saunas, tennis, rock climbing and more. Classrooms will be available alongside a production studio, where they can film exercise videos and “fitness prescriptions” for those who don’t make it to the facility.
Lead business consultant and business attorney for the project, Gary Feuerman, described it as a “wide ranging fitness-oriented wellness destination which com
bines all the best elements of Taos including all the adventure you can find all around us, as well as a place where you can find congruent care.”
Feuerman said that they hope to fit into the growing fitness travel industry. “It’s going to be a destination,” he said. “What has been developing in the U.S. and abroad over the last decade is the energetic spirited adventure travel and fitness travel area. You have hotels and motels around areas such as Taos where people come for fitness and for the adventure that’s available in the area.”
The Badeauxs say that they are hoping to form a good relationship with Taos Ski Valley and hope to provide room, board and exercise for the ski area’s residents. Feuerman added that the area is also just “a stone’s throw from the Ski Valley. When it becomes a yearround resort it’ll be a great jumping off point to take advantage of that,” said Feuerman.
The Badeauxs and Feuerman eventually settled on the property by the Quail Ridge Taos condos and Taos Tennis. “When we happened upon Quail Ridge as an option for our business we got really inspired by that because it’s such a popular, well-loved place in Taos and we wanted to be able to really beautify it and bring some new items to elaborate on what is already there and make it more of a fitness and wellness center,” said Brannon Badeaux.
Feuerman added that “Quail Ridge is ideally suited for our project in that it already has some of the fitness aspect to aspect to it [with] the flow of the campus that exists today.
Rosa Badeaux said they hope to be good neighbors to the homeowners at Quail Ridge Taos. “It’s not our goal to make it anything but beneficial for everyone involved, including our neighbors,” she said. “We’ve worked really hard to try to stay as far out of their view and to be as careful as we can really be. We would love to be a part of their lives in the best possible manner.”
Though the process has been slowed due to COVID, the Badeauxs and Feuerman remain persistent. “You have to be resilient during these times to get a project done like this. As far as the [special use permits] go, we are all confident we are down to the last couple sentences of language,” said Feuerman.
Rosa Badeaux added that they “are still very determined and persistent, as you must be during this time.”