I have a bone to pick with builders who developed condos in Belltown and downtown Seattle between the 1990s and early 2000s. This isn’t a huge thing – unless you are young, energetic, athletic and don’t mind working up a sweat to keep fit. You know, many of us living in local condos!
Having visited several of our city’s finest contemporary condos over the years, I am struck by how few offer a great fitness center – a space that would normally attract people to live in the building and cause many to work out and socialize. (Okay, maybe we can pause on the socialization until there is a vaccine.)
I live in a Belltown condo that has a decent gym but it can become crowded when more than five people want to hit the weights, ellipticals, treadmills and universal at the same time. But, honestly, that has only happened once or twice in the seven-plus years of living there.
There is something special – almost privileged – when you can visit your own workout room at any hour. It’s a chance to release a few endorphins, destress and firm that belly.
My beef is with select condos that seemed to have forgotten the importance of fitness – for whatever reason. What should be an enjoyable workout routine is sometimes challenging.
You must wonder what the building developer was thinking when creating a space about 8 feet by 10 feet at this fitness center (pictured). Or maybe we wonder what the Homeowners Association (HOA) had in mind when shoe-horning 10 items of machinery and equipment into that space. Visiting the room while previewing a home for a client, I was stunned at the configuration and wondered to myself whether one person on the elliptical could deliver a sharp right elbow to the head of an unsuspecting fellow resident on the treadmill at his side.
Instead of squeezing a full range of exercise equipment into a phone booth of a room, the area should be reduced of machinery to allow freedom of movement without risking serious injury.
In another part of the city, there is a relatively spacious fitness center in a condo that has had an unfortunate string of bad luck – broken equipment that takes time to repair or replace. There is nothing more frustrating than to change into your gym clothes and walk to your condo fitness center and find the piece of equipment you planned to use is busted. Sure, you improvise for a day or two … or a month or two … depending on the responsiveness of your condo property manager and HOA.
This same building also limits its residence to 30-minute workouts during “peak hours,” which happen to be a pair of four-hour segments. That’s 25% of the day you must leave the room – not simply finish a cardio machine – after a half-hour. (The location of the sign near the entrance did not appear to be associated with the use of specific equipment.) Sorry, but that would probably be a deal-breaker for me if I were seriously considering buying a home in that building.
On the other side of the coin, more contemporary condo buildings are making a big splash with their fitness centers. You have to start with Insignia Towers – the twin, 41-story high-rises on the eastern edge of Belltown – which offers dozens of cardio machines in a two-story workout palace, supplemented with a Pilates studio, lap pool, jacuzzi spa, sauna and steam room.
Elsewhere in Seattle, the condo community known as 2200 Westlake uses the excellent fitness center and small indoor pool within the Pan Pacific Hotel. Olive 8 shares the facilities of the downtown Hyatt, although there is an extra fee for residents to use the place with hotel guests, and there are plans for expansive fitness centers at both Spire (some are nicknaming the area perSpire) and First Light – each at or near the top of their luxury high-rises and offering stunning views.
It is almost as if builders of the current projects identified an issue with the earlier condos and are making amends by working out (did you see what I did there?) a way to improve the fitness center and make getting in shape worth the sweat.