Life Time Fitness to build two-story mega million dollar gym with parking deck

Life Time Fitness to build two-story gym, parking deck

Life Time Fitness, a Minnesota-based health and lifestyle club, is coming to Montvale.

 

A conceptual drawing of the new Life Time Fitness, to be built on the old BMW site in Montvale. Life Time Fitness targets families, and will include both indoor and outdoor pools, a child activities center, a bistro and a sauna/steam room, in addition to the usual gym equipment. The company has been looking to build in North Jersey for several years.

The site plan for Life Time Fitness features an outdoor pool and bistro, left, and the borough’s first parking garage, right, which will be two stories and hold 314 vehicles.

It will be on the old nine acre BMW site, 1 BMW Plaza, at the corner of Phillips Parkway and Sony Drive; the current building, vacant for several years, will be demolished.

Life Time Fitness will construct a building to suit its needs, which include indoor pools, a sauna/steam room, and many large rooms to house weightlifting equipment. According to plans by the applicant, the first floor has a lap pool, a leisure pool, men’s and women’s locker rooms, a sauna/steam room, a child activities center and a group fitness area, in addition to a gymnasium. The second floor has an area for free weights, resistance weights, cardio, and areas for wellness assessments, group fitness, stretching and advanced training, with open spots to view the gym/basketball court, indoor pools and main lobby. Concrete steps lead up to the main entrance. There will be an outdoor pool on the western side of the property, surrounded by a fence and landscaping, with an outdoor bistro in the westernmost corner. Landscape designs will be added to minimize noise, buffer the pollution from the parking garage and the Garden State Parkway and to beautify the site, with at least 29 shade trees planned around various parking spaces.

The final plan, which was unanimously approved by the planning board on April 3, includes a two-story parking garage, situated on the eastern portion of the property and adjacent to Van Riper Road. The parking garage, the first in the borough, will hold 314 parking spaces. An additional 282 spaces will be outside around the building. There will be spots for motorcycles and bike racks.

Originally zoned as a specialized economic development district in 2008 when Montvale‘s Master Plan was redone, the council passed an ordinance Jan. 31 turning the area into a specific office and research district, which permitted the larger area – encompassing borough hall, DePiero’s Country Farm and Mercedes-Benz, among others – to be developed into uses like health clubs and hotels. This was recommended in the Master Plan as a way to modernize the area and to be friendlier to businesses.

Parking decks are also allowed under the new ordinance, as long as they are smaller than the buildings they are serving. The garage for Life Time Fitness is to be used for that facility and has to be at least 5 feet shorter.

There will be an main entrance and exit directly off from the Brae Boulevard/Phillips Parkway intersection into the site, with a smaller road from Phillips Parkway leading into the garage, and an access road from the same street, leading to the main building, to be used by emergency vehicles.

Although there were a few concerns about traffic, data from Atlantic Traffic & Design Engineers showed that unlike a traditional office building, most traffic to the area would occur outside of normal business congestion times.

The Montvale location is the company’s third New Jersey site, after Berkeley Heights and Florham Park.

Karen Jayne Leinberger, a spokesperson for the company, said that it’s been looking to enter the North Jersey market since those other two locations opened, in February 2009 and November 2008, respectively.

Calling Life Time Fitness the “best-kept secret” in the health club world, she said that the East Coast is an area where it is looking to expand. “The East Coast is somewhere we want to be,” she said.

The average client, she said, is a family of four; the company always builds in suburban areas, and will have 102 locations at the end of May. The facility will hire approximately 300 full- and part-time workers.

Leinberger said construction, to start in the end of August or September, is expected to take 12 to 13 months, including demolition.

The former BMW building was originally constructed in 1972, but the company completely relocated its North American headquarters to its present site in Woodcliff Lake in mid-2009, said Diane Anton of BMW North America.