KX Private Members' Club
Location
Chelsea, London
Venue type
MEMBERS' CLUB
Equipment
11 sets of Edition 01: Bell in 4 and 8kg
Finish
Portland Stone and Brick Red
Storage
Box Console in Dark Mahogany
Class
Slow Strength®
Class Size
4-12
Certification
In-house team, Altere-certified
Scope
Three classes weekly
Sound
Custom Soundtrack by Altere
Scent
Hinoki Leaf
KX Private Members' Club
Club Director, KX Private Members' Club
01 — Design
The design was arrived at on site. Altere began with a consultation in the studio itself, measuring the space and understanding how it was used before proposing anything. Class size came first, which set the quantity of equipment for a ten-person session. The custom branding followed, shaped from KX's initial ideas, and then the console itself, developed into a full proposal and signed off before a single part was cut.
Altere took the room end to end, from the equipment through to the way it would be stored and shown. The starting point was colour. The Bells were finished in two tones drawn from the club's own interior: Altere's natural Portland stone, left unpigmented, and a custom brick red developed for KX. The red is a quiet nod to the teak strip flooring underfoot and the ornate sandstone masonry of the building's facade, so the equipment reads as though it had always belonged to the space. The colour was specified to run through the composite itself, never to sit on the surface.
Storage was the harder problem. The studio's mirror sat low to the floor, leaving only a shallow band of wall beneath it in which any furniture could live. That single constraint shaped the whole piece. Altere's answer was the Box Console, a low grid-like form of clean lines and balanced proportion, sized precisely to tuck under the mirror line without ever crowding the room.
The layout was resolved around access. The 4kg and 8kg Bells sit on the top surface facing the room, the lighter weight set in front of the heavier, while the 12kg sits on a lower level beneath the bench with its back to the room, exactly where a hand reaches for it. The console holds up to thirty-three Bells in all, each seated in a sculpted support groove cut for stability and neat alignment. Engraved weight markers and a KX logo complete it, so the storage becomes a piece of the room's design in its own right.
02 — The Making
Every Bell is hand-cast in Altere's Shropshire studio. The composite is proprietary, a mineral base of natural gypsum bound with a water-based acrylic polymer, and for KX the brick red was achieved with a natural powder pigment blended through the mix, so the colour is the material, consistent from surface to core. The Portland stone tone needs no pigment at all.
The process is unhurried by design. Each form is hand-poured into its mould, left to cure, then demoulded and hand-sanded, cleaned and coated with a penetrating sealer. A single Bell takes a full day from start to finish and passes through the hands of at least two artisans. The recycled steel formwork behind each mould is shaped by hand and weighed, so that when a Bell is poured and cured it comes out precisely on weight. Little of this is visible in the finished object, which is rather the point.
The Box Console is built with a London fabrication studio better known for its architectural models, a partner chosen for the tolerances that work demands. Development began with a single test module, built to prove the structure and finish, and to test how cleanly it would assemble, before the full piece was committed to. The console is cut on a three-axis CNC from a high-density engineered wood fibre made with recycled wood waste, its support grooves machined to the millimetre, with the weight markings and logo engraved in the same pass.
The fibre is impregnated with an organic chocolate-brown dye and finished by hand with an oil-and-wax coating chosen to take the impact of Bells set down on it over years of use. The whole piece is held together by a locking geometry Altere developed for the joints, strong and lasting without recourse to glue or a mess of screws. At five and a half metres long, the console is made in three sections that flat-pack for delivery and lock together on site.
03 — Delivery & Installation
Each set of Bells travels in its own crate, custom-made and foam-lined. On delivery day the installation team began with the console, assembling it quietly beneath the mirror where it had been designed to sit. For all its length, the build in the studio took under an hour. The Bells were then lifted from their crates and set into their grooves for the first time, the Portland stone and brick red catching the room's natural light. The studio became what it had been drawn to be.
04 — Accreditation
A week before the equipment arrived, Altere ran a day of instructor accreditation with two members of the KX training team. The timing was deliberate, so that the moment the studio was live the trainers were ready to teach.
Accreditation with Altere is exacting. Each trainer sits with Altere's training lead for a live demonstration of a complete class, followed by a full walk-through of the Slow Strength® General Delivery Guide, the method's complete handbook. The guide leaves very little to chance. It sets out the five defining elements every class must hold, from Time Under Tension and rhythmic nasal breathing through to the tempo notation that syncs each movement to the beat of the music. It goes further into the texture of the room itself, down to warm low lighting and a rolled towel spritzed with a signature scent at the head of every mat, and it asks the instructor to arrive fifteen minutes early and take five slow breaths before walking in.
Only after this does the assessment begin. The trainer delivers a full class back to the training lead, who reviews and scores it against the guide and returns detailed notes. Accreditation is granted once that standard is met, and not before. It is what allows three classes a week to feel identical in quality however often a member returns, and whichever of the two instructors is leading.
05 — The Result
KX now runs Slow Strength® three times a week to full ten-person classes. The programme rotates through varying difficulty levels and movement sequences set to curated soundtracks timed to the breath, so regulars meet something fresh each week while the method underneath stays constant.
The offering has done what the club hoped, and more. Slow Strength® has become KX's most in-demand strength class. Members who once kept away from the weights floor now train under load in a room that feels like the rest of KX, unhurried and quietly luxurious. Many are graduating up through the weight classes as they grow stronger and more confident in the practice. The console stands as a piece of the studio's design in its own right, an elegant and photographable presence rather than a store of equipment. Strength, at KX, has become part of the ritual of the place.