Cryotherapy pods at -110°C, London’s first magnesium pool, an alchemy bar run by a resident herbalist, a biohacking lounge with AI-powered fitness technology. Six Senses London is not a hotel that happens to have a spa. It is a spa that happens to have 109 rooms above it.
There is a spectrum in hotel wellness, and most hotels sit closer to one end of it than they would like to admit. A decent pool, a steam room, a treatment menu that includes a hot stone massage and a facial: this is what the word spa has come to mean in most city hotels, and it is fine as far as it goes. Six Senses London, which opened in March in Bayswater’s reimagined Whiteleys building, sits so far at the other end of that spectrum that it constitutes a different category entirely.
The spa occupies an entire floor beneath the hotel, covering 2,300 square metres. What is inside that space is worth going through specifically, because the specifics are the point. There is London’s first hotel magnesium pool. A 20-metre indoor swimming pool. A Finnish sauna, steam room, cold plunge, mosaic hammam and flotation pod. A cryotherapy suite with pods reaching -110°C. A biohacking recovery lounge with AI-powered fitness equipment, compression therapy, red light panels and sleep tracking technology. A longevity clinic offering an Integrated Wellness Assessment that analyses 40 biomarkers and produces a personalised programme of yoga, osteopathy, Ayurvedic therapies and treatment. And an Alchemy Bar where a resident alchemist uses seasonal British botanicals to guide guests through making their own scrubs, teas and natural remedies.
What is striking about all of this is that it does not feel like a list of amenities assembled to impress a press release. The spa has a coherent logic: movement and stillness, ancient practice and clinical technology, the restorative and the optimising, sitting alongside each other without contradiction. You can emerge from a cryotherapy pod and order a martini at Whiteleys Bar. The chicken wings at Whiteleys Kitchen are, by several accounts, excellent.
The hotel itself is housed within Foster + Partners’ £1.5 billion redevelopment of the Grade II-listed Whiteleys building, a former department store that closed in 2018. The interiors are by AvroKO, drawing on the building’s retail history with vitrines, haberdashery cabinetry and the original Whiteleys staircase as a cast-iron centrepiece. Of the 109 rooms and suites, many have terraces looking inward over the courtyard; the rooms themselves are deliberately quiet — dove grey, off-white, light wood — and treat sleep as seriously as everything else, with full pillow menus and impeccably calibrated lighting.
This is what a hotel spa looks like when the spa is the actual purpose of the building rather than a feature of it. It has taken London a while to get here. It was worth the wait.
Rates from £625 per night. Spa treatments and workshops from around £50. More at sixsenses.com/london