The Clearing
A members' club for mental and emotional health.
820 Ralph McGill Boulevard NE, Atlanta · Opening 2027
The Clearing
A members' club for mental and emotional health.
820 Ralph McGill Boulevard NE, Atlanta · Opening 2027
Atlanta BeltLine · Opening 2027
A hospitality-led private urban retreat and mental health club, opening on the Eastside Trail.
The idea
Fifty years ago, membership was a luxury and the idea that an ordinary person would go three times a week to lift weights would have sounded eccentric. Now it is unremarkable. Somewhere in that shift, caring for your body stopped being treatment and became maintenance.
That has not happened for the mind. Care for it is still something you go and find when something has gone wrong, in a building designed for nothing else, arranged around a diagnosis rather than a life.
A person can now get comprehensive, beautiful, well-designed care for almost every part of themselves. This part should not be the exception, and it should not be the one people are quietly embarrassed to book.
So we are building the Equinox of mental and emotional health. A Soho House where the membership is care. A place people join on purpose, walk into without flinching, and use most weeks of the year.
Where this stands
On the Eastside Trail in Old Fourth Ward, in the former Illuminarium building.
Two floors. Five therapy rooms, two treatment rooms, a gathering room and the wet side.
Funded to build and to operate through opening.
Which means clinical structure, licensure and staffing are being decided now, not later.
The practice
Private and acoustically treated, on both floors, so care runs through the house rather than sitting at one end of it. Residential in feel: dark walnut, cognac leather, honed stone. Nothing about them says waiting room.
A member arrives into a bright open lobby where they can sit, work, or wait for their therapist. Before or after the hour they can use the sauna, take a class, or spend twenty minutes in the Cocoon, and integrate the session in the same building instead of on the sidewalk.
Care is delivered and billed through our own practice. Reception, cleaning, scheduling, marketing and the membership base are ours to run. The hour belongs to the clinician.
Community
The hour is one part of it. What decides whether anything holds is what happens in between, and who else is in the room. That is what the gathering room is for, and it is the part of this we are least willing to compromise on.
Standing groups running alongside individual work, in a room designed for it rather than a conference table borrowed for the evening.
Something worth coming back for on the six days a week nobody has an appointment. Held in the same room, by people members recognise.
Leadership strategy, the enneagram, attachment theory. Longer sessions and visiting facilitators, open to members and their people.
Members who come for the sauna end up in a class. Members who come for a class end up in a group. That is the path we are designing for, and it is the reason a club can reach people a practice never will.
The line
There is a version of this idea where the therapy exists to sell the sauna. That is not what we are building, and a clinician should be able to tell the difference in the first meeting.
Whoever leads this practice holds genuine authority over clinical care. Founders do not overrule treatment decisions.
Clinical records and permissions stay separate from our hospitality and marketing systems. Front of house knows only what it needs.
People choose what they need. We do not tell anyone how they should feel, and we make no claims we cannot stand behind.
The building
Roughly 4,700 square feet across two floors. Members come for the sauna, the classes and the rooms. That is the traffic the practice sits inside.
Plus two treatment rooms for bodywork, reiki, spinal network analysis and practitioner-led somatic work.
The opportunity
People already pay two hundred dollars a month for a beautiful building, a schedule that holds them accountable and a room of people doing the same work. Nobody has built that for mental and emotional health, and the clinical side of it is a real business rather than an amenity.
We are talking now with experienced group-practice owners, ahead of opening. Some of those conversations are paid consulting. Some may become something larger. We would rather design the clinical model with people who have already built one than guess at it and correct later.
Operating model, capital plan and three-year forecast are available under NDA. None of it lives on this page.
Who is building it
Founder. Former mergers and acquisitions attorney at King & Spalding, and an entrepreneur with a successful exit in 2021. RYT 200, breathwork certified and Pravilo certified. Originated the concept and secured the site and the capital behind it.
Partner. Founder of FitConcierge and Vision Launch Co. Has opened seven studios and spent a decade on the operating side of boutique wellness: memberships, staffing, retention and the unglamorous parts that decide whether a space survives its second year.
Get in touch
We would rather hear what we are getting wrong now than after we build.
820 Ralph McGill Boulevard NE, Atlanta · Opening 2027