La Pausa - Why We Refused to Look Like Everyone Else's Spa
By Sara Delpopolo, co-founder
It All Started With a Vision
Before there was an interior design, there was a name problem. Scott and I had a list of more than 15 options, many of them were a version of "Foot & Body Haven / Sanctuary / Retreat" etc. Pleasant, but exactly the kind of names I would have flagged as problematic for a client.
Twenty-five years as an intellectual property lawyer teaches you that a generic name is not a safe choice, it's a deferred problem. A name that describes what you do instead of naming what you are is hard to trademark cleanly and easy for the next person to echo. So, I ran each name candidate the way I would have for a client: trademark registers, domain availability, social media handles - all before we let ourselves get attached to any of them. After more brainstorming, the name “ZenVida” won because it cleared every one of those checks, and it perfectly fused the calm feeling we were chasing with the country we were in.
When it came to the interior design, I started with a fairly clean and contemporary brief - the kind of neutral good taste you could drop into any city. My father was a builder of luxury homes in Australia for fifty years and something of his eye must have passed to me. I could picture the finished interiors clearly, but this image sat wrong for weeks before I understood why. What I couldn't picture was a single person walking into ZenVida and knowing that they were in Spain.
Once I saw this problem, I couldn't unsee it.
Every massage place we had tried during our travels all around Spain smelled faintly of coconut oil, a small Buddha by the door or a waving happy cat, Thai silks and so on – every single place had imported décor standing in for a personality that did not exist.
Nobody travels to Spain hoping to feel like they have landed somewhere in Asia. They come for the citrus in the air, flamenco drifting from a bar three streets over, an Andalucian patio with tiled floors and fountains, the particular slowness of the Mediterranean.
So I threw out the old interior design brief overnight and built a new one around olive trees, Spanish tiles, fountains inspired by the Alhambra, and flamenco guitar instead of the usual ambient spa music.
When I showed Scott the new mood board, he understood it immediately. We had visited enough five-star hotel spas during our travels to have a name for these alternatives - "rubber stamp luxury" he called it - beautiful rooms that could have been assembled anywhere on earth, telling you nothing about the country you were actually visiting.
That is still the test we use today. Someone walks through the doors of ZenVida from a busy, loud street near Puerta del Sol and the noise drops away. A completely calm and welcoming sanctuary. Customers catch citrus in the air, the trickle of water moving somewhere close by, and soft flamenco guitar playing in the distance. Before anyone has started their massage ritual, they know they are in Spain.
That was never decoration. It was the whole point.
About Sara Delpopolo
Sara is the co-founder of ZenVida. She doesn't come from the wellness industry. She was a consumer of it, in search of something she couldn't find in Spain. After 25 years as an intellectual property lawyer, she knows what it takes to build something that's actually original rather than borrowed. In La Pausa, she writes about the business of slowing down, and whatever she's noticed that month.
