Water Spa: Aire Ancient Baths Opens in Manhattan,NYC Photographed by Pieter Estersohn

Aire Ancient Baths in New York City's Tribeca

 

The lobby of Aire Ancient Baths

The locker room

 

A stone basin from a sixteenth-century palace in Granada, Spain, with old copper faucets.

For those weary of the whitewashed, clinical spa experience, there is an old-world antidote on a side street in New York’s Tribeca. Among mid-century furniture stores and neighborhood restaurants, in a former textile factory built in 1883, Aire Ancient Baths opens its doors today, bringing with it a time-honored bathing-beauty culture.

The spa—a deeply atmospheric subterranean cavern lit by candles alone—fuses soaking traditions from the Greek, Roman, Ottoman, and Arab empires into one elegant water world. Aire’s first location opened in Seville in 2004 in a sixteenth-century palace that had original Roman baths beneath it; two more followed in Barcelona and Almería. Cofounder Armando Prados—who grew up in an area in southern Spain where roughly 300 public baths built from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries were rapidly disappearing—wanted to recapture the traditional ritual of relaxing and rejuvenating through water.

The Romans’ progression from cold to hot pools—the frigidaria to the caldaria—is the prevalent idea here. But Prados has also been influenced by the Greeks’ taste for individual tubs as well as the Ottoman and Arab regimens, where steam and hot stones were preferable to a thorough soaking.

“We regard bathing as an intensely private matter,” says Garrett Fagan, Ph.D., a professor of ancient history at Penn State. “The ancient Romans had precisely the opposite view: They would invite people to dinner and have a bath before or after.”

The 16,000-square-foot space at Aire—where only 20 people are allowed at a time—is filled with white marble and stone brought from the South of Spain, mainly by boat. Black frame and terra-cotta lanterns from Marrakech proffer warm, flickering light.

Visitors alternate between four pools ranging from fiery (102 degrees) to icy (46 degrees); there is a saltwater bath (the Roman alvea), and a large, ­multiperson tub with aggressive bubbling jets. (“I don’t like the word Jacuzzi,” says Prados.) There’s also a glass-enclosed hammam; when the walls steam over, it looks like a sunken cloud. Heated marble benches provide a good place to rest mid-rotation and sip from the menu of juices and teas. If you choose, add an hour-long four-handed massage (or a fifteen-minute refresher) to your cycle; for maximum indulgence, consider a three-hour ritual including a private bath upstairs (for one or two), infused with a choice of red wine, cava, or olive oil.

All you need to bring is a swimsuit. The spa provides special slippers to be worn in the water because, as Prados says with a shudder, “you don’t want people in flip-flops.”

Aire Ancient Baths; from $75, 88 Franklin Street, NYC, 212.274.3777

ancientbathsny.com