Urban sanctuary: influenced by tropical spa traditions, this new health sanctuary in London makes inventive use of materials and light to create two very different interior spaces.

Stressed, time-poor Londoners snatching nano-moments of relaxation from the snapping jaws of urban existence now have a hip new decompression point on their radar. Calmia is a spa and health sanctuary at the north end of Marylebone High Street, one of London's livelier West End thoroughfares. Drawing on the tropical spa traditions of Bali, Calmia promulgates an Eastern holistic approach to health, relaxation and beauty treatments in a thoroughly modern setting. Opened around a year ago, the Marylebone outpost is the company's first flagship venture, but its success has led to greater things--a second outlet in Selfridges department store is currently on the drawing board.

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The young London-based practice of Groves Natcheva was asked to design the interior of the Marylebone shop and responded with great imagination to an exacting brief, a limited budget ([pounds sterling]400 000) and an awkward existing building with a roughly triangular floorplate and a car park underneath it. The new interior is split over two floors linked by a ground floor half level. In a neat yin-yang symbiosis, the two main floors embody entirely different but complementary functions and design principles. On clear view from the street, the upper shop floor sells an array of clothes, treatments, products, books and so forth; below, hidden from public gaze, are the various treatment rooms. Where the upper level is cool, luminous and connects with the wider world, the lower floor is a dark, hermetic labyrinth, intended to cultivate an atmosphere of calm and detachment.

Space on the shop floor and entrance half level is demarcated by a massive planar construction, like a huge sculpture, that wraps seamlessly around the interior.

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Obviating the need for conventional fittings, its nooks and surfaces can be used as display units, shelves, tables or seating. Inspired by the paintings of Modernist pioneer Ben Nicholson, the angular construction forms a neutral armature and backdrop for display, also framing views across to St Mary's churchyard through a huge vitrine on the street frontage. Flashes of colour are provided both by objects and the Calmia branding of vivid Barraganesque orange and pink. Though the surface of the construction resembles masonry in appearance and texture, the budget would only stretch to a handful of limestone sinks, so Groves Natcheva devised an ingenious economical substitute of granular resin that can be trowelled on like plaster 4mm deep over plywood framing to create the desired effect.

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Below ground, individual treatment rooms are intimate sensuous havens, with low ceilings, boldly coloured walls and oiled iroko floors. Light levels are also kept low, to enhance a sense of tranquillity and other worldliness and emphasize the quasi-religious nature of the modern spa experience. The layout of the communal relaxation suite, for instance, where clients spend time decompressing post-treatment, is loosely based on the layout of a gompa or Tibetan Buddhist prayer hall (Murray Groves, one of the partners, has travelled extensively in the Far East) with two parallel rows of cubicles overseen at each end by statues of Buddha. (The idea being that you never face the deity directly.) What Lord Buddha might make of the Naturopathica Sumatra Coconut Body Polish, one of the tantalizing treatments on offer, is open to question, but a place that seeks to restore the equilibrium of jaded city dwellers must surely be one small step on the path to enlightenment.

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