When Brooks Nader first moved to the city from Baton Rouge, La., five months ago, she searched for weeks to find an apartment in Soho with a suitable tub.
A steamy, candlelit bath is the brunette model’s favorite way to unwind after long days posing for shoots and racing around the city in sky-high stilettos. But when the time came to take her inaugural bath in her new place, her reveries of relaxation went down the drain.
“I took off my heels, started the water, turned the drain up — and it was broken. The [stopper] just didn’t work. It might as well have been a shower,” says Nader, 20. “I lost my mind — crying, literally, over a bath.”
‘When I take baths, I feel like myself.’
The city is a notoriously sad place for bath-lovers.
Thanks to old buildings, unresponsive landlords and tight spaces, tubs are frequently either too run-down or simply nonexistent.
At the same time, a growing number of New Yorkers are embracing the “self-care” movement, which emphasizes periodic retreats from the rat race, preferably in an Instagram-friendly oasis such as a pristine rose-petal-strewn bathtub.
So desperate was Nader to have a proper soak that she frequently trades her social-media influence for the chance to bathe in luxurious hotel tubs.
“I’ll collaborate with different hotels and they’ll let me stay there in exchange for posting,” says Nader, who’s scored a room in hot spots like New York City’s 11 Howard Hotel by gushing about the sweet digs to her 185,000 Instagram followers. She’s also gone so far as to pay for a room at the Gramercy Park Hotel for their bathtub.
“I’ll do anything for a bath. Like, anything.”
New Yorkers are willing to pay up to 10 percent more for an apartment if it has a nice tub, says real estate broker Leonard Steinberg. He’s seen homeowners here convert whole bedrooms into spalike bathrooms with beautiful tubs, or spend an extra $10,000 for a new bathtub.
“Ten or 15 years ago it was all about having a Sub-Zero refrigerator in the kitchen,” Steinberg says. “Today it’s all about having a free-standing tub in the master bathroom. That’s a dream. Even if they only use it once a year, that one day of taking a bath might be worth it for them.”
Publicist Braden Bradley was willing to uproot from a perfectly fine — albeit old — apartment in Williamsburg because of this one sticking point.
“The tub was disgusting,” the 29-year-old bath lover says. “The grout was missing, there was mold, I was constantly wondering, ‘When is the next roach going to crawl up and attack me?’ I would do as much as I could to clean it, but you can only do so much in an older building.”
So he moved to Harlem, into a newer building with a smaller bedroom but a gloriously clean tub. Now, two to three times a week, he loads up the bubbles, lights candles, pours himself a glass of wine and enjoys the latest “Real Housewives of New York City” on his laptop in the comfort of his own tub.
“That is the perfect Saturday night, if you ask me.
“Whenever I can put my phone away for 45 minutes and just relax, I get a sense of ease, I’m completely destressed and I feel like I am grounded,” adds Bradley. “When I take baths, I feel like myself.”
With so many lamenting their inability to submerge in a proper pool of hot water, Liz Tortolani saw an opportunity. In 2016, she opened CityWell Brooklyn, a 2,000-square-foot indoor-and-outdoor public bathhouse in Gowanus with amenities such as a eucalyptus steam room, dry sauna and massage services.
Since opening in 2016, the hydrotherapy tub sees near-capacity attendance.
“I saw this big, intense need [for a place where] one could take care of [one’s] body,” says the 41-year-old massage therapist, who refuses to bathe in her own outdated Park Slope apartment. “We don’t have good bathtubs here that we can actually soak in.”
Other bath-based businesses are surprisingly thriving as well. As the founder of the Brooklyn-based Palermo Body skincare line, Williamsburg resident Jess Morelli knows firsthand how a good soak is now a status symbol for New Yorkers.
While she was initially reluctant to start selling bath products in a place with so few reliable tubs, she realized the few people who do have the privilege of enjoying a bath were especially passionate about it — and would buy her products.
“New Yorkers understand it’s kind of a luxury to have one,” the 30-year-old says. “Because they’ve likely lived without one and they know what it’s like to not have access to that luxury.”
One of Palermo’s loyal customers is Catherine Willhoit, who uses the brand’s salt soak in her newly renovated bathtub in Hoboken, NJ. The 34-year-old publicist and her husband bought their home five years ago after braving a tiny Upper East Side apartment. There, the grimy tub had her dreaming of the day when she wouldn’t have to close her eyes every time she wanted to feel clean.
“I’d clean it with all my might and just try to block out the image of the mold and the body hair that was left behind by the apartment’s previous tenant,” she says.
At nearly 6 feet tall, having a tub she could submerge her whole body in was a top priority. So, after $40,000 in renovations, she has one. The installation of her glossy new tub came just in time — she’s nine months pregnant and “everything hurts.”
“There’s something about coming home after a long day and just washing the day away,” she says. “Renovating this bathroom was a difficult process, but now this bath is almost sacred.”
Water world
For those New Yorkers without a bath — or whose tub is characteristically grimy beyond repair — there are several local options for a good soak.
Marmara Park Avenue hotel’s Turkish hammam
The hotel’s authentic Turkish bathhouse just opened to the public this month. Located underground in a 250-square-foot chamber, the hammam includes a giant heated marble slab in a steamy warm room. Among the treatments offered in the bathhouse is a traditional exfoliation in which therapists use brisk massage techniques to scrub and cleanse. The 60 minute-treatment costs $195. See add-ons and details at Park.MarmaraNYC.com or call 212-603-9000 to make an appointment.
CityWell Brooklyn
In the heart of industrial Gowanus is CityWell, a bathhouse with a holistic health slant. Along with use of their wet and dry sauna, rain showers and an epsom-salt hydrotherapy tub, the bathhouse offers massage therapy, yoga and wellness coaching — as well as jazz nights so bathers can take in the jams as they chill out. Public hours are Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Mondays from 6 to 8 p.m. and, for women only, Sunday from 3 to 5 p.m. Costs range from $20 to $40. Reserve a spot at CityWellBrooklyn.com.
Sojo Spa
This new 240,000-square-foot Korean bathhouse in Edgewater, NJ, is essentially a theme park for bath enthusiasts. The eight-level spa offers views of the city skyline and nine specialty outdoor pools and baths, all with different temperatures and features. The spa also offers multiple sauna rooms and a steam room, plus Korean-style sitting showers, body scrubs and add-on massage treatments. Day passes are $65 on weekdays, $75 on weekends and holidays. Head to SojoSpaClub.com for more information.