Health is Wealth
Tim Gurner wants to put a glass dome over a wellness utopia in Docklands. Cameron Hurst investigates.
In a gravel car park in the north-eastern part of Melbourne’s Docklands, the first sod has been turned on a $1.7 billion, 1100-residence luxury wellness precinct. You may have seen the renders of this development. They show a series of towering buildings—glassy, greenery-dripping monoliths piped with white accents—rising above an azure marina, all ensconced within a gargantuan glass dome. The current plans include three apartment towers, a 5-star hotel, a park, and a “Path of Life,” a lantern-lit walkway that snakes through an “urban rainforest.” The fact that this land has never been home to rainforests—only swampy wetlands—is just a technicality to be irrigated away. One 31-storey residential tower, Helios, was approved by the state planning minister in October. Sales pitches are in progress and construction is starting next year. The development is described in brochures as an “oasis,” a “utopia,” a “lush pocket of paradise,” and a “sanctuary of luxury and longevity.” In the renders, residents arriving at the ground floor entrance in their CGI sports cars are met with palm trees, waterwalls, an abundance of marble and gold furnishings, and EF monograms: welcome to Elysium Fields.
Elysium Fields takes its name from the paradise of ancient Grecian mythology: a heaven for dead heroes made immortal by the gods; a place where, in the poet Virgil’s words, residents with brows wrapped in white cloth “make couches of river-banks, and inhabit fresh-water meadows.” These apartments will, according to marketing materials, be similarly idyllic. A core selling point is that residents of Elysium Fields will not get old like other mere mortals. Extensive in-house anti-aging services will be available: cryotherapy, IV drips, MRI scans, DEXA scans, red light therapy, saunas, and verdant gardens designed around the Japanese concept of forest bathing—Shinrin-yoku. The water will be filtered. The air will be filtered. The lighting will be circadian, naturally.
Only one person in the city of Melbourne would, could, or should be behind the megalomaniacal fantasia that is Elysium Fields. He is the preeminent Australian property developer of our dawning neo-feudal wellness epoch, a Trumpian figure who loves press and gilded facades but eschews the president-elect’s diet; he would rather jump off the penthouse balcony of a luxury wellness precinct than consume a Diet Coke and Big Mac. His name is Gurner. Tim Gurner.
For many, to know Tim Gurner is to hate Tim Gurner. The slender, sandy-haired mogul has a gift for generating headlines wherein he comes off as, put simply, a massive wanker. Once Gurner said that young people should stop buying avocado toast so that they could save enough money for house deposits. Another time, he argued that unemployment should be increased by 40-50%, so that the economy would feel “pain” and employees would stop being so entitled.
These loose speculative macroeconomic figures—according to the BBC, an unemployment rate of 40-50% would entail over 200,000 people losing their jobs—might seem uncharacteristic for a man who tracks other numbers with extreme precision. Gurner is famously possessed by wellness-mania. He only ever eats 2700 calories a day: 40% carbohydrates, 40% protein, and 20% fat. He wears two different app-linked rings, Oura and Whoop, which record his biometric data at all times. For the last five years, he has slept an average of seven hours and 48 minutes per night. Every morning, he gets up at 5:30am. Every night, he tries to go to bed by 9:30pm (his 11-year-old daughter has been keeping him up recently, which he says is “depressing”). Every Saturday, he sleeps between 1pm and 3pm to “recharge” for the week.
When Saint Haven, the first edition of Gurner’s members-only wellness club, opened in Collingwood, he began participating in the club’s “Limitless” program, a tailored anti-ageing biohacking regimen. In addition to gym, ice-bath, sauna, sound healing and breathwork sessions, this required him to take between three and 60 supplements per day, depending on the season, as well as information gleaned from his regular brain scans, blood tests, and stool tests. He consumed wholefood meals cooked by Saint Haven’s head chef, Chad. When Gurner started Limitless, he told one newspaper that his biological age matched his actual age—41. Now, he says, a couple of years later, his biological age is down by almost nine years. Almost, but not quite.
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Gurner is a hemp-fueled Ubermensch: a don in a world where health is wealth and wealth is wealth and each begets the other. His business model so far has been to dream up the most outlandish and elaborate services and spaces that he personally desires, then, banking that other people will want them too, build them at enormous scale and worse quality. Elysium Fields is the most accelerated iteration of this enterprise to date. Gurner has benefitted from ancient bathhouse technologies and magnesium infusions and a $15 million apartment; therefore he should build a billion-dollar wellness tech apartment precinct for the masses.
In this light, his much-publicised wellness obsession can be read as a canny marketing move. The holistic health angle differentiates Gurner Group developments from those by other big players, an essential edge when you’re trying to flip or rent property at scale. It’s working: so far Gurner has sold thousands of apartments in buildings from St Kilda to Fortitude Valley, and has thousands more in the “pipeline.” He is, according to the Australian Financial Review, worth $989 million.
But Gurner’s motivations cannot be explained solely by profit. There is a level of theatricality and camp excess that motivates him beyond the explanatory power of any Rich List. This is partly why, in recent years, I have found myself acting like Gurner’s third, secret biometric ring, tracking his every move. Last year, I wrote about his spa club, Saint Haven. At the time, construction was still in progress, and I wondered if it would deliver all that it promised once its burnished gold doors swung open. This year, in the midst of a housing crisis, I was intrigued to see him announce a suite of build-to-sell and build-to-rent residential developments—Elysium Fields being the most spectacular (pejorative) by far.
The city needs more houses. This much is undeniable. Will at least some of the resources and energy Gurner feverishly directs towards luxury apartments be siphoned into social housing and public infrastructure? Sort of, but not really: Docklands News reports that only 42 of the 700 residences—6%—will be “affordable.” Sonya Kilkenny, the Minister for Planning, approved the Docklands project despite unanimous opposition from City of Melbourne councillors, who noted that the wellness precinct was “staggeringly” different to previous plans. The approval coincidentally went through when the council was in caretaker mode during the election, inhibiting potential opposition. Gurner is reshaping the city in his own image, whatever it takes. Growth mindset activated.
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As easy as he is to caricature, Gurner represents the epitome of a new type of aspirational elitism. There is no contradiction between Gurner’s callous attitude to the job prospects of large swathes of the population and his attention to minute shifts in his bowel movements and circadian rhythms. His worldview is structured around absolute macro-socioeconomic ruthlessness and absolute inner peace. It’s the only way to be. There is a reason why one columnist called him the “id of neoliberal capitalism.”
You can see his attitude in the way he disparagingly compares Melbourne’s network of snooty private clubs to his own Saint Haven. The former are a set of squattocratic, masculine institutions founded in the nineteenth century, often modelled after British gentlemens’ lairs. Gurner isn’t woke, but he isn’t an aristocrat either. He has a lifestyle to maintain, one that the dining rooms of the more established private clubs aren’t necessarily conducive to. “A lot of them are focussed around alcohol and rich food,” Gurner said on a podcast recently, a quiver of revulsion in his voice. “I hate rich food and I don’t drink much alcohol. I hate the stuffiness of those old-school clubs.” But he loved the private element—the socialising with like-minded and like-bank-balanced people. The sense of escape from prying eyes and outside pressures.
So he made Saint Haven: a private club that, he says, just happens to be about wellness. Gurner’s club ethos is not elitist on the level of connections or gender or illustrious lineage; the premise is an egalitarian access to exclusivity. Anyone with the right cashflow and, most importantly, the right “mindset” can join the “community.” What makes a good candidate? A commitment to maintaining bodily purity; continual, cultish personal improvement; and a capacity for discretion in social encounters.
Gurner’s descriptions of ideal interactions at the club bely a set of strange and distinctive behavioural norms. For example: a CEO of a bank is sitting next to an artist in the sauna—”the most beautiful meld of different cultures”—but neither of them know their sauna-mate’s occupation. (I don't know a single artist who is a member of Saint Haven… but maybe I don't know the right artists.) Yet, precisely because of this depersonalisation—a release from their assigned social roles—each finds that they are able to be “vulnerable” and “share insights” with the other. People are hungry for connection, Gurner says, but not just any connection: “Connection without the bullshit.” Wait until they hear about cruising.
Gurner’s description of an ideal sauna exchange—one unmoored from job descriptions or social context—reminds me of the way people speak about Berlin, where it’s a faux-pas to talk about gainful employment. It also shares base desires with fka Twigs’ new song, “Perfect Stranger”: (“I don't know the name of the town you're from / Your star sign or the school you failed… I'd rather know nothing than all the lies/ Just give me the person you are tonight… You're perfect, baby/ My perfect stranger.” Or Troye Sivan's muse for his latest album, a guy in Melbourne who Troye shared one beautiful night of connection with just after a lockdown, a brief encounter that inspired his latest album, Something to Give Each Other… (TPE knows the identity of Troye’s muse, but that's a story for another time.)
It seems that identity obliteration is a precondition for modern intimacy. Everyone wants connection without the bullshit. Not everyone wants a 5:30am cryotherapy session—but quite a lot of people do. I spend a few days lurking outside the development which houses Saint Haven and a bevy of apartments, the Victoria & Vine precinct in Collingwood. A constant stream of residents and club members enter and exit the buildings. I accost a bloke in a tight, white exercise shirt and AirPods. He pauses for a moment, taking one Pod out to answer my question about his experience living in the apartments. “It's a bit pricey,” he says in a crisp British accent. “But have you seen the amenities? Three jacuzzis.” Wicked. He jogs off at a brisk pace. I pop into an open-house to inspect a two-bedroom apartment going for $920,000. It looks… fine. There are high ceilings. In one bathroom, a free-standing bath is crammed next to the shower. Everything is marble, matte black, charcoal, white and taupe. The overall feeling is Sims luxe.
I also speak with Candee, a Saint Haven devotee. We arrange to call while she is in the hyperbaric chamber at Saint. Saint, the newest addition to the Gurner empire, is a youth-oriented line of saint vs. sinner concept gyms. The Daicos brothers of Collingwood Football Club are freshly-signed ambassadors. Saint allows phones; Saint Haven, the more peaceful club aimed at an older demographic, does not. Candee video-calls from within a sleek, smooth space illuminated by purple-blue light. She is a glowingly beautiful woman in her early forties, with flowing hair and slick fitness attire. She works for an airline, among other hustles. In the corner of the video on my screen, right by her cheek, a small metal tube is visible. It's emitting hydrogen and oxygen; the hyperbaric chamber is an air-tight, pressurised container where, compared to sucking in normal air, it's possible for the body to absorb much higher levels of pure H and O2. Candee finds that hyperbaric chamber sessions, as well as other “modalities” on offer at Saint Haven, help her recover from jetlag and fatigue after long stints up in the air—some of her flights are 18 hours. “It’s a way of life,” she says. She knows it’s not for everyone, but if you want to invest in being your best self, these clubs are it. Candee loves the different health and wellbeing experts who visit to deliver educational talks, the magnesium pool, the teachers, and the sense of calm she gets when the door closes behind her. And she loves connecting with the other regulars: being surrounded by people who have chosen a life of purpose, mindfulness and health. “You can feel that vibration,” she says. “It emanates through you.”
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Elysium Fields will take the holistic wellness experience to the next level. But getting in will require more than just a weekly membership fee—it will require a down payment. In return, the precinct promises key-card-secured ascension: a Brahmanic separation from the impure lower castes, with their dirty foods, dirty water, and dirty air. I was not joking about the glass dome. In renders of Elysium Fields, a glistening bubble encases the entire development: an upturned fishbowl sealing off the verdant buildings from the greyscale outside world. Someone along the way clearly drank the filtered water Kool-Aid, because the most recent media release for the project boasts that “the precinct will... include a stunning, futuristic glass dome.” After making some enquiries, a reputable source confirmed that the dome is “just a concept.” When we asked another source at a local council, he snorted and said there is simply no way it would get approval. Pop.
Here is another wild concept: Docklands. There is no more suitable place in our city for the futurist folly of Elysium Fields than this suburb, which stands as a kind of temple to rampant privatisation, developer greed, and deluded PR spin. Docklands’ recent history is one of failed urban renewal. In the early 1990s, the area’s industrial docks had fallen out of use, so the state Labor government rezoned them for commercial and residential redevelopment. In the following years, the Liberal state government attempted to execute a Thatcherite plan inspired by London’s Docklands, which include the now-despised Canary Wharf. In Jeff Kennett’s scheme, there would be no government expenditure and minimal regulatory intervention in the redevelopment—only developer-led investment, with stipulations that new developments had to be accompanied by new infrastructure. This plan did not work. Contracts fell apart, and after a few years of waiting, the area was still just land with docks, not Docklands. At this point, the government committed to fronting some cash—putting up a road and a stadium; decontaminating some land—so that developers would start building offices and apartments.
By 2020, the entire area was meant to be a fully-developed, thriving paean to twenty-first century urban living. But as the years progressed, it became clear that the apartments were overpriced, the suburb lacked community, and many of the streets conducted wind tunnels caused by poor planning and the icy Southerly coming in off the water. Development stalled. Commercial tenancies emptied. The Central Pier was found to be unstable to the point of requiring demolition. Docklands was not a utopian success—it was, and still is, a dystopian flop. In the words of housing expert Terry Burke: ‘‘They should blow it up and start again.’’
At present, decimation has been sidelined in favour of attempts at urban re-renewal. The approval of the Elysium Fields development is part of this endeavour.
It’s a baking hot afternoon when I ride to the new millennium suburb to see the Helios site. I descend down the Hoddle Grid, from the heights of the dusty columns and marble of the Paris End, down, down, down, past Southern Cross station, past the former offices of The Age, which remain empty and for rent, dipping up a hill and down again. Here, the buildings begin to metamorphose. There are no gold rush-era imperial edifices, only monuments to the possibilities of “technological innovation” and “creativity.” These changes signal the city’s economic transformations—from industrial to post-industrial, from mineral extraction to service provision.
Some architects of prominent Docklands buildings seem to have taken inspiration from Rubik’s Cubes or Mondrian paintings; it is as though there was an unspoken Y2K design brief to go kindergarten modern. The resulting facades are faded puzzles with bright, geometric designs in primary yellows, blues, greens, and cadmium reds. Tradies are putting the last windows up in a new office building, filling in a gap in the glistening facade: tiny Minecraft agents. The stadium looms large. Now Marvel, previously Etihad, once Telstra, it’s a palimpsest of corporate naming rights. Down on the waterfront, white-tipped wooden mooring poles stick up from the still water. It could be Vancouver, London, or Singapore. This is an utterly nondescript place. Would you want to live forever if you had to live here?
Huge public artworks litter the streets. One gets the impression that a supersized alien civilisation has used the area as a dumping ground—there, a series of two-dimensional grey metal figures writhing in a cube; here, a massive circular object poked through with metallic turquoise, ruby and gold-tipped pins. On the boardwalk, a few people meander through a crowd of human-scale goopy white forms that look like a cross between Hans Arp sculptures and mangled cotton buds.
Most days, the harbour is nearly empty. Gulls flap towards the Bolte Bridge. A friend who works in the area tells me that a flight path runs behind the two gigantic silver towers that stick up from the centre of the bridge. At a certain point in the afternoon, it's possible to take a photo that exactly resembles the moment just before the planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11. Perhaps that’s an attraction worth visiting?
I take a seat on the wooden planks outside the Library at the Dock, on Victoria Harbour Promenade. It’s a Friday. Every single bike rack in sight from the library’s western side is free. Long-term residents of Docklands complain that there is a perception of the suburb as “soulless.” In response to this reputational slight, the Docklands Chamber of Commerce recently collaborated with a group of developers and a neighbourhood organisation to mount a public campaign called “Soul of Docklands.” The Humans of New York-style storytelling enterprise aims to communicate to the general public that Docklands residents do, in fact, have souls. “It’s all there, you just have to get out and do it,” Anikesh, resident and DJ, is quoted as saying. “I have always been interested in the sea,” says volunteer and community leader, Dr Harris. It is as though the locals unwittingly entered into a Faustian bargain when they took the keys to their waterfront marina apartments. Now, as they desperately cry out for recognition from the denizens of the world of the living—everyone above Elizabeth Street—noone can hear them scream.
On the other hand, it is extremely quiet and peaceful down here. The only sound is birdsong and the faint hum of cars crossing the distant bridge. A jellyfish drifts past a floating wetland installed by the council (part of a project trying to figure out how to unpoison the Birrarung). Sitting on the boardwalk, I have a diagonal view to the slot in the sky above the car park where Elysium Fields will be. Maybe now is the right time to go bullish on the marina. Maybe this time it’ll work. Elysium Fields is the next step in Docklands’ permanent self-improvement project. The gulls squaw. The wheel gurns. All that is solid melts into filtered air.