“Do Not Disturb”: a visit to Spa Le Bathroom
More : Floatation therapy, Massage, Montreal Urban Spas, rue St-Denis, Spa, Spa Le Bathroom
Tucked cutely on the second floor of a busy commercial stretch of rue St-Denis, this prosaically named spa offers a beautifully simple list of treatments: the floating Epsom salts bath, and massage. Boísin Murphy found myself immediately charmed one brisk November morning when he arrived, a little late and uncaffeinated, to the white and turquoise country-style relaxation haven with its whispering female staff…
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Some people find it is easy to “let go” and take time for a mysterious, and sometimes time-consuming task generally known as self-care. For those of us who find relaxation a mysterious idea, and for whom “meditation” means deciding between a single or a double espresso, and baths are for people who shop at British soap stores. Not to mention the country spas, which require that your bribe one of your really organized friends into renting a Communauto to take you out into the bucolic countryside. If getting out of Montréal and coming back to the city’s spaghetti of highways would seem to negate any relaxation a spa trip can offer, busy city-dwellers have the choice of a growing number of urban spas, such as the delightfully unpretentious Spa Le Bathroom.
I was booked for the classic floating bath, followed by a Swedish-style massage. If you haven’t tried an Epsom salts floating bath – or swum in the Dead Sea – you may be surprised at the simplicity of the concept. A spacious whirlpool in a wood-and-tile closed room can accommodate up to two people: when you slip into the bath, preferably naked, the most uncanny feeling of weightlessness makes you feel at once playful and healthy. The water is a deliciously warm solution of half water and half magnesium sulphite, a naturally occurring chemical that has the special property of allowing human skin to detox in the solution for an hour without any of that unsightly “pruning”.
Since I took owner Steve Landry’s advice and refrained from my usual two espresso + cigarette breakfast, I found my mind drifting to pseudo-memories of birth, and a somewhat frightening feeling that I was supposed to be somewhere else. That common obsession of the overbooked quickly faded away as the dim lighting and soft music lulled me into a semi-dormant state, which is the intention of floatation therapy: you are so unused to feeling weightless, that you forget about your banal problems, and later onanistically discover the other amazing advantage, baby-bum-smooth skin!
My massage therapist was a highly attentive and very cool young woman named Élyse, who empathically attacked the continental collisions in my neck and trapezoid area, a consequence of my enslavement to that ergonomically primitive machine known as the lap-top. Due to the post-floating sedation, the massage’s destressing effects were doubled – it was like having a whole day off in the span of 2.5 hours. With Monday and Thursday morning specials, and a rebate offer with sister spa BALNEA Thermal Retreat in Bromont-sur-le-Lac, Spa Le Bathroom lives up to its humble name by not assuming that you want to look at bamboo and Buddhas just to forget your looming deadlines for long enough to float away…
Spa Le Bathroom
4137 St-Denis, Montréal
514-842-6564
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