Zoī Vendôme is no ordinary medical facility. The Paris-based center joins the wave of new preventative medicine companies that offer holistic, full-body examinations for members. The goal? Life extension. But Zoī is even more unique: Its 20,000-square-foot wellness center, discreetly located behind a Haussmannian facade near Place Vendôme, is a site for both electrocardiograms and a room that re-creates a snowstorm.
Unconvention follows unconvention. The clients hosted a design competition for the interior, and Sala Hars, a young, Mexico-based firm with no prior health-care designs, emerged as the victor. The firm abandoned traditional health care designs completely. Instead, it delivered a contemporary take on baroque architecture, where theatricality is more in gesture than ornament. The team calls it “neon baroque.”
“The idea of Zoī is focused on the human body and specifically on each patient that enters,” Douglas Harsevoort, founding partner of Sala Hars, told AN Interior. “So everything from sight to sound to smells to tastes is curated around these different sensorial experiences as you move from one space to the next.”
The journey begins with a black box. The solemn entry makes a dramatic switch to a glowing hallway, framed with an enfilade of hyperboloid-like millwork. “These almost obelisk forms are somewhere between Brâncușian and Egyptian,” explained Harsevoort. They’re sandwiched between polished white concrete floors and a ceiling surface that evenly diffuses light. If Zoī teaches its members that the body is a temple, the heavenly hallway helps inspire reverence.
“In baroque churches, despite their powerful geometrical motifs and verticality, part of why you feel awe is this question of how something is built,” added Juan Sala, the other founding partner of the firm. The architects channeled this while sculpting each space. As the hallway progresses to the stairs and elevator banks, black walls and ochre-colored plaster walls frame each other with alternating curves. Sala indicates the ways in which curves meet other curves at a point and the hidden thickness that create an illusion of flatness.
These geometric tricks serve functions. In the 18 wood-clad examination suites, Harsevoort and Sala slot an elliptical room within a square footprint. On one hand, it helps establish an environment that doesn’t feel medical. On the other hand, it allows the negative space to serve as storage and hide equipment. Even venting is concealed: Slits in the wood floor are the only evidence of air escaping, a detail that is reinforced by the gap between the luminous panel on the ceiling and the plaster ring below—it may look like a dome, but it is really just the visual effect of a straight line cutting an ellipse.
The rotund room and lack of visually evident medical gear (much of which was moved to a cart the doctors tote around) provide a clean, calm interior that looks neither medical nor spa-like. Ambivalence is the point.
When done with exams, members can ascend to the top floor of the building, where an onsen awaits. Full of volcanic stone and strong, almost severe gestures interrupted with skylights over the pools, this space rejects traditional design. “The idea was not to replicate a Japanese onsen,” continued Sala. “I think that would have been maybe too easy and also a bit absurd; a Japanese onsen should be in Japan. If you’re in Paris, I think you should maintain this pillar of the experience, but infuse a certain nuance, a negotiation of cultures.”
In fact, Zoī is very much rooted in its sense of place despite its otherworldly style. “The DNA of the project is very Parisian; it’s baroque architecture. People don’t think about Paris as having this Egyptian influence, but it’s very much there,” said Sala. Emphasizing culture, and mediation between its old forms and new possibilities, is the basis of the project and Sala Hars’s own practice.