We help people open recovery studios.

Cold Hut Recovery helps people open recovery studios in the UK. It works with gym owners adding a recovery room to an existing site, and with first-time founders opening a standalone studio. The work covers site scoping, room design, custom container builds where a building will not take a room, full fit-out, ice bath and sauna supply and installation, compliance and governance, pricing and the launch itself.

Cold Hut Recovery operated its own recovery units before it began supplying other people, so the numbers it models come from rooms that traded rather than from a brochure. Seven studio founders have opened with its help to date.

A single-piece recovery room typically starts around £16,000 including kit, install and the base room build, and a four-piece room runs to roughly £42,000 before lease costs. A standalone studio with its own lease, changing facilities and reception costs considerably more.

The figure most people underestimate is not the equipment. It is drainage, three-phase power, ventilation and flooring, which is why Cold Hut Recovery scopes the site before quoting anything. The calculator on this page gives an itemised build cost for your own space.

A recovery room can pay back its build cost within twelve to twenty-four months, and faster where it is added to a gym that already has members. Profitability turns on four things: how many sessions the room can physically sell in a day, what share of those actually sell, the price per session, and whether the room is staffed.

Staffing is usually the difference between a profitable room and a loss-making one. Unstaffed access via app or code entry lets a room open early mornings and late evenings, which is where most recovery demand sits, at almost no marginal cost.

A recovery room suits a gym that already has members and unused floor space, because the demand is proven before a penny is spent. Ice bath and sauna use went mainstream without anyone advertising it, so the question is not whether people in your area want recovery — it is whether they buy it from you or from someone ten minutes away.

Recovery also brings in people who would never buy a gym membership, which makes it one of the few genuine top-of-funnel additions available to an operator.

A recovery room added to an existing gym typically takes eight to sixteen weeks from decision to opening, depending on services and any planning requirements. A standalone studio takes longer because of lease negotiation, licensing and fit-out sequencing.

Cold Hut Recovery runs a six-month partnership that covers the whole route from scoping to trading, plus support after handover.

A working recovery room needs at minimum one cold plunge with filtration and a chiller, and one sauna, whether traditional or infrared. Contrast therapy — alternating heat and cold — is what most customers actually book, so a room with only one of the two limits what it can sell.

Specification matters more than brand. Chiller capacity, filtration type and service intervals decide whether a room can run all day and what it costs to keep running. Cold Hut Recovery specs equipment on those figures rather than on headline price.

Yes. A converted shipping container is the usual answer when a building will not take a recovery room — insufficient ceiling height, no drainage route, listed status, or simply no spare internal floor space. Cold Hut Recovery builds custom containers finished to spec and delivered ready to connect.

Containers also suit car parks and outdoor areas at gyms and leisure sites, where the alternative would be losing indoor training space.

UK operators are generally expected to hold public liability insurance, take signed participant waivers, keep water quality and temperature logs, set supervision rules, and follow a documented cleaning and testing regime. Requirements vary by insurer, local authority and whether the facility is staffed.

Most disputes arise from missing records rather than missing equipment, which is why Cold Hut Recovery sets up waivers, logs and staff protocols before opening rather than after. This is general information, not legal advice — confirm requirements with your own broker and local authority.

Yes. Most recovery rooms in the UK go in on asset finance, with the monthly payment set against the revenue the room generates. That closes the working capital gap for operators who have the demand but not the cash sitting available.

Cold Hut Recovery works with asset finance brokers and will price the finance alongside the build so the two numbers can be compared directly.

A realistic figure is up to fourteen sold sessions per piece of equipment per day, allowing for turnaround between sessions. A two-piece room running twelve hours a day therefore has real capacity well above what a new room will actually sell in its first year.

The gap between theoretical capacity and sold sessions is where most business plans go wrong. Cold Hut Recovery models on a cautious share of bookable slots rather than on a full room.

A recovery studio is a standalone business with its own lease, reception and changing facilities. A recovery room is a recovery offer added inside an existing site, usually a gym, physio clinic or PT studio.

A room reaches a steady book far faster because the audience is already through the door — typically around five months against fifteen from scratch. Cold Hut Recovery works on both.