The ‘Merivale of Gyms’ Just Opened in North Sydney

For Justin Ashley, One Playground is the culmination of more than a decade spent perfecting the fitness experience. Under the CEO’s watchful eye, the brand has transformed from an adult amusement park with a strength training element into an industry-leading destination that blurs health, wellness and lifestyle components with staggering ease.

Each of the fitness marque’s seven unique venues offers an entirely bespoke experience, more akin to a social club than a big-box gym. Forget the musty carpet, fluorescent lights and dated Top 40 playlist; One Playground has reimagined what a 21st-century gym really looks like. Its latest outpost in North Sydney could well be Ashley and Co’s most remarkable.

A New Playground in the Heart of North Sydney

Occupying four sprawling levels within the newly completed Victoria Cross development, One Playground North Sydney offers something for everyone. Taking cues from its more established siblings, the enormous space embodies a sense of relaxed urban calm, replete with sophisticated finishings, state-of-the-art equipment, and a multisensory wellness menu that would make the Ritz-Carlton blush.

Situated at the bustling intersection of Miller and Berry Streets, and just steps from the new Metro, it’s a space designed to mirror the rhythm of its surroundings, which Ashley explains is a growing hub of corporate offices, residential towers, cafés, and restaurants.

“When we first looked at the site about two or three years ago, it was really quiet. It was described as a bit of a ghost town, but we saw the vision for Victoria Cross,” Ashley explains. “We’ve got this amazing tower above us that will eventually have 5,000 people working in it, and as you’re coming off the metro, there will be another 50,000 people walking past One Playground each and every day. We really feel that this is the epicentre of North Sydney, and the region is going to experience a massive resurgence. It’s really like the coming of age of the brand.”

Redefining the Fitness Experience

For Ashley, a lifelong fitness fanatic who co-founded One Playground in 2014, growth has been slow and steady. Gyms and studios are considered, integrated with meticulous planning and aligned with the aspirations, interests and energies that characterise their respective communities. In many ways, it goes completely against the formulaic framework that has long governed gym success, but that is firmly by design. From the outset, Ashley reveals, the team made one unconventional decision that has come to define the brand’s DNA: no two gyms would ever be the same.

“If you think about how most gyms or most brands grow quickly, it’s through scalability, simplicity, and repeating the same stuff,” he says. “For us, if we build the world’s best Pilates studio, we’ll never build that again. We’re always starting from scratch.”

The concept for North Sydney was built around ‘Transcendence’; the idea of rising above the ordinary to elevate health and wellness to new heights. Looking at the towering four-storey marvel in the flesh, it’s easy to see where the inspiration came from. The building’s vertical structure naturally lends itself to a four-part journey, from movement and strength through to mindfulness and recovery, which starts, somewhat unexpectedly, on Level Two.

Inside the Playground: A Four-Level Journey

As Ashley puts it, this is where the journey begins. Level Two serves as the gateway, featuring a marble staircase, travertine floors, and soft lighting that evoke the ambience of entering a five-star hotel lobby. Here, members find Dyson-equipped amenities, traditional saunas, and top-tier Technogym cardio equipment; a prelude to what lies above and below.

Level One houses the high-energy group fitness studios:

• Pulse Studio – a “you versus you” hypertrophy and HIIT experience where each member trains at their own bench.
• Surge Studio – a theatrical cycling space complete with ceiling screens, immersive lighting, and sound design.
• Force Studio – strength and conditioning reimagined, with four-week progressive training cycles and team-based “test weeks” that end in DJ-led community events.

Ascend to Level Three, and you’ll find the Strength Floor, a cathedral to performance featuring Technogym, Gym80, Alpha Fit, and Watson equipment. The jewel in the crown is the Biostrength Range, intelligent resistance machines that log user data, adjust settings automatically, and sync progress to the One Coach app.

Finally, Level Four is the sanctuary. The Wellness Lounge invites members to unwind with complimentary T2 teas or sparkling water, while offering ethereal Reformer Pilates and Yoga studios, each featuring mirrored ceilings and infrared panels that blur the boundaries between body, mind, and atmosphere.

“We do see people escaping from work and using that as a bit of a coworking space as well, where they can sit back with their laptops and get a little bit done throughout the day,” Ashley says. “So, we are seeing this sort of blend of work, exercise, and play coming together.”

With a unique offering that evolves and expands with each passing level, One Playground North Sydney is a fitness lover’s paradise. Equal attention is paid to strength, recovery, wellness and coaching, specifically geared towards the aspirational, time-poor corporate workers of the booming inner-city region, but that isn’t to say One Playground is immune to the same challenges that plague all gyms. As Ashley admits, progressive evolution is rooted in the age-old question: “How do we make people want to come to the gym?”

“The biggest challenge that gym operators have is that 40 per cent of their members don’t actually use their memberships,” he explains. “So, how can we create a space that people actually want to go into? That’s our number one goal, objective and challenge to take someone who only goes to the gym because they know they have to, but doesn’t necessarily love it, to someone who thinks, ‘I want to be here not just because I want to get fit, but because I love it’.”

This focus on emotional design, Ashley says, has been critical in transforming the gym into an experience rather than a transaction. The interplay of sound, scent, and materiality has created something that directly opposes the one-size-fits-all approach Sydneysiders have come to expect.

“We choose things like where we’re going to eat based on the whole experience. It’s a mix of how it looks, how it feels, how it sounds, who’s there, who’s hanging out there, and what the community is. I think that today, consumers are choosing where they exercise for many of the same reasons.”

“We’ve always viewed ourselves as the Merivale of gyms. Each space that we go into, we think about the customer, we think about the ‘menu’ that the customer is going to love, and then we over-invest in the design because we think that is something that people really care about,” he says. “Other brands want to be the McDonald’s of the fitness world, and McDonald’s is an amazing business, but it’s just not what we do. Everything is designed from scratch with its own brand, persona, personality, and heartbeat for each of those individual communities and our locations.”

Expanding the ‘Menu’

That bespoke focus has often arisen in an unexpected fashion. For the latest One Playground North Sydney gym, Ashley and the team partnered with local artist Anya Pesce, who created a series of stunning custom artworks that flow throughout the multi-level space.

“I’ve been doing this for 22 years, and I can’t think of any other gym that I have been a part of that’s thought about introducing artwork into the environment,” Ashley says. “It’s pretty amazing that these folded metal sculptures sit on the wall. They’re incredible.”

As Ashley explains, the latest outpost might well be the coming of age of the brand, but that doesn’t mean that the goalposts have shifted. Despite growth, evolution and the nation’s habitually shifting fitness preferences, the ethos has remained as steady as ever. North Sydney merely represents a vision of health brought to life in a big, bold new way.

“When we started, our goal was to build the world’s best gyms,” Ashley says. “Our mission when we started was not to build the most gyms, but to build the best gyms. That remains true today, but five years from now, it’s about how you actually live the vision we created to inspire change in communities.

One Playground North Sydney

• Amenities: Sauna, Wellness Lounge, Strength Equipment, Reformer Pilates
• Address: 155B Miller St, North Sydney NSW 2060
• Phone: 1800 496 348
• Hours: Open 24 Hours

One Playground North Sydney officially opened to the public on 24 October 2025 and is situated at the intersection of Miller and Berry Streets in North Sydney. The bustling location is right by the laneways to Denison Street and close to the region’s diverse range of eateries and shops.

At present, One Playground North Sydney is offering flexible membership plans that provide access to all One Playground facilities across Sydney, including strength, cardio, functional training and Sauna, or full-scale options that offer unlimited classes, including up to three Reformer Pilates sessions weekly. For more information on the new venue, visit the One Playground North Sydney website.