The Aman Club at 730 Fifth Avenue, on a Wednesday in March, somewhere around half past seven in the evening. The Banya, the wood-fired Russian-style sauna two floors below the members' lounge, is at capacity. The bookings list runs three weeks. The principal in the corner of the cedar steam room is a hedge-fund founder who has not stayed a single night in the hotel upstairs and has no intention of doing so. He paid $200,000 to join. He pays $15,000 a year to remain. He uses the building four nights a week.
Aman New York opened in August 2022 inside the Crown Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street — 83 hotel suites, 22 residences sold out at over $1,500 per square foot before the doors opened, and, above the second-floor entrance, the Aman Club. The numbers reported by the South China Morning Post, Yahoo and the wider luxury press have settled at $200,000 for the initiation and $15,000 in annual dues. Aman has not formally confirmed, and the membership is now waitlist-only. The Crown Building is the brand's first urban members' club globally. The format is being studied for replication; the price is what is currently keeping it singular.
What the membership delivers is the wellness floor — the spa across two full floors, with the Banya, the cold plunge, the 25-metre lap pool, and the treatment suites that have no public hotel availability. It delivers two restaurants — Nama for Japanese and Arva for Italian — with kitchens that are operationally separate from the hotel's room service, meaning the members' tables are not waiting behind in-room orders. It delivers the underground Jazz Club, which has booked a programming list (Diana Krall, Norah Jones, Cécile McLorin Salvant) that competes with the city's standalone music venues. And it delivers the 7,000-square-foot rooftop terrace with the retractable roof above 57th Street.
The reason the price is being paid — and the reason the waitlist exists — is that the membership underwrites a household behaviour, not an occasional event. The principal who joins the Aman Club is, in most cases, replacing a corporate hotel-suite arrangement that would have run to several hundred thousand dollars a year in transient costs. The membership delivers ten times the number of useful evenings across the year at a fraction of the per-use cost, with no check-in friction, no logistics burden, and a wellness floor that the corporate suite cannot replicate. The maths makes itself once the principal has used the building four or five times.
The wider strategic move, and the one that the rest of the hotel industry is now watching, is that Aman has used the Crown Building to convert a hotel asset into a residential adjacency. The 22 residences sold out at price levels normally reserved for trophy condominiums. The club membership locks the most valuable transient guests into multi-year commitments at six-figure entry. The hotel itself becomes, in revenue terms, the third asset rather than the first. Aman has confirmed that the Beverly Hills project, opening 2027, will replicate the model. Tokyo, currently in design, will follow.
The Aman Club is not, in any conventional sense, a club. It is a private wellness-and-dining floor sold on residential logic to UHNW principals who would have been spending the equivalent annual figure on inferior hotel suites. That is the proposition. The pricing is the answer to a question the rest of the category has not yet thought to ask.
— Camille Vedy
