Sampling the 80s: The Ken Club in Paris by Rodolphe Parente and Marion Mailaender.

When Mireille and Pierre Benzaquen opened the Ken Club in 1985, Paris had seen nothing quite like it. It was American in spirit and French at heart, a place where CAC 40 executives, actors and neighbours trained side by side, and where Madonna or Yannick Noah might turn up between laps. Adman Jacques Séguéla dubbed it “the museum of body sculpting”. The name stuck.

Forty years on, and after four years of closure, the club has reopened on the banks of the Seine, facing the Eiffel Tower. Arthur Benzaquen, the founders’ son and now head of the Masada Group, set a trickier brief than a straight restoration. The aim was to keep what made the original so loved, its colour and its cheek, and rebuild everything else with the materials and precision of today. The club calls the result an architectural remix.

For once, the press language is accurate.

Stories On Design: The Rise of Designer Health Studios & Gyms.

A revisit of an article from 2016 archives that charts the beginning of the spaces supporting the health industry revolution.

Benzaquen brought in two interior architects who had never worked together, Rodolphe Parente and Marion Mailaender. Both have served as president of Villa Noailles, and both treat humour as a working method. “To reinvent the Ken Club, we needed creators who truly understood the 80s,” says Benzaquen. Architect Denis Valode opened the building up to daylight with a series of new glass roofs.

The designers pictured the club as an ocean liner cut off from the world, and the nautical cues are easy to spot. The nearly 20-metre pool is lined with porthole windows that frame glimpses of a speckle-patterned stair beyond, while round skylights sit in the ceiling above. In the changing rooms, the usual colour code flips: blue for the women, pink for the men.

On the training floor, textured plaster and lino, materials once tied to cheap 80s fit-outs, return in a bold Malabar pink. Opposite them, millimetre-precise joinery builds walls of mirror and stainless steel, alternately perforated, corrugated and brushed, with black equipment anchoring the 300-square-metre space. Budget finishes and high craft sit shoulder to shoulder, and each makes the other look better.

A Nod to Renoir: Citrons et Huitres Paris Oyster Bar by Marion Mailaender.

Mailaender drew inspiration from the history of the neighbourhood—from local artists, and specifically Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose last studio was located in the same building as the oyster bar.

Elsewhere, a grand concrete staircase curves up beside a reception desk clad in bubble gum pink. The cycling studio goes dark, with around 20 bikes in a room where the lighting shifts with the tempo of each session. A glazed patio under a steel-framed roof holds a pale green serpentine bench, and beyond it sits more than 1,000 square metres of garden-solarium.

Parente, who began his career alongside Andrée Putman, has always loved an unexpected juxtaposition. Mailaender’s working motto is “fun follows function”. Put them together, and they keep each other’s excesses in check. The 80s references arrive through material and colour, while the shapes underneath stay calm and generous. Even the timetable plays along, with step and aerobics back on the schedule.

Plenty of brands have mined the decade for nostalgia. The Ken Club does something more useful with it, working out what the original was for and building that again. In 1985, it was a place to be seen sweating. In 2026, it’s a place to spend the whole day.

Art Attack: A Haussmannian Apartment in Paris by Rodolphe Parente.

True to Parente’s signature—and in his own words, his penchant for "making people lose their perception of spaces and volumes"—this Haussmannian apartment flows like sunlight.

[Images courtesy of Rodolphe Parente. Photography by Ludovic Balay.]