All very wellness

Wellness real estate is now all the rage, finds Rupert Bates, but is this about clean air or just hot air? And will there be a medium-rare steak within walking distance?

IT seems I live just a few miles from the country’s top ‘wellness hotspot’. Brighton in East Sussex is where it’s at if you want health and well-being.

The housing market loves a survey, whether it is based on hard data or soft sentiment. It used to be all about prices and graphs – where was on the up, which locations on the slide – but now anything goes. A ‘wellness’ survey was conducted by a company called Flowercard, which does what it says on the tin and sends flowers in a card. While happy to see my local town top of the table, above York and Bournemouth, I take issue with the criteria, which includes number of ‘vegan friendly’ restaurants per capita, as well as yoga classes and spas. They clearly didn’t question this resident. Each to his own in their food choice but my wellness is directly proportional to the number of medium-rare steaks within striking distance of my home and promoting veganism as the healthier of the diets would require a whole new column.

Health and well-being, especially in the wake of the pandemic, should of course be taken seriously. Air quality and pollution levels, the more obvious criteria in the survey, are essential barometers to read, with the ‘health’ of a building as important as its practical purpose and architectural aesthetic.

It is a harmless way to market a florist, but ‘wellness’ is a huge business. The Global Wellness Institute tells us the market is now worth £200 billion, up from just over £100 billion in 2017. While construction shrank, ‘wellness real estate’ grew by over 22%.

I have no idea what constitutes wellness real estate but apparently the number of ‘wellness-focused’ residential projects worldwide more than tripled, from 740 in 2017 to more than 2,300 today.

The report Wellness Real Estate: Looking beyond COVID-19 was written to shine a light on the built environment, using data and case studies. “Just three years ago, wellness real estate was a concept not understood well by consumers, builders, developers or investors. The pandemic has driven the idea of building for human health into the mainstream consciousness,” says Ophelia Yeung from the Global Wellness Institute (GWI).

Our homes are now seen as “‘the protectors and enablers of our very health and well-being”, with wellness real estate “quickly moving from elective to essential”. Heavy property hitters such as Blackstone and JLL are crunching the numbers and tracking the investment trends, and I was getting well invested until the GWI said: “The human bottom line that drives the financial bottom line is the hard evidence about how wellness architecture, design and innovation actually impact health and well-being.” Is the human bottom line a yoga position?

The pandemic and lockdowns have made us much more aware of the air we breathe, the buildings we live in and how they impact us physically and mentally. Anything that encourages architects and developers to think how their schemes improve the lot of the resident or the worker is to be welcomed, but it is clean air we need, not hot air. I’m off to eat pork ribs and chicken wings, reducing Brighton’s chance of holding on to top spot.