Sparkcycle

Nine years ago I designed a spin studio by taking their classes first.

That may not be the textbook way to start a project. You're supposed to develop the program, study the precedent, start sketching. I did all of that too. But before I drew a single wall for Sparkcycle's new studio, I put on cycling shoes and rode in a room like the one I was about to design, because I wanted to know what it actually felt like to be in there.

This was 2017. I was working full time at Gensler in San Diego, and this was the first work I ever took on outside that job, five years before I went out on my own for real. I was already branded as K2Design by then, but I wasn't an official business yet. It's the initiation, for sure.

Sparkcycle already existed. They had a location in La Jolla with a brand that was completely locked in: very white, very bright, and a red logo everybody there just called the red bolt. Liberty Station was going to be their second location, and it happened to be close to my home. I didn't have to invent who they were. I had to design everything else: how someone walks in the door, checks in, finds a cubby for their shoes, browses the merchandise wall, gets into the studio, and leaves, stoked to come back for their next ride.

The space itself was an old, abandoned warehouse. Liberty Station has a lot of those, buildings and old bunkers just sitting empty, and I genuinely don't know what this one used to be. It was simply unoccupied, waiting for someone to decide what it became next.

My scope was the whole thing. Rough plans had been drafted, renderings to develop, making sure it all flowed together. The reception desk. The shoe cubbies. The merchandise racks. The locker room. The bathroom, down to the millwork. The studio itself, which is a pretty simple layout once you're standing in it. I worked with their graphics team on one piece I still think about: a wall at the back of the studio that's a full image of San Diego. Riders see it through the whole class.

And the room, once it's running: dark, loud, pumping with music and lights, and a lot of red light, because red is their brand color. The bolt on the wall becomes the light on the riders once class starts.

I was scared going into this one. I'd never done a project like it, start to finish, on my own. But fitness has always been a huge passion of mine, so experiencing a room like that one wasn't outside my wheelhouse, even if designing one was. I think that familiarity is what actually made me equal to the job. Not my resume from Gensler. I already knew what it felt like to walk in, drop my bag, find my shoes, and show up to ride. I just hadn't designed the room for it yet.

Nine years later, the La Jolla studio has closed. Liberty Station, the one I designed, is still open, and it's still busy. Walk in today and the flow still runs reception to cubbies to studio to locker room with nothing in the way. It's clean. It's bright. It's timeless, and it still has a genuinely good energy in it, all these years later.

I got paid adequately for that project. Not at all what I'd charge now, but fair for what I was doing at the time and the scope of the work. I've been back since, though not recently, and I've ridden a class in my own room.

What I actually carried out of Sparkcycle wasn't the reception desk or the red wall. It was the habit of listening to a client, taking their goals and considerations seriously, and then helping them see the parts of flow and process they hadn't thought to ask about yet. I still work that way with every client I have.

And it led to a second project, not long after…also commercial