LYNNWOOD — Olympus Women's Spa, a Korean-style day spa in Tacoma, is negotiating with the Lynnwood Public Facilities District to open a 10,000- to 13,000-square-foot spa in a strip mall at 196th Street Southwest and 37th Avenue West, near the city's planned convention center.
"We're all excited about this," said Grant Dull, the executive director of the facilities district. "It'd be a great fit for Lynnwood."
The Lynnwood site, near Interstate 5, is a large space formerly occupied by a movie theater. The facilities district demolished part of the theater under development plans for the convention center.
Olympus has hired SKB Architects of Seattle to work on designs for the spa. Shannon Rankin, a principal at SKB, said the proposed Lynnwood spa would use more space than Olympus' 7,000- to 8,000-square-foot bathhouse in Tacoma. That would enable Olympus to offer a larger pool, more steam rooms, and a small juice bar and cafe for spa clients, she said.
Rankin said her firm traveled to South Korea to visit spas as it considered designs for the new location. Olympus, she said, follows a Korean tradition of charging a low basic fee for access to steam rooms and a swimming pool, and then adds a la carte charges for massage and beauty treatments. The communal environment and a la carte pricing set it apart from more-expensive spas, "It's the opposite of the type of spa where the elite go in for treatments and then get whisked away," Rankin said. .
By Jane Hodges
Times Snohomish County bureau
