Gravity Haus Vail completes renovation of its gym, spa, lounge area and coworking spaces
Gravity Haus Vail, a new membership-based hotel and lifestyle company, has completed its renovation of the former Vail Athletic Club and is now fully operational in Vail Village.
Gravity Haus is a growing hospitality concept that is designed for outdoor enthusiasts. The company was founded in 2019 by entrepreneur Jim Deters, who previously co-founded the Denver-based technology and education company Galvanize. After stepping down from his role as CEO at Galvanize in 2017, Deters was interested in creating a way to empower people to live an active and sustainable lifestyle.
“My biggest passion — besides empowering entrepreneurs — is really for the planet, and wellness, and fitness,” Deters said. “The premise was how to build a community and enable a lifestyle to live this crazy, wonderful life, connected with outdoor adventures and people, and staying healthy and fit so that you can have these great experiences.”
The downstairs lounge area of Gravity Haus Vail.
Carolyn Paletta/Vail Daily
Deters came up with a concept to put all of the amenities that support an active lifestyle in one location, while giving outdoor adventurers a place to connect and share meaningful experiences. Out of that vision, Gravity Haus was born, opening its first location in Breckenridge in 2019 and its second in Vail in 2020.
The brand has since expanded to two more locations — one in Winter Park and one in Truckee, California, in the Lake Tahoe area — and Deters said this is only the beginning of what he hopes will become a global community.
A campus for mountain living
Deters purchased the building that used to house the Vail Mountain Lodge, Vail Athletic Club and Terra Bistro restaurant in December of 2019.
He said that the space was a perfect fit for Gravity Haus, because it had long served as a central hub for the local community.
“We got super lucky, because we got to take something that was already well-established and just modernize it to how people live today,” Deters said.
The Gravity Haus Vail location features 22 rooms and fully-renovated gym and spa amenities, coworking spaces, a game room, hot tubs, and a restaurant and coffee shop.
Members get discounts on food and beverages at the internal Slope Room restaurant and Unravel coffee shop, as well as discounts on spa treatments.
The recently completed remodel features a restructured fitness space, with cardio and strength equipment, an indoor turf field, a pilates and yoga studio, professionally instructed fitness classes and open gym times. Classes are available for free to most membership levels.
The newly-renovated Dryland Fitness facility has a variety of strength and fitness equipment and an indoor turf field.
Gravity Haus/Courtesy Photo
The spa area includes a sauna, steam room, cooling bath and salt therapy room, as well as access to hot tubs and a range of self-massage guns for post-activity relief.
Jen Razee is the director of Dryland Fitness and the spa. Razee has worked at many wellness centers in Vail, and was formerly the director of the Vail Athletic Club.
“I think the piece that’s really different with Gravity Haus and the way we’re looking at this is that it’s more about building a community,” Razee said. “It’s not just a gym membership. When someone is truly taking advantage of the events that we offer, the discounts at our spa, the discounts on food and beverage, then they really see that it’s so much more than a fitness facility.”
There is also a Haus Quiver available with most memberships, which allows members to reserve top-of-the-line equipment and use it for free on their mountain adventures. This enables members to try new activities and gear without paying the high costs of renting, shipping or buying. During the winter, members can choose from a wide range of skis, snowboards, touring setups, snowshoes and more, while in the summer they’ll find kayaks, fishing gear, hiking gear and camping equipment, among others.
Complete with locker rooms and showers, Gravity Haus is intended to be a home base for an active lifestyle in Vail.
“Every property we build, first and foremost we think about how we can be an asset to the local community. The transient guest is not the first thought,” Deters said. “It’s this idea of seamlessly moving from getting to work, working out, grabbing your ski gear, getting on the mountain, coming back and changing, going to meet someone for coffee or a dinner meeting — we think about it as a campus for this lifestyle.”
Coworking spaces and board rooms are available for member use at Gravity Haus Vail.
Gravity Haus/Courtesy Photo
There are four membership options, and all but the Explorer option are offered in both individual and family packages. The Local membership option, which starts at $150 per month for an individual and $300 per month for a family, gives unlimited access to all of the Gravity Haus amenities and events, and members can add Haus Quiver access for an extra $50 a month.
The full spread of membership options is available on the Gravity Haus website.
Empowering exploration
With four Gravity Haus locations and a growing number of hotel partnerships around the world, Deters is also enabling members to travel to new destinations in a simpler and more affordable way.
Some membership levels get significantly reduced rates at all Gravity Haus locations — 50% off on Sunday through Wednesday, and 25% off on Thursday through Saturday — as well as up to 50% rates at sister properties in Denver, Costa Rica, Telluride and Silverton.
Deters drew on his personal experience as a family of five trying to get out to the mountains, and wanted to come up with a better way for people to travel to new adventure locations.
“I know it from the Front-Ranger perspective of how hard it is to raise three kids and truck them back and forth,” Deters said. “We have a mobile key and check-in platform, so you can really move around the property like it’s yours. And it’s way better than people buying up housing and turning them into Airbnbs, which has turned into a disaster in pretty much every resort community on the planet.”
Members get discounts on spa treatments, as well as all food and beverage at Slope Room restaurant and Unravel coffee shop.
Gravity Haus/Courtesy Photo
Gravity Haus also hosts numerous member events each month. Among those on the list for this January are a climbing night, avalanche training course, moonlight skin, pasta-making class and sunrise run. All are designed to bring members together while exposing them to the wide range of activities available in their mountain communities.
A global community of outdoor enthusiasts
Deters has now moved full-time to Vail with his wife, Alicia Deters, and son, and is using Gravity Haus every day in precisely the way he imagined it.
“This is my home,” Deters said. “The whole genesis was about how do we make this easy for our own family and our own lifestyle, and making that easier for other people.”
Gravity Haus recently purchased the Cedar House Sport Hotel in Truckee, and Deters has an eye out for new locations to add to the growing network of Gravity Haus locations.
“There are a lot of cool legacy properties in mountain towns all over North America,” Deters said. “They need to be modernized, and they don’t need to be modernized by The Four Seasons or Marriott — they need to be modernized by authentic people that live the lifestyle.”
Having opened the first location just over two years ago, there is a lot of room for Gravity Haus to grow, and the Vail community is one of the first to fully experience Deter’s vision.
“I’m just personally so grateful that somebody had a vision for the VAC,” Razee said. “To have an ownership group that came in and saw a different way to use the space — to have a modernization for the vision and realize what an athletic club for Vail could be — I think is awesome, and I’m super grateful for that.”
Gravity Haus Vail is offering tours to prospective members, which can be scheduled online at their website. They are also offering a free two-night stay at their new Cedar House location in Truckee for anyone who joins this month.
For more information about Gravity Haus and to join as a new member, visit GravityHaus.com.
