The Day I Got Lost (...And Found the Blueprint for Building Community)

Written by Jon, Co-Founder, Alchemy Springs

Jon is the Co-Founder of Alchemy Springs, a modern bathhouse in San Francisco built on the belief that connection, ritual, and shared spaces can transform how we live.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, one afternoon quietly changed the trajectory of my life.

At the time it wasn’t obvious, it wasn’t an ‘ah-ha’ moment. It was an experience that stayed with me, and years later, became the foundation for everything we’re building at Alchemy Springs.

I grew up in New York, and in my senior year of high school a few friends and I took a weekend road trip to Montreal. We did exactly what you’d expect from a group of 18-year-olds. We went out, had fun, stayed up too late, and created stories we’d half-remember.

On the drive home, we got completely lost.

This was before smartphones, and of course no GPS’s. Just a group of guys pretending we knew where we were going.

My best friend’s last name is Strombelline and we’ve always called him Strom. So when we saw a sign for Strøm Spa, we laughed. It felt like a coincidence we couldn’t ignore, so we pulled in to ask for directions.

I still remember walking through the door. Everything shifted. It was quiet, calm, clean, minimal, and the air smelled incredible. No one seemed rushed or like they had anywhere else to be.

We decided to stay the entire day.

For the first time in a long time we weren’t chasing anything. No sports. No parties. No screens. No trying to impress anyone.

We completely slowed down. We moved between hot and cold - talking, meeting strangers, laughing and sometimes just sitting in silence and reflecting.

And without trying, we connected more deeply in that space that day, than we had through years of being friends.

That same group is still incredibly close today. We take annual trips. We have our own traditions. We have had our own Slack group for over a decade where we discuss everything from finances to wellness to politics and anything in between. The five of us show up for each other in real ways. I have to say I’m not sure we’d be this close without that day.

At that time, I didn’t have language for what happened. Now I do.

Community isn’t something you force, schedule, or manufacture. It’s something that takes time. You create the conditions where people who don’t know each other, but should actually slow down, drop in, and connect.

It’s not shallow networking in a loud room where everyone’s performing and leaves feeling emptier than when they arrived.

Community is real connection, real trust, real relationships. It’s friendship, slowly and intentionally created.

That lesson quietly shaped everything that came after. It influenced my years at Summit Series. It shaped how I approached building community at Abundance360.

And now it sits at the center of what we’re building at Alchemy. From the way we design our saunas to the intimate shape of the tea lounge to the circle of chairs around our firepit, every detail is intentional.

It’s built to help people pause, exhale, and feel comfortable enough to be themselves, but close enough that connection becomes natural, even inevitable. You can have a quiet moment to read or sip tea, or you can strike up a conversation that turns into something more.

That balance is everything.

And we’re starting to see it happen. People meeting as strangers and leaving as friends. Going to dinner together after a session. Starting book clubs. Finding business partners. Even finding their person.

And it starts from the very first moment someone walks through the door.

When a new guest walks through the door to experience our pop-up, Alchemy Sauna Garden, we give them a tour. On the walls are mood boards. Materials, textures, ideas, glimpses of what Alchemy Springs is becoming just beneath their feet.

We paint a future people can react to before it exists and ask simple questions:

What resonates?
What doesn’t?
What do you want more of?

We’ve made real changes based on those conversations.

In a very real sense, we’re building Alchemy with community, not just for it.

There’s one board in that room that I always stop at. It’s a simple image of a minimal Corten steel spa front desk, with a big word on it:

Strøm

Even now, there’s something that gives me chills:

I never told our architects that story from when I was 18. And yet, when they presented their design for the first moment a guest arrives - they chose the image of that exact front desk at Strøm as inspiration.

As we build Alchemy Springs, I think about that experience often. We’re not really building a spa. We’re building a place where moments like that have a chance to happen again. Where someone walks in stressed and walks out lighter.

Where strangers become friends. Where friends become closer. Where someone remembers what it feels like to slow down.

Where connection feels natural again.

Sometimes getting lost and slowing down is how you find what actually matters.

— Jon, Co-Founder, Alchemy Springs