All Spa-merican: An Editor's Note By Gary Walther of "Luxury SpaFinder Magazine"

In the March/April, 2005 issue Mr. Walther wrote the following article:

“What do spas have in common with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Asian cuisine, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and pizza?"

"They are all imports that have flourished here in ways they never could have on their native soil. Where but in America could a provincial Austrian weight lifter rise to become the governor of California? Or millennia-old cooking techniques end up sparking a wild new genre of cuisine, Asian fusion, and being championed by an Alsatian chef, trained on Escoffier, who transplanted himself to America? As for pizza, I’ll just say, “Wolfgang” (he’s an Austrian immigrant, too) and you’ll see my point."

And so it is with spa, a word that is derived from Latin (it’s thought to be an acronym of salus per aqua, or “health through water”) and a concept that came to America from Europe in the 19th century. Here, as there, spas grew up around mineral springs: Bath in Britain and Saratoga Springs in New York, Baden-Baden in Germany and Calistoga in California.

It took 1990s America to blow spa out of the water. In that decade, for reasons as varied as the desire for sanctuary and the burgeoning obsession with health and wellness, Americans took up spa in a way that only Americans do. In a decade, it has gone from lifestyle indulgence to lifestyle necessity: the spa-ification of America, trumpeted the January 2 headline of the Sunday New York Times travel section, summing it up.

But because this is a country in which innovation trumps tradition, we reinvented the spa, adding fitness, production values (music, candles, etc.), profit margins, and new treatments (hot stone massage, for example). Now the American spa scene is so diverse that people complain that the meaning of the word is as hazy as a steam room. To which I say, “Vive la différence.”

This issue is an homage to that pioneering spirit. Europe has spas with long pedigrees, and Asia has spas with ultralavish facilities and eons-old holistic healing traditions to draw on, but it’s in America that the spa envelope is being pushed hardest—and often through borrowing and reinvention. It’s innovation that defines American spas today.

Thus, the California spa on the cover has taken classic European hydrotherapy techniques and married them to fitness and the current American mania for customized experience. At the other pole is a New Mexico spa that eschews hydrotherapy in favor of out-there healing treatments, some of which seem to me like a spa version of a séance. We have a Texas property that has evolved from nudist camp to top destination spa, a small Wisconsin spa that has done what many big spas haven’t and gone almost completely organic with its food, and a Phoenix hotel whose interior designers consciously combined disparate old- and new-world elements in decorating the spa — a quintessentially American approach.

To read more about American spas, pick up the March/April issue of Luxury SpaFinder Magazine.

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