If art galleries are an early warning and pour-over coffee a sign of seismic shift, nothing indicates that a neighborhood has settled in quite like the arrival of an establishment peddling reiki and matcha milk. Just down the street from a Greyhound station in the Arts District of downtown Los Angeles, the Springs, a new 13,500 square-foot holistic wellness center opening this weekend, is a beacon of change in the form of an organic juice bar and cafe plus yoga studio and spa with infrared saunas, jade-stone therapy and an in-house horticulturalist, who will come every week to sing to the fig trees and palms. “We figured that people who like one will also be interested in the other,” says the Springs co-founder Jared Stein of the decision to offer both dining and wellness services. (As an opening offer, a yoga class comes free with the purchase of a cold-pressed juice.) “But it’s complicated to do all of these things in one place,” explains his partner Kimberly Helms, walking by a back office that has already been rented to a nonprofit that rescues farm animals. “So we approached it similarly to producing a show: by building the best team.”
Helms and Stein, it turns out, met while working on Broadway musicals, and their familiarity with managing large-scale productions served them well in reconsidering the cavernous space, a former paper factory. Neither had ever owned a business before, but Stein grew up watching his parents run a Jewish deli in Cleveland, so even though there is “no corned beef and pastrami over here,” the longtime vegan says, “having a place to gather and converse is definitely at the core.” The pair hired the Los Angeles architecture and design firm Design, Bitches, who took inspiration from the idea of a desert oasis, incorporating sun-bleached walls and woven rubber chairs from Mexico. The firm then layered ingenious practicalities like wall-slung bicycle racks, a maze of indoor planters to encourage meandering (made of cinderblock in a nod to the building’s exterior) and small LEDs in the skylights for “moon glow,” says the architect Rebecca Rudolph.
In keeping with raw-food principles, nothing at the restaurant, headed by the chef Michael Falso, is heated above 118 degrees, which means there’s a fromagerie’s worth of nut-based cheeses to pair with West Coast biodynamic wine, from cashew-coconut mozzarella to pine nut parmesan to macadamia chevre. The kelp is harvested by kayak at low tide; the rolled oats are sprinkled not only with goji and yellow inca berries, but also with schizandra berries, used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat fatigue.
A rotating-use community space near the entrance launches with a temporary outpost of the Oakland store Atomic Garden, owned by Adrienne Armstrong, whom Stein and Helms met while working on “American Idiot,” the musical written by Armstrong’s husband, the Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong. And in a more permanent retail area outside the yoga studio, where the painted Sanskrit words mean “happiness for every living being,” according to Helms, the Springs will carry rubber mats made from recycled tires and windmill-powered body oils. If it all seems like a broad embrace, that’s by design, Helms says: “We just fell in love with people over and over.” She takes her hand out of the pocket of her floor-length tie-dyed dress and pats her heart: “You can’t trust this, because it flutters,” she says, “but you can always trust your gut.”
The Springs opens Saturday, October 18 at 608 Mateo Street, Los Angeles, thespringsla.com.
