Inside the LA club where work, workouts and social life share one roof

Hybrid work has changed where Angelenos spend their days. At the Los Angeles Athletic Club, some members now stay for as long as 10 hours – moving between laptops, workouts, meals and nights out without leaving the building.

For some members of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, stopping by for a workout is no longer the point.

“There’s members who spend more time here than we do,” club director Najeeb Shamsid-Deen said. “There’s members who spend ten hours here.”

It is a pattern the downtown private club says accelerated as hybrid and remote work became a permanent part of life after the pandemic.

Shamsid-Deen said members who once might have spent the day working from home increasingly wanted somewhere else to go – without giving up the flexibility that came with remote work.

“Maybe you don’t want to sit at your dining room table all day,” he said. Instead, members began bringing laptops to sofas and common areas, eventually prompting the club to invest in dedicated coworking space. More than half of its new members now have hybrid or flexible work schedules, according to Shamsid-Deen.

For member Caroline Valmont, that means the boundaries between the workday and the rest of life can become unusually porous.

“It coalesces the work and the social part,” she said. Valmont has held meetings and worked remotely from the club, where stepping away from a laptop can mean grabbing a coffee – or taking a swim – before getting back to work.

Longtime member Wellington Phillips described an even fuller version of the routine: arrive for a morning workout, work for a few hours, take a class, hit the sauna or steam room, eat lunch, work again and then stay for trivia, karaoke or another evening event.

“So you spent your whole day under one roof,” he said.

That ability to move between different parts of life is part of what member Patrick Rutnam finds unusual about the club.

Like Los Angeles itself, he said, the building has different “energies” layered on top of one another — athletic spaces, quieter rooms that feel more like libraries, work areas and places to socialize.

The convenience comes at a price. Membership is about $245 per month, with a joining fee of just under $1,000, according to Shamsid-Deen. The club has more than 4,500 members, roughly 3,000 of whom are considered active regular users.

But members interviewed for the story repeatedly returned to something less tangible than the amenities: having a place where familiar faces are likely to be around.

“The connection really isn’t the professional side,” Valmont said. “It’s the uniqueness of getting to know somebody and the authenticity of that conversation.”

Shamsid-Deen put it more simply.

“All of us want to belong to something,” he said. “And I think we check enough boxes that people find a home here.”

For Rutnam, that description is nearly literal.

“It’s my second home,” he said. “Sometimes it feels like my first home. It really fills in the gaps of what’s going on in my life.”