The resolutions hang in the air. Treadmills are dusted off. Gyms prepare for an onslaught. For most, the season ends in February. But for others, fitness is a constant that shapes more than their muscles. It shapes their houses.
Joan Vos Macdonald says she saw the future of healthy living in 1995, at the Amsterdam offices of Dutch financial giant ING. Erected in 1987, the 10-towered building keeps employees active with a 350-metre "internal street" and staircase banisters with running water to make moving from floor to floor more fun.
Now the corporate experiment has gone domestic and Vos Macdonald has chronicled the shift in her book High Fit Home, a coffee table survey of dwellings where exercise isn't left to spare room treadmills but infiltrates bricks and mortar.
There's the Lake Michigan house with 10 levels and no elevator to keep the kids moving. The architect calls it the StairMaster house. There's the New York apartment with its own dance studio where closet door handles double as a ballet barre. There's the ski lodge where the interior mimics local ski trails and the outside is clad in the same varnished wood as skis.
And in Los Angeles there's the Sinnott Residence. Like most of the city's high-end properties this house has a gym. But it isn't in the basement or garage. It floats over the main living area, self-contained and mysterious, with a row of tiny windows like a minstrels' ÂÂgallery for the MTV generation. The windows are high up, so when you pound equipment you see the garden and the blue of the pool. The pool is also atypical. The water touches the side of the house. Taking a dip means opening the living room doors and stepping right in.
Elevating home gym to architectural talking point exemplifies the move towards healthier houses, says architect Trevor Abramson of Abramson Teiger. Instead of being afterthoughts, exercise rooms are now "part of the lifestyle of the house" for people whose entrepreneurial spirit creates the cash to hire him. "Their high-driven lifestyle means being on top of the game," Abramson says. "Keeping fit is part of that."
His clients also tend to be mould-breakers, both in their business and in their architectural preferences. "These people don't want Tudor-style," Abramson says. They want experimental, modernist homes that enshrine the fitness ethic: "Light, clean and fresh."
Fresh is everywhere in the Utah mountains. Take the pool house built among aspen trees for a lawyer who wanted to swim every day by the architects responsible for London's Apple store and Bill Gates's pool.
Jutting out of the mountainside, through the trees, the building is made of grey stone and cantilevered over a stream that flows down from the peaks. The views can be admired from underwater. The 25-metre pool's north end is glazed from top to bottom. Overhead, a steel riband runs the entire length, reflecting the scene and shimmering like a hologram: "It's all a little magical," says architect Peter Bohlin of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. "A little otherworldly."
Bohlin chooses words well. For him, fitness isn't just notching up laps in a chlorinated pool: "Everything we do is loaded with emotional associations. Architecture isn't just a matter of accommodating needs in a utilitarian sense. It's a thing of spirit."
Like many "high fit" pioneers, he believes living well and wellness are entwined: "I see no line between a place to exercise and a place to read. They all have this need to transport and comfort." Behind the mountainside pool is a wine cellar.
Swap mountains for apartment blocks and you end up at the Murray Street building in Manhattan. From the ground it looks like a standard complex of 700 luxury apartments. But its rooftop is home to the Sky Court, a basketball court 20 storeys up. "The owners wanted to attract a younger crowd from the Wall Street area," says architect Joseph Tanney of Resolution 4: Architecture. And the impact on that crowd has been striking. Instead of the virtual anonymity of many blocks, there is "spontaneous hoop playing and a very active lifestyle intertwined with socialising". Non-players hang out on court-side seats linked by catwalks to a terrace and media room - all up there in the New York sky. "It gives a sense of community and activity."
Sometimes fitness architecture brings folks together. Sometimes, it pulls homes apart. The VXO House in Hampstead, London, is less house, more campus. Across from the original 1960s "V" residence (a red V column supports the top half of a contemporary glass-foyered extension) is the "X" pavilion gym, which has a glass front and pebbled interior wall aping a 17th-century grotto, and across from this is the "O" pavilion/carport.
"You have to go outside and make a bit of an effort," says architect Alison Brooks. "It's also mentally healthy in that the "X" pavilion lets household members escape - particularly useful for teenagers." Brooks dubs the project a modernist interpretation of the 18th century romantic landscape - "follies in a garden of Eden" - and confirms how far perceptions of "at-home" fitness are changing. Activity is becoming habitual, she explains. Fitness zones are beautifying landscapes. "Gyms should have prime locations," she adds. "They can be a pure space and therefore full of promise."
Where that promise leads, Vos Macdonald isn't sure. But with obesity up and baby boomers realising "they must use it or lose it", she reckons that "high fit" homes will crack the mainstream: "Even some Midwest farmers have converted old silos into climbing walls."
If she's right, and high-rise hoops and centrepiece gyms become commonplace, what's next for exercise-inducing architecture? Perhaps a place like Spine House, designed by Sir Nicholas Grimshaw for a site in the countryside outside Cologne.
The building itself is stunning, like a glossed-up aircraft ready for flight; two glass-rich wings join a curvilinear spine with a cockpit-like front that runs the length of the second storey. But visitors entering (through its spine), will find the interior even more interesting. To the left is a swimming pool. To the right is a squash court.
The home was built for a forty-something German industrialist who rose at 6am, worked all day and mistook pizza for a balanced diet. "He was a very energetic guy whose energies were going into his business, not him," says Sir Nicholas.
So he prescribed, as architects do, a beautiful house with pool, court and view to inspire healthy living. The industrialist had some reservations about the high-cost proposal. But eventually the house was built. And "it's changed his life". Pizzas have been put aside, the pool and court are used regularly and weekends are spent playing basketball on a converted field nearby.
Beautiful architecture can "change our perception of a healthy lifestyle away from the sterile," Sir Nicholas says. While "running on a treadmill in a grotty basement is pretty barmy", more luxurious fitness areas can actually push people into keeping their new year resolutions. As he told his German client: "If you leave [this] house without having a swim in the morning, I want you to feel guilty."
