Cover The interiors of private members’ club Vanta, located
within the historic MacDonald House
The interiors of private members’ club Vanta, located within the historic MacDonald House
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The idea of the third place has long assumed that the lower the barrier to entry, the stronger the community. In Singapore, a new generation of private members’ clubs is testing a different proposition entirely: that belonging, increasingly, begins with a closed door
There is no wrong hour to arrive at Mandala Club. On the first floor, The Members Bar hums with casual coffee catch-ups that ease into evening martinis, while The Velvet Room draws its drapes for a more intimate nightcap. Lunch at Popi’s on the second floor often gives way to a drink at cosy cocktail lounge Sidebar, while The Analogue Room draws a smaller crowd to its shelves of vintage records. Upstairs, the club opens into dining rooms, an intimate sushi and sake counter, a cellar and, eventually, an attic gym.
Last September, the club added a 9,000sqft heritage wing designed for everything from wellness sessions to late-night parties—its first significant move since joining Icon1c, the global luxury network co-founded by Southeast Asian investment firm Catcha Group. This expansion mirrors a wider resurgence of private members’ clubs in Singapore, reflecting a more considered approach to how time is spent. The boom stands in sharp contrast to the churn of the local dining and nightlife scene, which saw record-breaking closures in 2025. As familiar spaces become harder to hold on to, so, too, do the routines that once anchored social life, heightening the appeal of more stable, self-contained environments.
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Above The Analogue Room at Mandala Club
The Analogue Room at Mandala Club
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This desire for places that foster genuine connection is not unique to Singapore. In its 2025 report From Loneliness to Social Connection: Charting a path to Healthier Societies, the World Health Organization estimates that one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness, identifying weakening social ties and modern digital habits as key drivers. Against this backdrop, American sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s idea of the third place feels newly urgent. In his 1989 book The Great Good Place, he described it as a neutral ground—neither home nor work—where people gather and belong. The model assumed that accessibility was enough: lower the threshold, and community would follow. But in a city as hyper-connected as Singapore, access is no longer the problem. Private members’ clubs, offering curation and intentional belonging, are finding renewed relevance as a result.
“The Covid-19 pandemic did something important to people’s relationship with time and their own well-being. It made many of us confront what we actually want from our days, rather than simply moving through them,” says Mark Watts, managing director of private members’ club Madison House. “Health, connection, feeling present—these stopped being aspirational and became genuinely urgent. Clubs that only offer prestige or a nice room for drinks haven’t kept up.”
The Mandala Racquet Club on Sentosa brings together padel, wellness and hospitality in a beachfront setting
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Holding Space
Nowhere is this evolution of physical space towards intentional living more apparent than at Mandala Club, which has now extended its footprint beyond the city centre with the recently opened Mandala Racquet Club on Sentosa. Merging premium hospitality with sport, this beachfront oasis features a wellness suite, courtside dining, an outdoor pool and five professional padel courts—four indoors and air-conditioned, and one outdoors and sea-adjacent. Here, a full programme, including padel coaching clinics and tournaments, echoes that same commitment to the variety found at the flagship on Bukit Pasoh Road, where the line-up spans everything from Latin fiestas and closed-door parties to philosophical dialogues and live neurocoding experiences.
“Mandala has always been built around the belief that some of life’s most valuable moments happen through shared experiences,” founder Ben Jones stated when introducing the concept. “Mandala Racquet Club is a natural extension of that philosophy—a place where sport becomes a catalyst for connection, wellness becomes a daily ritual, and leisure is given equal importance.”
The main hall of Vanta
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Vanta distils that same impulse into a single, concentrated address. Its invitation-only membership is tightly controlled, with entry built around alignment in taste, ambition and intent—as acting CEO Alex Chew puts it, it’s about “what someone is building, how they think and how they show up in a room”. This purposeful curation, he shares, is a direct response to a specific kind of appetite: “What we’re seeing is a clear shift from status consumption to cultural authorship … Today, people are far more intentional. They value privacy, discernment and influence over exposure … They don’t need more access. What they need is the right rooms, with the right people, at the right time.” This approach, he adds, is no mere tag line. As he notes, what has been missing in the local private members’ club scene “is something more considered and restrained, where every detail from membership to programming feels intentional and deliberate”. The goal with Vanta, then, is “to create the right mix”, he says. “When that balance is right, the conversations naturally tend to take care of themselves.”
Vanta, which expects to open later this year with 1,500 members and maintains a wait list, is located in MacDonald House and spans 16,000sqft. In addition to lounge and dining areas, a mezzanine overlooks the main salon, offering secluded enclaves for smaller meetings and private dining rooms for tasting-led gatherings. “The space is designed to guide energy rather than try to control it,” says Chew.
Food and drink are central to the club’s identity. Consulting chef Alvin Leung—of the Michelin-starred Bo Innovation and aKin in Hong Kong and Toronto respectively—oversees the culinary programme, while the beverage offering focuses on investment-grade whiskies, rare single malts and collectible bottlings. In the cellar, limited-release wines and storied vintages sit alongside small-batch sake, aged koshu and Junmai Daiginjo. “Collecting, whether it’s whisky or wine, comes down to taste, patience and curiosity, so it naturally brings together people who appreciate craft and provenance. That makes it a very easy starting point for conversation, without it feeling very transactional,” shares Chew.
Beyond the table, Vanta’s calendar is filled year-round with art exhibitions, intimate talks, cultural salons and discovery sessions—from a private watch experience with Blancpain to a wellness talk with Como Shambhala and a networking session with Leica to mark International Women’s Day. A typical month might bring intimate salons, private dining with guest chefs, tastings with collectors or producers, and the occasional larger cultural evening. But structure only goes so far. “Not every evening needs to be programmed,” Chew notes. “Sometimes, the most valuable thing is simply having the right room be left alone to do its job.”
The pool at Madison House
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At Madison House, that room is an entire heritage estate. Set within Fort Canning and connected to Mett Singapore hotel, which shares the grounds, it occupies a different register entirely. Spanning 37,000sqft across indoor and outdoor spaces, the club, capped at 1,000 members, brings together dining, fitness and wellness within surrounds that feel, improbably, a world away.
For Watts, the setting has been central to the club from the outset. “The moment we understood we’d be building a club [on] a heritage site—moments from the city but completely removed from its noise—we knew the setting alone would [do] a lot of the work,” he says. “There’s a calm to it you simply can’t manufacture.”
Here, a morning on one of the two padel courts or in the 3,200sqft gym might give way to time at wellness centre The Longevity Suite—where offerings range from cryotherapy and hyperbaric oxygen therapy to dry float and breathwork sessions—before lunch at the club’s own spaces or Mett Singapore’s L’Amo Bistro del Mare or the Canning Bar & Lounge. The dining line-up is set to expand this September with the opening of Art di Daniele Sperindio in the hotel, followed later in the year by Hanu, recently ranked among the world’s best steak restaurants.
What members get, then, is an interconnected sanctuary where high-performance lifestyle spaces meet the quietude of a historic canopy. “What we saw was a real opportunity to bring all of that into one place in a way that felt natural and genuinely multidimensional,” Watts says, adding that it is a “combination that’s hard to replicate”. The feeling he is after, he elaborates, is closer to a “family restaurant” than a members’ club—somewhere regulars are recognised and the experience of simply being there becomes second nature. “Members who get the most from Madison House aren’t necessarily the ones with the most impressive CVs. They’re the ones who show up, bring their friends, try the new class and stay for dinner,” he says. “Participation is the new exclusivity.”
The lounge at Rekoop, a recovery-focused club
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Not every club arriving in Singapore is built around traditional socialising. Rekoop, founded by Yinon Vardi, is organised around recovery—cryotherapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, infrared saunas, cold plunges and lymphatic drainage—within a membership model built around repeat use rather than one-off treatments. As Vardi notes: “You go to a gym, maybe a physiotherapy treatment and spa, but there’s no integrated system and no culture around recovery itself.”
To build that, Rekoop bridges the gap between private members’ clubs—traditionally focused on status and access—and wellness spaces built around single modalities or performance. Here, wellness elements shape its offerings while the club structure redefines how members connect. It hosts talks, workshops and wellness-focused events, but avoids conventional club programming such as pure social mixers. “The connection comes from shared discipline, not shared events,” he says.
Oldenburg’s third place assumed that belonging required no barrier to entry—that a space earned its value through availability. Singapore’s private members’ clubs have arrived at a different conclusion: that the right environment, curated with intention, makes possible the kinds of connection that a more open door tends to dilute. As Chew puts it: “What people are looking for now are more trusted, well-composed environments where their time is respected and conversations carry weight. It’s more about filtering signals from all that noise.” In a city that has never lacked for options, the most valuable thing a space can offer is a reason to stay.
