The Tamesis
but real The dream – and the heart of Pocketbook – is in the building across the courtyard, away from the rooms, bars, restaurants and shops. This is The Baths, the hotel’s new spa, currently open to guests and set to open for day trips in May.
To get there, you walk through a grassy courtyard and into a small lobby, where you check in with staff and they change your shoes into bath slippers. When you enter, there is a changing room with cubicles for your stuff. Turning the corner, you’ll see a white-tiled scrub and shower station that leads to the spa pool area, an open space with 40-foot-tall vaulted ceilings and wooden beams overhead. The brick walls gleam in the light of wall sconces and reflections in the sparkling water. The walls are dotted with windows, allowing plenty of light. The pools have an inward, toward each other feel that reminds me of a Quaker meeting house. The space does give off an almost church-like feeling of peace and tranquility.
The bathroom was designed by an in-house team of Caitlin Baidia, Mary Keena Frisbee and WangShui, led by Nancy Kim, she told us Fashion The team envisioned the baths as “a place that welcomes sensory immersion and erases the boundaries between self and environment.” (They were inspired by iconic spas around the world, including The Spa at Swissotel 7132, Fosso Bianco in Italy and the Blue Lagoon in Iceland.)
The 6,000-square-foot space houses three pools: a 100-degree saltwater pool using sea salt from Amagansett; a 104-degree heated pool and a 55-degree cold pool. To start the bath cycle, you head to the scrub station and exfoliate while sitting on Rich Aybar’s custom-made rubber stool that looks like honey.
