Bridging wellness.
Building community.

The Concept

It took one cup of coffee. The idea came from a place we love. Corby is a partner in The Golden Mill, a food hall in Golden that was built as a taproom and became the place the town gathers. The beer and the food bring people in. The community is what keeps them there.

So we asked a simple question: what if we took that same community gathering and built it around wellness, longevity and vibrancy, here in Central Park?

"As soon as we sat down for coffee, we literally had the idea complete. And we already had the people we wanted in here."

Corby

We knew exactly what we wanted, and we knew exactly who we wanted in the building. We went to them one by one. Every one of them said the same thing: awesome idea, let's do it.

That's still how it works. Nobody here came looking for us. We came to them.

The Foundation

The community was here before the building was. Revel is built on top of something that already worked. Brandon Harkey has spent years building a gym community of well over 200 members, many of them with him for a long time. He is the place. That community-based effort was never a marketing plan. It's his personality, and it's ours.

"It's a tight friendship, and it's very welcoming to anybody new. When you come into class, it's more than just strength training. It's community."

Brandon Harkey

It's people who know how your mom is doing, how the house remodel is going, whether the new car worked out. Greet anybody in here and you're getting a hug. Fair warning.

So we didn't try to invent a community. We built on the one we had, and pointed it toward practitioners we'd already trusted for years.

Why We Do It This Way

A friend of ours put it to us plainly: the two best indicators of how long you'll live are grip strength and community. How well you treat your body, and who you've got around you. Have both, and you can more or less tell how the next thirty years are going to go.

The community half isn't decoration, either. Across 148 studies and more than 308,000 people, those with stronger social relationships were 50% more likely to survive a given follow-up period, an effect comparable in size to smoking.

Holt-Lunstad, Smith & Layton (2010), PLoS Medicine

"We're kind of the antithesis of big health insurance. Start with your body. Get your mind right. Be proactive about it."

Corby

The Collaboration

The hard part isn't finding good practitioners. It's getting them to work together.

Everyone in this building is someone we found years ago while healing our own injuries. They are the ones we kept going back to, and the ones we kept referring our members, our friends and our families to. We're not sending our mom to just anybody for physical therapy. We're sending her to the best physical therapist we know.

So when we approached them, we didn't lead with are you interested. Everyone's interested. We asked two harder questions first:

1. Are you willing to keep learning, and to collaborate with the other practitioners in this building? The disciplines overlap. Something we said from the very beginning is that this has to be collaborative or it isn't worth doing.
2. Are you willing to put the ego down? To not insist it has to be done your way, that massage won't help, that your discipline is the only answer. You have to be open-minded about it.

Everyone in this building said yes. That's why they're in this building.

"A physical therapist is really good at being a physical therapist. But sometimes they need to refer to the gym, or to the massage therapist. That's what we can bring them."

Corby

Communities like this exist. Practitioners like these exist. What hasn't happened, not at this level and not around here, is pulling them all together so their communities finally touch each other. We're not inventing something new. We're just putting the best of it under one roof.

Why One Roof

You don't know the treatment that's right for you. You think you do. Walk into a chiropractor with knee pain and the chiropractor will help you, because it all works. We know excellent chiropractors, excellent physical therapists, excellent massage therapists. What you never find out, going to just one of them, is whether one of the others was actually the answer for your injury.

Here, you find out. That's the whole point of the building.

"It's not just massage. It's not just physical therapy. It's not just yoga, and it's not just strength training. It's everybody together, working on the same body."

Corby

Most people who walk in don't want to be as strong as humanly possible. That's a small percentage. Honestly, that's us. Barely anybody else.

The people coming in here want to be able to say yes when a buddy calls on Wednesday: we're hiking a 14er Saturday, you in? They haven't hiked all season. They still want to be ready. Their knee is cranky from six hours of skiing, so they see the physical therapist, they see the massage therapist, and they're good for next Saturday.

That's what Revel is. You come here a couple of hours a week, and you live the rest of your life better because you did.

Why Central Park

This community gave us everything. We're on Havana just off MLK, easy to reach from Central Park, Park Hill, Lowry and beyond. But the real reason is personal. Corby has run a business in this neighborhood for twenty-five years, and it has given him everything he has.

Central Park and Park Hill value small business, and not as lip service. People here want their hard-earned money going to a person who's raising a family, paying a mortgage and putting something back into the neighborhood, not to a corporation.

We felt that the entire way through the build. Our electrician, our plumber, our contractor, the drywall guys: every one of them got as excited about this place as we are. They all want to be at the grand opening. Building something out is supposed to be stressful; this was enjoyable.

"Our electrician believes in this so much he calls me almost every evening to talk about how it's going. He knew this place is special. It is special."

Corby

Where This Goes

A thirty-year community, not a profit center. Five years out, we want to have built one of the best wellness communities in the country, and not measured by revenue. Measured by the people who work inside this building and commit their days to it, and by the clients who walk in and become ours for good.

Success in the first month is simpler than that: Central Park getting curious enough to push open the door and ask, so what are you guys doing in here? That's a win.

All the energy these practitioners have built separately, finally under one roof. That's potential energy. We cannot wait to turn it kinetic.

"The second you walk in, I want you to feel welcome. Immediately. This was a great choice. This is exactly what I needed."

Brandon Harkey