Vision is to become the next Blue Zones® Community
Downtown Miami's highly anticipated mixed-use development, Legacy Hotel & Residences, will be the home of a first-of-its-kind Blue Zones® Well-being Center. The joint venture (JV) with Adventist Health, called Blue Legacy Ventures (JV), will lease and operate a first of its kind 120,000-square-foot surgical, medical, spa, fitness and lifestyle medicine facility.
The estimated $100 million, 10-floor center reflects all the parties' shared vision to make Miami Worldcenter in Downtown Miami, and eventually Miami as a whole, the next Blue Zones community. As one of the largest commercial leases to be executed in Downtown Miami's history, the JV officially marks Adventist Health's and its subsidiary Blue Zones' next chapter in putting their longevity principles into practice via this first flagship center for well-being.
California-based Adventist Health acquired Blue Zones in 2020 as a key step forward in their commitment to leading a 21st century well-being transformation movement that is rooted in their 150-year well-being heritage. The nonprofit integrated health system serves more than 80 communities on the West Coast and Hawaii through hospitals, medical clinics, payer partnerships and other care, health and well-being services.
Blue Zones has a proven, research-based solution to improving the well-being of entire communities by making healthy choices easier in all the places people live, work, learn, pray and play. The company was born out of explorations and research done by National Geographic Fellow and Blue Zones founder Dan Buettner, who identified the blue zones hotspots around the world where people live extraordinarily long and happy lives. Blue Zones is recognized as the proven global leader in applying this research to transform entire populations by empowering people to live longer, healthier, happier lives, resulting in double digit drops in obesity and smoking rates, increases in activity and happiness, lowered healthcare costs and more.
The JV will merge the best practices of hospitality and healthcare by leveraging RPC's expertise in developing visionary properties with Adventist Health's expertise in lifestyle medicine and Blue Zones' experience in improving well-being by design. The Blue Zones Center will be the first place, built from the ground up, with a fully integrated well-being and medical center that focuses on keeping people well. At the integrated well-being and medical center, guests will have the ability to benefit from a lifestyle approach to medicine and an evidence-based approach to well-being therapies and treatments.
Lifestyle medicine has emerged as the future of healthcare, and with the new medical facility, the JV will pioneer building a large-scale lifestyle medicine center from the ground up. The Blue Zones experience at Legacy will combine modern medicine, holistic healing, and the most sophisticated artificial intelligence and technology for members, guests, visitors, residents and employees to live better, longer. The Blue Zones Center's membership model will offer high-touch, frequent interactions and deeply rooted health relationships with patients, members, residents and visitors.
Blue Zones takes a systems-focused approach to designing places and spaces that improve the comprehensive health and well-being for everyone that moves through them—from the patient to the family to the front desk hotel employee. There will be a unified approach to materials used, foods offered, physical designs implemented, storytelling, policies and programming—all designed to deepen and enrich the guest experience and create the optimal environment for higher well-being.
Everyone can expect a fully immersive Blue Zones experience as they visit the Legacy Hotel & Residences where the healthy choice is the easy choice, from the building design encouraging moving naturally to the Blue Zones menus in onsite restaurants encouraging eating wisely, to the policies and programming encouraging people to connect more with each other and their purpose.
Blue Zones programming will also benefit the wider Miami community, including an onsite farmers market, a curated voluntourism program, movement activation in downtown Miami's planned 80-acre park system as well as the creation of the Blue Zones interactive Exploratorium.
"Blue Zones has captured the imagination and attention of people all over the world for being a pioneer in improving the health of entire cities and helping us all get the most out of our years," said Developer Dan Kodsi, Founder and CEO of RPC. "Now with The Blue Zones Center, their proven principles will come alive as hotel visitors will actually be able to see, touch, and live the Blue Zones lifestyle themselves for the very first time."
"This will be a more advanced way of addressing health, where the patient's journey begins with a highly personalized medical evaluation by your physician, followed by a unique and customized high-tech and high-touch program that utilizes all of the services within the center, including surgical, aesthetic, therapeutic, consultative, lifestyle coaching, well-being programming and more to keep people well and happy," said Stephen Watson, Managing Partner of RPC Health, who envisioned and lead the development of the center. "We believe this combination of advanced diagnostics with lifestyle medicine and unparalleled personalized care will help members reach and sustain their optimal health."
"The value proposition of the Blue Zones Center is to generate better performance and more good years. Embarking on a trailblazing project like this requires the right partners, and we're impressed with the RPC leadership and team, who have been committed to co-innovating with us on this visionary project. The JV leverages our joint capabilities and competencies to combine our transformative model for creating optimal well-being with RPC's expertise in forward-thinking development and placemaking," said Ben Leedle, CEO of Blue Zones."
"Creating the first Blue Zones Center and integrated large-scale lifestyle medicine center marks our commitment to move beyond sick care," said Bill Wing, President, Adventist Health. "It will also establish a model and lead the way to the fusion of care, health and well-being."