Victor Del Valie, a longtime personal trainer and former bodybuilder, has transformed the second floor space at 28 Warren into a gym and training refuge — Aesthetic Lab — complete with a infrared sauna and cold plunge. It’s a beautiful space, made possible by 16-foot ceilings and a complete overhaul.

“It’s my dream come true,” said Victor, who opened his first studio on Houston in 2021. He’s wanted to drift to Lower Manhattan for a while. “Tribeca has a lot of families, a lot of people with high standards, bigger spaces and higher ceilings.”

His trajectory started 15 years ago, when, on his way to being a dentist, he fell in love with body building. “The process of shaping the body the way you want it — that fascinates me,” he said. He went on to compete all over the world, living for body building for seven years until the pandemic. He followed that career with one as a personal trainer at Equinox then Crunch then private services, working in clients’ homes.

But he wanted people to come to him so he could work with more sophisticated equipment and also combine diet and recovery with the training. Here he can track everything about his clients: lifting patterns, size, overall health.

The studio has a completely new HVAC system, soundproofed floors, exposed brick walls, plus of course his preferred training systems: a 3D body scanner that measures size and muscle mass, strength training machines, a turf area for pushing and pulling. He added a kitchen to provide nutritional advice plus filtered water, and a wet room with a cold plunge at 37 degrees and an sauna. “This is a little hot and cold sanctuary,” he said.

He employs seven trainers including his sister, Nadia, who was a psychologist in the siblings’ native country of Ecuador. That training, she said, has come in handy with her gym clients.

He caters his services to all sorts of clients — parents, young professionals, seniors. “Clients come here to get in shape,” he says. “Maybe they want to get big, maybe they want to get smaller, but they all just want to get healthy.”

Aesthetic Lab
28 Warren, Second Floor | Church & Broadway
victor@aestheticlab.nyc
917-940-9324