It’s just past noon on a Monday, and the dining room at Miraval Berkshires is a sea of fluffy white robes. Not a cell phone is in sight. The assembled masses tuck into grain bowls and sip double-pours of pinot grigio, faces flushed from hiking or glowing from facials.Everyone in this room, myself included, has paid around $1,000 a night to be here, at a different kind of all-inclusive resort—one where, instead of downing daiquiris by the pool, guests pack their days with spa services, fitness classes, guided hikes, aerial silk meditations, equine therapy, tarot readings, and nearly anything else you can imagine. The vibe is adult summer camp, made fancy, with a whiff of cult thanks to the robes worn at all hours of the day.Globally, wellness tourism is a nearly $1 trillion market. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Berkshires, where Miraval is far from the only show in town. It’s practically in the backyard of the area’s OG spa resort, Canyon Ranch, which has been operating in Lenox since 1989. Just down the road is Kripalu, North America’s largest yoga retreat center and a Stockbridge staple since 1983. That’s three luxury wellness resorts within 5 miles—nearly a hot massage stone’s throw from one another.
Miraval, which opened in 2020, won’t be the new kid on the block for long. In April, the Stockbridge Select Board greenlit plans for a housing development and wellness-focused resort at Elm Court, a Gilded Age mansion that once served as a summer retreat for the Vanderbilt family and sits on sprawling grounds designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Additional projects are in the works at the former DeSisto Estate in Stockbridge and the shuttered Brodie Mountain ski area in New Ashford.
That’s a lot of wellness for one corner of western Massachusetts. Can the Berkshires—a rural area home to some 129,000 people and dropping—really support this many high-end resorts?
Developers flocking to the Berkshires aren’t worried. The region’s positioning between Boston and New York City keeps guests flooding in, and setting up shop in an established wellness capital has its benefits, according to Linda Law and Richard Peiser, the pair behind the Elm Court project. She’s a California-based real estate developer; he’s a Harvard Graduate School of Design professor. “It’s sort of the basics of Real Estate 101,” Peiser says. “The more concentration of these resorts that we have, the more visible it is.”
For the people who live here year round, the equation is more complicated. Wellness resorts are major economic drivers and job creators for the Berkshires. They are also changing what the region is. Berkshire County has a well-documented affordable housing crisis, a climbing unemployment rate, and the second-lowest median household income in Massachusetts. Into that, the resorts pour tourists wearing performance fleece and vacation-home buyers with the money to scoop up the area’s housing stock. As they flood in, some locals feel increasingly pushed out. The resort at Elm Court will be just another “exclusive thing for rich people” in a region already crawling with them, says Julie Edmonds, a neighbor of the property who has opposed the project. “We’re saturated with resorts. It’s out of proportion, and it’s out of scale.”
Call it a tug of war, and the people pulling on the other end say it’s only just beginning.
While reporting this story, I heard the same thing over and over: The wellness resorts in the Berkshires might look alike, but they are, in fact, different. Canyon Ranch is focused on physical health, with a stable of doctors available for a checkup after your facial. Miraval is a little more woo-woo, the kind of place where you might be asked about your “intention” as you sit down to breakfast. Kripalu is all about yoga, with fewer frills and lower nightly rates to match. Then there are smaller properties—Prospect Berkshires, a collection of chic lakeside cabins that opened in 2025—and the ones still to come, like the ambitious project planned for Brodie Mountain. Florida-based developer Todd Oifer says it will be anchored by a “European, Nordic hot-cold spring spa,” with a Christmas-themed village, ice-skating rink, biking and hiking trails, and a wedding venue.
Plenty of locals celebrate the region’s thriving wellness scene. One told me the steady stream of resort guests inject great energy into the area’s downtowns. And many people who live in the area enjoy a schvitz in the sauna or a meditation session, too, says Nichole Dupont, a former marketing manager at Miraval.
But there are also those who feel the region is a bit wellness-ed out. Some residents roll their eyes and say, “Oh my God, another resort,” Dupont says. When I mention the plans for a health resort at Elm Court to a shopkeeper in downtown Lenox, she gasps. “Is that what’s going in there?” she says, her tone not exactly overjoyed.
Even Law, the woman behind the Elm Court plans, understands the sentiment. “I agree,” she says emphatically. “How many wellness centers do you need?”
So why, I ask, is she building one? “This is very different,” Law assures me. “A completely different model,” capable of drawing visitors from even farther afield than New York City. “Globally, and even on the West Coast, nobody knows [about the Berkshires],” she says. “How crazy is that?”
Law won’t go into detail about how her resort will be different from its competitors just down the road. The most she’ll say is that it will be “more science-based and similar to what is happening in Europe” than what’s currently in the Berkshires. There will be “no fooling around,” she says. “I mean, I’ve never had a massage in my life, or a facial. It’s just not my thing. I don’t like wellness… But I would go to this and live there.”
That desire goes back decades for Law, who is based in Silicon Valley but has carried on a long love affair with western Massachusetts. “Every time I go,” she says, “there’s a feeling of exhaling.” She wonders aloud if the region might even be a “vortex,” a hub for spiritual energy à la Sedona and Santa Fe—the kind of thing I heard often while reporting on the wellness industry.
Long before today’s corporate warriors descended on Lenox for turmeric lattes and Thai massages, the atmosphere Law is describing drew 19th-century scions who escaped to the Berkshires “because the air is fresh and the skies are clear,” says Canyon Ranch CEO Mark Rivers.
The stately homes that those families left behind are today’s catnip for hotel developers. Canyon Ranch took over the Bellefontaine Mansion, built in 1897 as the summer residence of a wealthy New York shipmerchant. Miraval’s property includes the Wyndhurst Mansion, once the retreat of a furniture magnate. Law previously owned Blantyre, another Gilded Age estate turned hotel in Lenox. Now she’s back in the mix with Elm Court, which she purchased for $8 million in 2022 and dubbed the Vanderbilt Berkshires Estate.
She and Peiser have pledged to preserve the historical manor house and key features of its Olmsted-designed grounds, while constructing a 74-room hotel, 60-seat restaurant, 15,000-square-foot spa, and 38 single-family homes on the property. None of this will be easy or cheap. Costs are projected at close to $100 million, and the resort may not open until 2030.
The manor house, though still stunning, has sat empty since 1958, save for a brief stint in the early aughts. Previous owners restored parts of it—and from those rooms, with their detailed crown molding and heavy drapery, I can imagine resort guests paying top dollar for suites with breathtaking views clear to the Stockbridge Bowl. The half that hasn’t been restored is in decay—more horror-movie set than luxury retreat.
Restoring the rest is a priority for Law, who says the on-site housing development is a pragmatic move meant to subsidize the restoration process. “I’m in California. We don’t have history like this,” Law says. “We want to make sure it’s not forgotten.”
She isn’t the first to try. In 2012, a subsidiary of real estate investment firm Amstar bought the property and announced plans to turn it into—you guessed it—a high-end wellness resort, operating through its affiliate Travaasa Experiential Resorts. The plans died on the vine, undone in part by fierce pushback from locals who didn’t want a major hotel and all the traffic it would bring to their bucolic neighborhood. A group of them—including Julie Edmonds and her husband, Barney—sued to stop the development.
This is a recurring move for locals afraid of “condo-ifying the Berkshires,” says Josh Landes, Berkshire bureau chief for WAMC Northeast Public Radio. Last year, a Stockbridge couple sued to block a planned hotel and housing complex at the old DeSisto Estate, which is set to include a 130-plus-room hotel, 23 single-family homes, 4 townhomes, and plenty of space for outdoor activities.
Both lawsuits were eventually dismissed. But the Elm Court plaintiffs got what they wanted, at least temporarily. Amstar never opened its hotel. The company put the property up for sale in 2020. It sat on the market for two years until Law scooped it up for $4.5 million below asking—much to the neighbors’ chagrin. “We spent 1,000 hours, minimum, fighting this thing,” Barney Edmonds says. “Now it’s come back all over again.”
The neighbors fought again, in part by arguing that Law and Peiser needed to file an entirely new land-use application instead of piggybacking on the one previously awarded to Amstar. The move likely would’ve significantly delayed the project. The Stockbridge Select Board was unsympathetic. (Select Board Chair Jamie Minacci did not respond to a request for comment.)
Law and Peiser came in and “razzle-dazzled” them, says Mike Lucia, a Lenox resident who lives near Elm Court and has opposed the development. “They could have been presenting a casino and an airport and [town officials] would have approved it.”
Because Elm Court’s grounds straddle the Lenox-Stockbridge line, the plan still needs final sign-off from Lenox’s Zoning Board of Appeals. The process is expected to play out in the coming months. Still, the consensus is that the deed is all but done. “Everyone who lives on the street or on a nearby street is disappointed,” Lucia says. “I haven’t talked to one person who is happy about it.”
Then again, he says, there might be one exception: “There’s a Realtor somewhere that’s happy about it.”
The competition, somehow, is delighted. Executives at Canyon Ranch and Miraval—Elm Court’s future neighbors—swear they don’t mind a fourth wellness resort moving in. Gilbert Santana, general manager at Miraval, is—given his line of work—predictably Zen about the whole situation. He calls Canyon Ranch “the yin to our yang” and says “there’s magic in the air” that will allow the Berkshires’ wellness industry to “flourish” even as additional brands move in.
Their confidence isn’t unfounded. Last year, Canyon Ranch in Lenox had its best year since before the pandemic, Rivers says. Miraval has “frequent” periods of operating at full capacity, according to a brand rep.
Yet not everyone is convinced the market can keep growing. There’s already “a lot of inventory” available for the “.001 percent” of travelers willing to pay top dollar to spend their vacation cold plunging and exercising, says a Berkshires hospitality insider. It’s hard to see how these hotels avoid cannibalizing one another as new players join the fray.
There are already signs that the kumbaya spiel is overly rosy. “Some might say imitation is the highest form of flattery, but others do not,” says Jennifer Hoffman, former brand operations director at Canyon Ranch. When Miraval started edging into Canyon Ranch’s territory, “There was a lot of, ‘We need to be number one.’” (The two brands parallel one another, with twin locations not only in the Berkshires but also Tucson, Arizona, and—as of later this year—Austin, Texas.)
It’s not clear who has won that fight. But some “Miraval vs. Canyon Ranch?” threads on Reddit and TripAdvisor give Miraval the edge. “I had been a long-term repeat guest at Canyon Ranch (annually for 15+ years) until the pandemic,” wrote one Redditor. “I hate to say that I do think there’s been a decline in the overall experience”—one that the poster attributed, in part, to changes in the business after the founders sold to a real estate investor in 2017.
Mindi Morin, managing director at Canyon Ranch until last summer, dismisses this critique. “I don’t feel like anything ever changed; it just got better,” she says. When Canyon Ranch was sold, “it felt like it went from one family to another.”
Rivers, for his part, is not sheepish about the changes. Canyon Ranch is tailoring its programming to capitalize on buzzy topics like longevity and menopause, bringing in celebrities like Sutton Foster to host retreats, and rolling out property upgrades and new experiences that “look and feel a little more Hamptons than traditional Berkshires.” The moves are purposeful, Rivers says: “You always have to be evolving and contemporizing and meeting your guests where they are.”
But what if your guests are at the resort next door?
Plenty of current and former Canyon Ranch employees told me the brand isn’t trying to compete with Miraval—but to some observers, aspects of its evolution are attempts to compete with the newer and shinier hotel in town, which is attracting a “younger” and “hipper” clientele than Canyon Ranch, according to a former Canyon Ranch executive. Most obviously: The resort recently reversed its long-standing dry campus policy and started serving booze, just like its neighbor. (Rivers says this change was an internal strategic decision.)
Plenty of guests celebrated. The owner of a wine shop in downtown Lenox tells me Canyon Ranch guests used to come in all the time, searching for screw-top bottles they could guzzle in their rooms. But for some longtime guests and employees, it was a shock. “For so long at Canyon Ranch, it was like, ‘Never, never, never. It’s not gonna happen,’” Hoffman says.
To some insiders, the reversal signaled that leadership “didn’t understand what it was that was so special” about the place, and that “the magic” was gone, says the former Canyon Ranch executive. In other words, they feared that Canyon Ranch was turning into just another resort—not the place where you could escape the pressures and vices of modern life and focus all your energy on staying well.
That privilege was never available to everyone. Many people who live in the Berkshires have never been inside Canyon Ranch or Miraval or Kripalu, let alone shelled out the money to stay overnight. “If for some reason out-of-state visitors stopped going,” says WAMC Northeast Public Radio’s Landes, “it’s very difficult to imagine that the average Berkshire County person is suddenly going to fill those gaps.”
The resorts have tried to make their offerings more accessible to locals. Kripalu arguably has had the most success on this front, offering reduced day-pass admission and special membership programs to people who live nearby. The goal is for “people to come in and see what we’re about” instead of viewing Kripalu as “the large building on the hill,” says interim president and CEO Erin Tunnicliffe.
The locals most likely to spend significant time at these properties, though, are there as employees. A 2018 report from Williams College found that Kripalu alone generated $56 million a year for the local economy and supported 670 part- and full-time jobs.
But some of the people who most need those jobs can’t get a foot in the door. Hoffman, now in workforce development at Berkshire Community College, says it’s been “tricky” to place students from the college’s job training programs with resorts in the area. The big-name hotels want workers to come in with strong “soft skills,” ready to be molded to fit “the Canyon Ranch way, or the Miraval way,” Hoffman says—and that skillset is hard to teach in a classroom. “The standard is very high across all of these hospitality organizations,” she says. “It’s difficult to find those people.”
Rivers attests to that. “Staffing is always a challenge” in a “resort corridor” where multiple hotels are competing for the same chefs and massage therapists, he says. “There are only so many people in this field and up and down Route 7 to try to collect.”
For workers who live in more-affordable areas like North Adams, the job can be untenable. Public transit in the Berkshires is thin, and entry-level salaries at the resorts may not be high enough to justify the gas burned on the nearly hourlong commute each way—let alone the cost of finding a place to live in tonier towns like Lenox and Stockbridge.
Across the region, the housing situation is dire. Rents in Berkshire County rose by 35 percent from 2021 to 2024, and vacancy rates dipped below one percent in 2023. Whatever’s in the Berkshires air, it makes people want to come back and put down roots, says Dupont, who now runs a marketing agency in Pittsfield. She often hears from people who grew up going to camp in the Berkshires and decades later decided to summer or retire there. Many made that decision during or after the pandemic, when second-home buyers descended on the Berkshires and helped make Pittsfield, according to a recent ranking, the second-hottest luxury real estate market in the country. “It’s kind of ironic that now it’s so infiltrated with people seeking wellness and relaxing summers in the Berkshires that the people who serve them can’t find housing,” Dupont says.
Given that, it might seem hypocritical for locals to fight new developments that include housing. But the pushback also signals a culture clash—residents fed up with seeing their towns overrun with “transient” visitors who “don’t add to the community in any way except money,” says Elm Court opponent Julie Edmonds.
Dupont calls it a tug of war between “country mouse and city mouse.” Plenty of residents, not to mention small business owners, are happy about new amenities in the Berkshires. But as the region develops, some longtime residents grumble, saying things like, “I used to be able to get a spot on Main Street to park,” Dupont says. “But there is something deeper in that sentiment, and I do believe it’s the inherent resistance to change” as old-timers watch their quiet, remote home become less so.
“A couple of years ago, they opened a Starbucks in Lee. Then there was a Chipotle in Pittsfield,” says Susie Arnett, a hospitality consultant in the region. “That says a lot about our growth, which really happened during COVID.”
Then there’s the question of what kind of housing is actually getting built. Under Stockbridge town law, major new developments must contribute to the town’s affordable housing stock. Developers can either build it themselves or pay into a fund that supports new construction. Law and Peiser reportedly pledged $1.7 million to the town’s housing trust and are moving ahead with plans for 38 homes with up to four bedrooms each. If the local market is any indication, each one will sell for not much less than what they pledged to contribute to the fund.
Law expects the homes to sell to a mix of retirees, families seeking a good school district, and second-home owners. They’ll have to fight for 37 of them, she tells me, because “I’m buying the first one. I’m sorry, I’m just, like, dying” to get in.
Meanwhile, locals are dying to stay. Dupont clues me into something called “the Berkshire hustle.” It’s a cheery name for the bleak reality: “People are working several jobs, in totally different venues, to be able to stay here,” she says. The resort Law is building is where those hustlers might go to work—but not to live.
In fact, the region is still scarred by the General Electric plant in Pittsfield shuttering decades ago, Landes says. The wellness and hospitality sectors have helped it bounce back—but as the pandemic showed, that’s “a tenuous-feeling industry.”
And that has Landes asking a simple question: “What does putting all of our chips into this service and tourism sector mean for the future of the Berkshires? There is no plan B.”
First published in the print edition of the July 2026 issue, with the headline,“Spa Wars.”
