At Forth, a 36-inch hallway separates a 300 square foot lobby from a room we built to hold 100 degrees. The thing doing the separating is a specialty insulated curtain. It holds the temperature line between the two spaces, and it absorbs sound at the same time, which is why it is there instead of a door. That curtain is one of the smallest line items in the project, and it is doing what every other decision in a wellness build-out has to do. It manages a physical condition, heat on one side, comfort on the other, and in managing that condition it manages what a customer feels walking through it. Health and wellness spaces have an atypical approach in commercial construction because the physical condition of the room is the product. A restaurant sells food that happens to be served in a room. A hot yoga studio sells the room itself: the temperature, the air, the sound, the surface underfoot. Heating, cooling, and insulation stop being line items on a mechanical schedule and become the reasons a customer uses when deciding whether to come back or not.
We have delivered multiple of these project types in the Chicago area, each pulling on those levers differently. A heated yoga studio. Spa retreats, massage studios, saunas, and cold plunges. A chiropractic and performance space built to feel like anything but a medical clinic. Sometimes all of these services are offered inside a single 10,000+ square foot building or wellness center. In all cases, the thermal and acoustical envelope did more to shape the experience than any other part of the design or program did.
Forth Yoga Studio on Milwaukee Avenue in Logan Square, with hot yoga and pilates, is compact enough to see all at once. Eleven hundred square feet total: a 600 square foot heated studio in the center, a 300 square foot lobby with reception and retail at the front, and a 200 square foot staging area at the back holding bathrooms, showers, and a post-workout changing area. The 36-inch hallway runs from the lobby, past the studio, to that back area. A customer's entire visit, arrival through shower, happens inside those three zones, and every one of them has a different temperature requirement than the others.
A basic search for a modern hot yoga studio typically promotes infrared panels as the cornerstone ingredient for the hot yoga experience, which is somewhat accurate, but also incomplete. The room runs on two heating systems, working in balance together. At Forth Yoga, a high-efficiency furnace brings the space to 75 or 80 degrees on forced air, and ten 1,250-watt, 208-volt infrared panels from Heating Green, 24 inches by 48 inches each, add the remaining 20 to 25 degrees to reach the target temperature. The panels were sized to drop into a standard two-by-four suspended ceiling grid, so we could insulate the ceiling behind. The combination of systems and insulation is the design.
The commercial HVAC scope for that room is dedicated, not shared with the adjacent spaces. A 70,000 BTU, 96 percent efficient variable-speed furnace with an evaporator coil, a two-ton outdoor condensing unit, an inline exhaust fan, and its own thermostat. That package ran about $50,000 including all new ductwork and equipment. Separately used the existing HVAC system and modified its intake and distribution to serve the reception area, the back of house, and the basement, added exhaust venting for two bathrooms, and put a separate Ecobee Lite thermostat on the general system.
The dedicated system matters more than the tonnage does. A heated room sharing air distribution with a lobby and a changing area is a room that cannot be controlled independently, and a wellness tenant selling a 100-degree class cannot have the front desk decide how warm the studio is.
The heating spec is the part people ask about. The cooling spec is the part that determines whether the room is tolerable at 7pm on the fifth class of the day.
There was no humidity target at Forth. No setpoint. Instead, an exhaust fan runs during or after class, depending on how the room feels to the instructor, pulling humid air and bacteria out and replacing it with fresh air off the high-efficiency furnace. Between classes, the air conditioning runs as a secondary form of dehumidification. Humidity gets managed by air movement, cooling, and class scheduling rather than by a number on a controller.
That is a deliberate choice and worth understanding if you are programming a heated room. Sweaty bodies and exhaled air put moisture into a small volume of air quickly. If the only strategy is heat, the room gets progressively worse across a day of classes, and the customer who booked the last slot has a different experience than the one who booked the first. Exhaust and recovery between sessions is what keeps those two experiences the same.
At the other end of the temperature range, Elite Wellness has rooms that run cold plunges alongside saunas. Same principle inverted. The equipment is the visible part, and the room around it is what makes the equipment usable. Management of the air inside that room, beyond the pieces of equipment, is what supports the user experience. Balancing the room's ambient heating, cooling, and moisture is a thankless job given graciously by creative engineering and methodical construction.
Above the panels and the drop ceiling at Forth, we installed thermal batt insulation across the studio ceilings. On the walls, moisture-resistant gypsum board, the type commonly called Greenboard, with standard primer and latex paint over it. That is the envelope holding a 100-degree room against the rest of a masonry Chicago building.
Sustained heat is where wellness spaces diverge most from a standard build-out, and where specification research earns its keep.
At Forth Yoga Studios in Logan Square, the owner kept the existing vinyl plank flooring from the previous retail tenant, a reasonable decision to protect cost and tight construction schedule on a job that needed to open during the winter to maximize revenue. That existing flooring unfortunately was not glued down to the substrate below. Once the studio began operating, it developed separation gaps and light buckling from expansion and contraction as the room heated and cooled and humidity varied. The infrared panels compounded it: they heat the black yoga mats to a different temperature than the vinyl plank around them, so the floor underneath an occupied mat runs hotter than the floor a few feet away, and the localized areas moved more than the general floor did.
We did not select an LVT spec on that project. Had we been specifying it, working through the options with a flooring professional to find a spec that resists buckling and gap separation would have been part of the research before selecting a final material. Our team has since walked the owner through two paths for whenever she wants to take it on: a rolled rubber floor, or vinyl plank glued down to a primed plywood substrate.
The transferable point for anyone programming a heated room: the floor is part of the thermal assembly, not part of the finish schedule. A material rated for retail traffic is not automatically rated for a surface that cycles 30 degrees or more several times a day with uneven radiant load across it.
The Elite Wellness project came a year before Forth Yoga Studio, and the most transferable thing we took from it was sound. Elite had multiple massage studios where keeping sound out was mandatory.
At Forth, sound considerations shaped the studio and design: we installed sound insulation in the walls, purchased and installed ceiling tiles with a high NRC rating for absorption in the drop ceiling of the yoga studio, and the insulated curtain at the hallway divide, which absorbs sound in addition to holding the temperature line.
Acoustic isolation does two jobs at once in wellness spaces. It keeps the room quiet for the people inside it, and it softens sound leaving the space and reaching adjoining ones; be it either neighboring tenants, or other services and programs offered by the business. It also supports future uses of that space that our customer may not be considering yet. A yoga studio across its life cycle often hosts pilates, meditation, sound baths, and community events, often with children's and family programming. Building a room only for a single purpose, in this case a heated yoga class, limits what the operator can sell out of it later. A space that is uniquely designed, with acoustic management as a sidecar, provides longevity and revenue flexibility.
The methods of acoustic management scale widely. On the straightforward end, inexpensive ceiling tiles and wall insulation are good basic practices. On the detailed end, specialty sound panels, sound-absorbing drywall, treatment at electrical fixtures and junction boxes, baffles, and gaskets, provide a slew of options that can appeal to even the most noise-sensitive groups. We recommend that every customer consider sound insulation regardless of where they land on that range. It is a relatively low-cost investment that raises the experience of the space and preserves functionality of the space.
Where heat, cold, and standing water all land in one room, the assembly stops being a detail and becomes the primary scope. That was the case with the sauna and cold plunge rooms at Elite Wellness.
We waterproofed the floors and portions of the walls with water-durable, mold-resistant concrete backer panels, then a liquid-applied elastomeric membrane over the floor and wall surfaces. Porcelain tile on top of that, with stain-resilient grout and a penetrating sealer to protect against body oils and general commercial wear. Every room had drains dedicated to the plunge pool, plus a floor drain with the floors lightly pitched toward it, so an overflow has somewhere to go before it reaches the rest of the space or the building.
Elite also carried yoga studios and a full gym with rubber flooring and turf areas, which is worth noting next to the Forth flooring question. Rolled rubber is standard in a gym for reasons that have nothing to do with heat, but it is dimensionally stable and it is one of the two paths we put in front of the Forth owner. Wellness operators running multiple room types under one roof end up making the same flooring decision several times, against a different set of conditions each time.
Heating, cooling, and insulation are the technical players. What they are being used for is narrower than it sounds: the customer's experience of the room, from the moment they walk in to the moment they leave.
Elite Wellness taught us that the arrival experience has to be immediately understandable to anyone walking in, across a wide range of ages and physical abilities. Where do I go, who do I talk to, where is the bathroom, where do I put my things, is the retail clearly defined, what's free and what's for purchase, what is the lighting and the temperature like the moment I enter. Every one of those affects whether someone becomes a repeat customer, and repeat customers and word of mouth are what compound into revenue for a wellness operator over time.
Adjusted Health and Performance in Tinley Park, a 1,700 square foot chiropractic and stretch medicine space put a different version of the same problem in front of us. For those of us who have had chiropractic adjustments before, we know that those sessions are frequently painful or uncomfortable for customers. The owner was motivated to provide a space that felt considerate enough to offset those discomforts. His answer was custom wood millwork and cabinetry integrating with the technology. Computer monitors, lighting, and equipment directly built into the casework, floors, and ceilings, so the room reads as clean, organized, unified, and modern rather than as your classic medical office. When that much attention goes into the physical space, a customer can reasonably assume the same standard of care applies to how they are treated.
That is the direction I see the market moving, in urban and suburban areas especially. Customers are shifting toward smaller, more boutique, higher-quality spaces and experiences at a slightly higher price point, and away from the transactional spaces that were standard over the last few decades. The clearest example is dentistry. Compare what a dental office looked and felt like in the 1980s or 1990s to a current one. For any service where a customer has to be present longer than 15 or 30 minutes, the quality of the room they interact with is part of what they are buying. Wellness is that same shift, with temperature and acoustic requirements attached.
One more thing a wellness operator should know, because it is the part of the build that shows up directly in their revenue: the opening date is a seasonal decision, not just a project milestone. At Forth Yoga Studios, the building permit was approved on November 14, 2025, and the owner held her first classes on Monday, February 2, 2026. She was pushing hard for delivery before March so she could open into a few cold months and start on a solid revenue base, which for a heated studio in Chicago is the strongest part of the year. We delivered several weeks ahead of that target. Most weeks on the job were six working days, and we cleared all rough inspections, framing, plumbing, electrical, and HVAC, before the City of Chicago's building department shuts down the week before Christmas and New Year's for two weeks. The planning, material ordering, and offsite fabrication of custom millwork and stone work all overlapped the field construction rather than following it in sequence. That overlap bought us six weeks in saved construction time, and those six weeks were worth more to the operator than they were to us.
A wellness buildout carries a requirement most commercial tenant improvement work does not: the room has to perform a physical condition, continuously, in front of a paying customer, for years.
So the questions I would put to an architect or operator programming one of these spaces go past what equipment the room needs. What temperature does this room hold, for how long, how many times a day. What removes the heat and the moisture when it’s not wanted, and does the last customer of the day get the same experience as the first. What is every material in that room going to do under the use cycle of the space, including the substrate, the coatings, the tile, the grout, water drainage, and the floor durability, whether those materials are new to the project or already sitting in the space. What does the customer hear from the room next door. And what does all of it feel like at the front door, those first few moments of arrival. Is it calm, relaxed, and approachable. Do customers know what to do, or where to go, when they first walk in.
None of those are equipment questions, and none of them get easier to answer after pricing is locked. They are design questions, and the time to work them is while the drawings are still in progress. Having a knowledgeable commercial general contractor at your side during this phase is necessary if you want to achieve cohesion and intended functionality between the vision, the design, and the built space.
Which brings it back to the curtain at Forth. It is a piece of insulated fabric hanging along a 36-inch hallway, and it is holding a 30-degree temperature difference and a sound separation at the same time, in the one spot where every customer passes through during their visit. Nobody walking into that studio thinks about it from that perspective. Sure, is it unique and luxurious to pass through a thick hanging curtain as you enter a tranquil space? Absolutely, but that’s the whole point. When heating, cooling, and insulation are specified with what the room actually does and how the customer interacts with it, the customer enjoys what's beautiful, while the space enjoys what's functional. They notice that the room is 100 degrees when it should be, quiet when it should be, and the same at 7pm as it was at 6am. When those decisions get made against a general standard instead of the room's real operating condition, the customer notices immediately, and often.
The Elite Wellness North Shore project is where we worked most of this out, and Forth is where we applied it. And for reference, for those planning a build-out in Chicago in the health and wellness industry; Elite Wellness in Northfield, IL came in at $76 per square foot across 11,000 square feet, Forth Studio in Chicago, IL came in at $297 per square foot across 1,100 square feet, and Adjusted Health and Performance in Tinley Park, IL, ran $274 per square foot across 1,700 square feet.
If you are programming a space that has to hold heat, cold, or humidity in front of paying customers, that is the conversation worth having before the drawings go out to bid. Our commercial construction services start there on every wellness scope we take. Discuss your project.
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CEO and Founder, Klasik Construction. Klasik is a Chicago general contractor specializing in tenant improvement within existing commercial spaces, with delivered wellness projects including Forth, Elite Wellness North Shore, and Adjusted Health and Performance.
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