From St Kilda to Canberra: The Wellness Residential Revolution Spreading Across Australia

When Tim Gurner unveiled plans for his $800 million project at 424-426 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, the industry took notice. Approximately 180 residences across 19 levels, designed by Chicago-based architecture firm SOM, with the kind of specification that positions the project in a category of its own in the Melbourne luxury market. The announcement followed his completion of Beach House at 1 Wellington Street in St Kilda, a 297-apartment build-to-rent development delivered with Qualitas, and his ongoing expansion of Saint Haven, the private wellness membership club brand he launched in Collingwood in 2023.

The Saint Haven Effect

Saint Haven is not a residential product. It is a private members-only wellness club, capped at 500 members per location, with a waitlist that reached 15,000 after the Collingwood flagship opened. Inspired by northern Italian bathhouses, it offers a candlelit grotto bathhouse with a 35-degree thermal mineral pool, ice plunge baths, cedarwood sauna, aromatherapy steam rooms, cryotherapy, infrared sauna, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, IV infusions, a strength and conditioning studio, reformer Pilates, cycle studio, and co-working spaces. Membership runs from $179 to over $1,000 per week. Gurner plans 20 to 30 locations globally by 2030, with South Yarra and Toorak expansions already confirmed for Melbourne, and Dubai and Los Angeles in the international pipeline.

The significance of Saint Haven for the residential market is not just in the club itself. It represents Gurner's articulation of what the premium wellness lifestyle looks like as a built environment, and it sits alongside his residential developments as a statement of intent about the direction luxury living is heading. In Sydney, his $800 million project at 189 Kent Street in the Barangaroo precinct takes this vision into ultra-luxury residential: 91 residences, most occupying full floors at around 250 square metres, with a sky pool, private dining, valet, and concierge. The logic is consistent across every project: build for the life, not just the apartment.

Melbourne's Appetite for This Model

Melbourne has been the most fertile ground in Australia for this shift, partly because the city's inner-suburb residential market has the buyer depth to support it, and partly because Gurner himself is based here and has spent a decade shaping what the top end of the market expects. The inner-city professional buyer in St Kilda, South Yarra, or Collingwood who is already spending $500 per week on personal training, regular health retreats, and functional medicine consultations is the natural customer for a building that integrates all of that into the residential product.

Gurner has named the trend accurately: this is not luxury residential with a wellness feature. It is a wellness product that happens to include residences.

What Canberra Is Building in Response

The Lawson, developed by SAP Canberra Pty Ltd with SP Experts as Development Manager under Shane Anderson, is pursuing the same philosophy for the ACT market. Club Lawson, the development's integrated wellness and lifestyle hub, brings premium health facilities, private dining, and rooftop living to Canberra for the first time in a residential context. The development, independently valued at over $260 million, is designed for the Canberra professional who has experienced what Gurner is building in Melbourne and Sydney, and wants the equivalent in the capital.

For a market as significant as Canberra, with one of Australia's highest average income profiles and a large cohort of health-conscious professionals and diplomats, the arrival of this model was a matter of when, not if. The Lawson is the answer.

Enquire at the-lawson.com | sales@the-lawson.com | 1800 329 181 (Gaurav Pahwaa, The Apartment Collective). Development Manager: spexperts.com.au.

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