Why Alchemy Springs Isn’t a Members Club
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.
Most people already spend enough of their life trying to get in. Into the right schools, the right companies, the right social circles, the right rooms. Modern life has become one long sorting mechanism, and the part that I often feel challenged with is what happens once you’ve made it: you often feel like you have to keep performing just to stay there.
I’ve worked inside a few high-end membership businesses, and have literally built the “algorithm” and made the selection criteria for who gets in. And what I learned is that curated communities cut both ways. They can create incredible circles and lasting friendships, but they can also become echo chambers: the same ideas, the same networks, the same social sorting machine we run into everywhere else. Status signals, social ranking, buzzword matching. Just another algorithm.
Every time I stepped into a members club…even ones I helped build…I felt like I had to become the person I’d described in that 250 word application. A polished, compressed version of myself, assembled from credentials and accomplishments. And if we’re honest, that version isn’t really who any of us are.
I think that’s a big part of why I was so drawn to bathhouses. Bathhouses have always been different. Historically they brought together people from every walk of life… a rare kind of equalizer. When you step into one, the armor starts to fall away. Titles, net worth, follower counts disappear, and everyone is left meeting the same elements: heat, cold, breath, sweat, stillness, discomfort, recovery. Something happens when humans share a challenge like that. A quiet empathy emerges where the simple recognition that beneath all the layers, we’re far more alike than we pretend to be. There’s something deeply healing about being around people who are different from you while remembering they’re also just like you. That reminder is disappearing from modern life, and a bathhouse interrupts the disappearance.
It offers something increasingly rare: anonymity without loneliness. A place where you can put your phone away, step out of the digital world, and return to the one right in front of you… where diverse perspectives spark deeper empathy, fresh ideas, and moments of spontaneity. Where a single conversation sends you down an unexpected rabbit hole, and a stranger becomes a friend you otherwise never would have met.
That’s part of why Alchemy emerged in San Francisco. In the heart of tech culture, in the land of AI and algorithms, we wanted to be a bit of yin to that yang. If people are going to work 9-9-6, we’ll take you in on the 7th!
With Alchemy, we set out to create a place where perhaps the ultimate luxury lives: not needing to be anyone else.
Had we built a members club, we’d probably be fully funded by now and on our way to a second location. But something richer emerged instead: authenticity, organic growth, a community built with community. Our Sauna Garden feels less like a curated garden and more like a little permaculture farm… the more diverse the inputs, the more the whole thing flourishes with time.
Alchemy isn’t a curated room. It’s a living room. A place where strangers remember they belong to the same world. And in order to do that well, we could never be a private members’ club.
— Jon, Co-Founder, Alchemy Springs
