The Om in Home: Kripalu’s New Dorm

I’m not a big yoga fan, and always looked at the Kripalu Yoga Center, in Lenox, with a fair degree of skepticism. Its main building, a kind of overgrown quasi-colonial motel, certainly doesn’t conjure any great visions of inner peace, though it is set on a bucolic bluff with privileged views. (If you’re on the Stockbridge Bowl, you can’t miss it.) Kripalu’s new dorm, however, just might have me converted. It’s beautiful. Designed by Peter Rose of Rose + Guggenheimer, it’s everything that its overbearing institutional neighbor is not: a calming, handsome structure of wooden slats and louvers set comfortably in the landscape. The aesthetic is similar to Bill Rawn’s Ozawa Hall, at Tanglewood, another wonderful project just down the road. A few more images.

The great Michael Van Valkenburg is credited with the landscaping so I guess he’s responsible for that judiciously placed rock. Or maybe it was already there.