Just over 20 years ago, I — along with seemingly half the country — started going to yoga classes, and the man to blame for that is standing next to me in a building site in Primrose Hill, north London. Not because we are doing some exciting new kind of yoga (scaffolding yoga? Drill hammer yoga?), but because he is showing me what will become his new yoga centre, called Home. “So over here will be the reception,” Jonathan Sattin says, laconically gesturing towards some steel beams, “and the Pilates classes will be in here,” he adds, gesturing towards what can just about be described as a room.
Sattin (“I never give my age, only in dog years”) is — as he has been since we first met 25 years ago — clutching the lead of a golden retriever. “Once you find your breed, that’s it,” he says, with a fond pat of nine-year-old Piper’s head. Piper leads the way to a café around the corner where we get tea (me), toast (Sattin) and water (Piper). “The idea is that, in the key time slots, we’ll be able to offer a dynamic class, a classical one, a hot one and something restorative. It may work or not but that’s the aim,” Sattin says in his laissez-faire tone that has always belied his fierce focus. “But most importantly, I want it to have a very specific feeling, a particular scent and sound, to make it feel like you’re coming home, which is why I called it that. Because I think that’s what people really crave.”
It already feels very familiar to me, although less because of the scents and sounds (which are, as I mentioned, currently those of a building site). Home will be on the site of Sattin’s previous studio, the renowned Triyoga studio, which stood there from 2000-14. It kick-started the yoga craze in this country, and I went to classes there three times a week through most of my twenties and early thirties. Sattin’s golden retriever back then, Teddy (“Ah Teddy,” Sattin sighs), would wander around, downward dogging and tail wagging, and he was far more of an integral part of the place than the celebrities. But it’s impossible to talk about Triyoga without talking about the celebrities.
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Yoga fans Kate Moss, Matthew Williamson and Sienna Miller in the Noughties
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Before the studio opened in 2000, yoga was still seen as something for the mung beans and hippy beads crowd. But things were about to change. In 2002 Christy Turlington was photographed doing a yogic backbend on the cover of US Vogue. The UK’s version of this was the pap shots of Kate Moss and Sadie Frost trundling around Primrose Hill with rolled-up yoga mats under their arms, on their way to Triyoga. Yoga — an ancient Indian spiritual and physical practice — had officially arrived in the western zeitgeist. But why then?
“Well, the teachers we had at Triyoga were all excellent,” Sattin says, which is why I started going there after an osteopath, infuriated by the stiffness of my shoulders, suggested I try yoga. But other factors sexier than stiff shoulders brought the celebrities.
Primrose Hill was then known as the home of British celebrities: Jude’n’Sadie, Pearl’n’Danny, Kate’n’Whoever. By the Noughties those people were looking for something nearby to counterbalance what is euphemistically referred to as “the partying”. “[The designer] Matthew Williamson lived nearby and he got involved with Triyoga as its designer. We had these dark wood floors upstairs and he walked in and said, ‘No, they need to be white.’ He put jewel colours everywhere, reds and purples and blues. Then he brought all the fashionable people. And that was that.”
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Sattin was never the most likely trendsetter. He still looks less like a yogi and more like the lawyer he was several decades ago, when he lived on a daily diet of “40 cigarettes, 40 cups of coffee, plus a few other things”. One day, a colleague said to him: “You’re a bit weird, you should try yoga.” Almost immediately, the cigarettes, and then the coffee, and eventually the law practice, fell away as he devoted his life to yoga. Every time I went to Triyoga, Sattin was sitting in reception making sure things were running properly, and always accompanied by Teddy. “Initially I thought I’d sell up and move on soon after,” he says. “But I found that I really believed in it. And I believe in what I’m doing now. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it.”
But Triyoga was a casualty of its success. In the two decades after it opened the centre overexpanded, with outposts across London, in Soho, Covent Garden, Chelsea and more, and not even Sattin and Teddy could oversee all of them at once. Then, in 2014, the landlord of the original Primrose Hill site decided he wanted to develop the building and kicked Triyoga out. Sattin found another building down the road in Camden, but it didn’t have the elegant, tranquil feel of the original building and many regulars moved on.
United Fitness Brands, an investment group, offered to buy Triyoga in 2019, but Sattin didn’t think it was a good fit. Then Covid hit and in the immediate aftermath, when former regulars were slow to return, he didn’t have a choice. By 2022 Sattin was out of the company he had built and loved.
Further problems had been brewing for Triyoga beside overexpansion and Covid. Countless other yoga centres copied its formula of being serious but not pious, aesthetically pleasing but not too chichi. After Triyoga opened in Camden, I switched allegiance from the centre to my favourite former Triyoga teacher, Stewart Gilchrist. Eleven years on I still follow Stewart to wherever he teaches around London — and every other regular yoga student I know does the same. It’s all about the teachers now, not the centres, and we keep up to date with their teaching schedules via their social media.
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Sattin outside Home, which is on the site of the original Triyoga studio
LESLIE LAU FOR THE TIMES
None of this was true 25 years ago. Sattin knows this better than most, and he has already signed up some big-name teachers for Home. Yoga isn’t quite as trendy as it was two decades ago — the fashionable people have moved on to reformer Pilates, which Home will also offer. But while Sattin always appreciated the extra business that the celebrities brought to Triyoga, he had no idea who most of them were anyway. “I think Home will be different because Primrose Hill is different these days. My investors are all low-key locals, really good people, and they just want it to feel like a nice community place,” he says. Although, given that the actor Patrick Schwarzenegger and the fashion designer Christopher Kane are sitting at tables just inches from us in the café, “low-key locals” is a relative term when it comes to Primrose Hill. True to form Sattin recognises neither of them.
After he sold Triyoga, Sattin assumed he’d live a quiet life with his dogs. But then an estate agent mentioned that the original Triyoga site was empty — and Sattin couldn’t resist. Piper has already picked out her favourite sunny spot in Home’s reception.
“I get the sense that people really want it, which is nice but a bit scary because you can’t just repeat what you did last time,” he says. You can’t. But while fitness trends come and go, good teachers plus golden retrievers — and the occasional celebrity sighting — is a timeless combination.
Home opens on June 30, launch offers available until September 1, book at homewellness.uk