Two of Long Island's shuttered LA Fitness clubs are not staying dark. The buildings at 2350 Jericho Turnpike in Garden City Park and 122 E. Main St. in Smithtown, both former Signature clubs that have disappeared from LA Fitness's own club locator, are now listed on the website of Club Studio, the luxury gym brand run by LA Fitness's parent company, as coming soon. They would be the brand's first two locations on Long Island.

For the members who watched those clubs close and wondered what happens to a building that size, this is the answer: the same company is coming back with its most ambitious format, and both Long Island sites already have VIP waiting lists open on the Club Studio site.

What Club Studio actually is

Club Studio is Fitness International's bet that the two halves of the fitness market, the big-box gym and the boutique studio, belong under one roof and one membership. The format launched in Irvine, California in 2022 and has been spreading through California, Texas, Illinois, Maryland and Pennsylvania since.

Each club wraps a full gym floor, free weights, cardio and strength equipment, a lap pool and a basketball court, around five boutique studios that would each be a standalone business anywhere else: a cardio and strength circuit the brand calls CS4, a rhythm cycling room, a boxing studio, athletic reformer Pilates and heated yoga, with trampoline rebounding classes in the mix at some locations. Studio classes of that kind typically sell by the pack at dedicated storefronts; here they come bundled with the gym.

The recovery side is where the luxury positioning shows. The brand's clubs advertise dry heat saunas and whirlpool spas along with cryotherapy, red light therapy, compression sleeves and massage beds, plus a cafe pressing organic smoothies at the front. It is the gym as a place to spend a Saturday morning rather than a lunch hour.

Two corners that did not stay empty

The Garden City Park site on Jericho Turnpike and the Smithtown site on E. Main Street both went quiet when their LA Fitness Signature clubs closed. Gym closures of that size usually mean a long vacancy: few tenants can use a building shaped like a gym, with its open floor plates, showers and parking field, except another gym.

That is what makes the conversion plan tidy. Fitness International never gave the buildings up; it is trading its volume brand for its premium one on the same footprint, the retail equivalent of a renovation rather than a replacement. The same play is underway across the company's portfolio, where former LA Fitness boxes in other states are being converted under the Club Studio name.

Long Island's boutique boom, consolidated

The arrival says something about where Long Island fitness spending has gone. The Island has been absorbing boutique concepts at a steady clip: reformer Pilates studios, padel courts in Freeport, a first-of-its-kind training studio in Commack that became one of the most read stories on this site. Each of those sells one discipline. Club Studio's pitch is all of them at once, which is either the end state of the boutique boom or the big-box gym's way of fighting back, depending on which side of the counter you stand.

For Nassau and Suffolk readers, the geography works out neatly: one club on the Nassau side of the line in Garden City Park, one in the middle of Suffolk on Smithtown's Main Street, each a few minutes from the big retail corridors.

What happens next

Club Studio has not posted opening dates for either Long Island club; both pages show a coming soon status and a VIP list, the step its other locations have gone through before presale pricing opens. The brand's New York pipeline is deep, with eight locations listed across the city, Queens and Long Island, including clubs already in presale in Bayside and Manhattan.

If you were a member of either closed club, the practical takeaway is that your old gym is coming back with more inside it, likely at a higher price point befitting the amenities. If you were paying for a gym and two studio memberships on top of it, the math of one roof may be the thing worth watching when the doors reopen.