On a recent afternoon, the lobby of The Proper Hotel looked less like a hotel than a highly evolved ecosystem of Westside aspiration. Sunlight poured across the terracotta-accented interiors while guests drifted between business meetings, turmeric lattes, and sound bath classes in head-to-toe cream linen. Someone carrying a Bottega Veneta tote disappeared toward the elevator bank. A woman in ballet flats and a Khaite sweater sat cross-legged on a sofa answering emails beside what appeared to be a spiritual advisor. No one seemed to be in a hurry, exactly, though everyone looked extremely busy becoming their best self.
That tension—between ease and optimization—is what The Proper understands unusually well.
When the hotel opened in 2019, much of the conversation centered around Kelly Wearstler’s interiors, which seemed to invent an entire Westside design grammar in real time: sculptural lighting, hand-troweled plaster walls, vintage textiles, curving furniture that appears designed specifically for attractive people to lounge on while discussing adaptogens. Years later, the aesthetic still feels transportive, even as much of the rest of the hospitality industry has copied the look into oblivion.
The design was never meant to be just decorative. Wearstler says she wanted guests to “immediately exhale upon arrival,” while also feeling “inspired and energized.” Luxury, as she sees it, is not about “perfection or formality” so much as “the emotional resonance of a space.” That is a useful way to understand the hotel: glamorous, yes, but not sealed off or intimidating. It is warm-blooded, tactile, and slightly theatrical, with enough texture and surprise to keep it from lapsing into beige wellness serenity.
“I’ve never been interested in environments that feel clinical or overly purified,” she says. Spaces, she adds, should have “personality and tension.” At the Proper, that comes through in the layered materials—plaster, stone, natural woods, vintage pieces, sculptural lamps, textured textiles—which make the hotel feel less like a wellness retreat than a layered, lived-in house.
But design is no longer the only draw.
The recently launched Proper Club transforms the property from a place people stay into a place people orbit. Part wellness club, part social club, part luxury lifestyle infrastructure, it reflects a broader shift across hospitality, where affluent urbanites no longer want hotels to simply provide service. They want them to provide identity.
Jared Poulin, the hotel’s director of membership and wellness, describes the club less as a gym or spa than as a place where people feel “like they’d been let in on something, like a friend is giving them a key to secret hideaway where tension drops and they can just be.” The clinical end of wellness, he says, can feel “stark” and “managerial”; the Proper’s ambition is to offer comfort and care while still giving members “access and the tools to optimize your health and wellbeing.”
The programming reflects the language of modern longevity—fitness classes, recovery treatments, wellness experiences, and cultural events—but its real achievement is creating a daily rhythm. Brandon, a remote tech worker I met at the club, told me he comes every morning: he works out, then joins friends in one of the hotel’s beautifully designed co-working spaces. “You can easily spend an entire day here,” he said, and I quickly found that to be true. Lunch might be a sandwich by the pool, followed by an infrared sauna session or cold plunge in the rooftop members-only lounge. In the evening, there’s twilight vinyasa yoga or a sound bath. Here, wellness is less a private discipline than a form of social architecture. As Poulin puts it, “Members aren't just looking for another optimization protocol, they're looking for permission to simply be well.”
That may be the most modern thing about the place. You can go deep on the protocols—red light, infrared, PEMF, cold exposure, biomarker-driven longevity—but the mood is less managerial than restorative. It is come in, sit down, have lunch, recover, talk to someone interesting, and maybe remember you have a body without turning it into a full-time job. Beyond the amenities, “the community itself is part of the offering,” says Poulin. “You come for how the space looks and feels, but you stay for who's in it.”
As for who actually joins, Poulin describes a mix: tech founders, filmmakers, couples, Westside families, what he calls “the cool mom.” The common thread, he says, is not celebrity or scene-making. Members are “not here to be seen and are almost allergic to anything that feels like a scene.” That is, of course, exactly the kind of thing people in scenes like to say. And yet it rings partly true. The Proper has all the ingredients of a scene—the clothes, the lighting, the architecture, the mildly improbable concentration of people who appear to know their exact protein intake—but it does not feel frantic or performative in an Erewhon kind of way. You don’t see a lot of people making duck faces and taking selfies.
Wearstler says that was always the intention: The Santa Monica Proper was designed to feel “residential and communal rather than transactional.” Guests, and now members, move through it in that way: coffee in the morning, meetings in the afternoon, cocktails on the roof at sunset, dinner with friends, a quiet moment somewhere in between. The hotel becomes less a destination than a daily ritual.
Which is why Surya Spa feels so essential to the whole proposition. Founded by Ayurvedic healer Martha Soffer, Surya has developed something close to cult status among wellness devotees. It is also the least algorithmic part of the hotel’s wellness offering. Before anyone guides you toward a treatment room, Soffer takes your pulse, looks at your tongue, asks about your sleep, hormones, digestion, stress, joints, and what, exactly, you feel you need help with. In a city where wellness often begins with a blood panel and ends with a supplement protocol, there is something almost radical about being read this way: by hand, by eye, by instinct sharpened over decades.
The treatments are almost aggressively nurturing: rhythmic bodywork, warm herbal oils, the feeling of being handled with unusual patience and care. But Soffer is quick to distinguish what she does from the decorative pleasures of a very good hotel massage. “This is not just like I’m gonna put some oil in my body and give you a massage,” she told me. “The treatments go much deeper and really change things in your life.”
The treatments are highly personalized. The oils, she explained, are made from scratch for each person. “It’s not like one fits all,” she said. “It will be your jar with your name, with your herbs.” Sometimes the oil cooks overnight; sometimes for three or four days. If she sees something change, she may add another herb and cook it again. The whole thing has the specificity of couture, but the fitting happens somewhere beneath the skin.
For me, she prescribed a four-hand abhyanga massage, herbal steam with the head kept cool, and shirodhara, the stream of warm oil poured across the forehead. The point, she said, was to “really deeply relax the nervous system and release the stress that is embedded into your tissues.”
Later that evening, I checked my Oura ring. The evidence of inner peace was not metaphorical: My restorative blue lines were suddenly heroic, with none of the pink stress spikes that had been following me around all week. Over the next two days of panchakarma—an immersive Ayurvedic detox protocol involving hours of warm oil massage, steam, shirodhara, ear candling, and other interventions that, in another context, might have made me raise an eyebrow—my body appeared, by at least one Silicon Valley-approved metric, to be registering the shift.
That is where the Proper’s whole proposition comes into focus. The amenities are all there — red light, infrared, PEMF, cold exposure, the whole expanding grammar of longevity — but they are not the soul of the place. The soul is softer. It’s lunch after a treatment, a conversation that stretches longer than planned, the faint scent of frankincense still in your hair. In a world increasingly fluent in optimization, the Proper’s real luxury is that it lets you stay awhile, until the part of you that keeps score has finally gone quiet.
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