Circle Conversations | Jonathan Sattin
Jonathan Sattin founded triyoga in 2000, which grew into one of London’s most influential yoga and wellbeing communities, helping to shape the city’s modern wellness landscape.
He recently opened HOME, a place created to offer something genuinely good to the community. For Jonathan, this work is an act of service and not separate from his spiritual life; caring for people, creating the right conditions, and paying attention to how a space feels are practices in themselves.
HOME was not conceived as a continuation, but as something more personal. Rooted in presence and intention, it is partly housed in the original triyoga building and shaped by how it feels to be there — from the materials underfoot to the way people are welcomed.
In this Circle Conversation, Jonathan sits down with OYUNA to reflect on service, energy, and why creating spaces that feel like home still matters.
@homewellnessuk | www.homewellness.uk
Jonathan by Home Wellness entrance, with SERA shawl Sky.
When did you open HOME? And is it a similar concept to triyoga?
We opened in July 2025.
I wasn’t planning to work again after leaving triyoga. But I also felt I had a reasonable amount of knowledge about running these places that was going to sort of disappear. And I certainly wasn’t going to write a book. Then I ended up working with a company in Dublin called Yoga Hub. They approached me about working with them, which I did.
What I realised was that, in London - and in the world generally - we’re incredibly connected at one level, at a digital level, but as human beings we’re becoming more and more disconnected. I felt I needed a place where I had a sense of connection. There’s something about being in a room with other people that has an energy you can’t replicate online. There’s something about walking into a building and having your senses impacted - visually, sound, smell - all those things that affect you when you walk into a space.
The idea was to create a place where people felt connection. I know it’s a bit clichéd now, this idea of community and connection, but that was a genuine intention - to create somewhere where people really felt that.
The name Home came because when I walked into this building, which was the original Triyoga building, it felt like home. That name just came to me.
It wasn’t about recreating Triyoga. That wasn’t the intention at all. This building that we’re sitting in now had been turned into offices, which were completely inert, God bless them. It had a raised tiled floor, so we had to create a space that had a feeling to it. But I think the building already had a feeling anyway - some energy to it.
We wanted people to feel warmly welcomed, ideally remembering your name so you felt recognised/seen.
In some ways, yes, the ingredients are reasonably similar - yoga, Pilates, treatment rooms, a café, sauna, changing rooms, and a small shop. But the intention is different.
I think it’s like anything - it depends what you put into it. When you’re creating a cashmere design, there’s something about the way you create it, or the intention you have when you create it, that makes it unique. When you do something with a certain intention, it becomes different. That’s probably what we’re aiming for - to be somewhere meaningful. And we also have a golden retriever, which is obviously unique.
Triyoga now has different values (I’m sure all business founders say that about the places they have created after they leave) to what we created and I hear that it feels different to people.. This original space was special. Energy matters, whether it’s buildings, people, animals, or products.
Intention matters. When we designed the building, the flooring was meant to be in part marmoleum, a biodegradable material, but it was quite expensive and then by some ‘miracle’ James Lynch who is the lead designer who I’ve known for years, an old friend of mine, sourced this floor that we’re standing on its 150 years old Douglas Fir reclaimed from the rafters of a disused warehouse It’s not engineered. When I take my shoes off and walk down the corridor, it feels good. It completely makes the building. It wasn’t planned. When things like that happen, you know it’s right.
What was the building here before Triyoga?
Originally, this building was a piano warehouse, then offices, then Caterpillar Shoes’ offices. Triyoga took it in 1999. After we left in 2014, it was redeveloped into offices but had been empty until 2023. Almost ten years. It’s the same landlord as in 1999. When I started thinking about this I thought I’d better ask him up front if he would be happy to have me as a tenant again as we’d had a bit of a legal fight in 2014 as we had wanted to stay and he wanted to develop the whole estate. It was purely a business ‘fight’ as I had always thought he was a good Landlord. I asked to speak to him and I was relieved that he was happy to work together again.
It felt meant to be.
What was your journey between Triyoga and Home Wellness?
I left Triyoga in the summer 2022 and had a break. I had my two dogs with me almost all the time. JayJay, my older retriever was 14 so we had his good company for his last few months hanging out at home and in the garden with Piper our younger one , exactly where we wanted to be.
I hadn’t planned to stop working so suddenly and didn’t really have a set idea of what I was going to do. I felt I was at a point where I was either going to do something using my brain or step back from life and go more deeply into my spiritual practices. That was really the question for me: what do you want to do?
I also understand service as a practice. I’m passionate about the principles of service and what an amazing spiritual practice it is. It isn’t the easiest route, but it’s one I could offer. Meditation can be challenging, and so can service, but it felt like my ‘main’ path.
So I decided to go back to work and create HOME with a new business partner Bob Taylor who had been a yoga buddy at triyoga. And I wanted to support my therapist who would no doubt make a lot of money helping me cope with the stresses and strains of opening and running HOME. She is on permanent speed dial.
When you look back, you see that even when you’re floundering, like a ship on the ocean, something takes you to where you’re meant to go. Even if you don’t know, you somehow end up doing the thing you’re supposed to do.
Jonathan in front of the Ganesh statue from a ceremony at an ashram in India, which he kept in his home for 15 years and then in the original triyoga studio at Primrose Hill, now HOME.
How did yoga enter your life?
My first real step into that world was when I was at law school in London. I was meant to go to medical school, believe it or not. I had a place at medical school largely because I was good at sports - football, rugby, running - and my interview was mostly about that. But I changed my mind (much to my father’s dismay) and somehow ended up at law school (much to my father’s relief).
While I was there, I felt I needed to slow down. Law school can be intense. So I went to Transcendental Meditation. At first, I saw meditation purely as a relaxation technique. I didn’t think of it as anything more than a way to relax. But I kept practising, even after I qualified.
People used to take the piss out of me (in a nice way). My friends I played football with used to write “guru” on my shirt.
I qualified quite young - I was 24. I think I was 28 when I opened my own law firm. I’m not sure they’d let you do that now.
I grew my practice, and one day a friend said his wife was going to a yoga class and said, “You’re a bit weird, you’d probably like it.” So I went to a one-to-one yoga class in a flat near Parliament Hill.
At one point in that class, I was lying on my back with my eyes closed. I could see a wall of mirrors. I saw myself running, not wanting to look. And I knew I had to stop and look. It was a very profound experience.
At the time, I smoked 40 cigarettes a day and drank 14 mugs of coffee, all with sugar. And a few other things. Within three months of that first yoga class, it all stopped. At that time I of course didn’t connect the two (you see you don’t have to be bright to be a lawyer)
I found a really good yoga teacher called John Stirk and did one-to-one sessions with him. It was very powerful. I didn’t really understand yoga then - I was just doing the physical practice - but I knew there was something more to it.
I tried classes at the Iyengar Institute in Maida Vale and the Sivananda Centre in Notting Hill where the chanting freaked me out. I thought, I can’t do this.
Later, I went to a meditation centre in Harley Street from an Indian tradition and eventually travelled to India, to an ashram about three hours outside Mumbai. I never thought of myself as a seeker, but I had some profound experiences and realisations.
There, I learnt that yoga wasn’t just asana - not just downward dog and sun salutations - but part of a much bigger picture. That’s where I learnt about service, or seva, which is Sanskrit means selfless service. We chanted, which initially freaked me out, but I learnt to love it.
I also learnt about self-inquiry - about contemplating what’s going on rather than never stopping. I was suddenly living two parallel lives: West End lawyer and slightly flaky yoga/mediation practitioner. But the yoga practices impacted how I worked. It sharpened my instincts and gave me different perspectives.
Eventually, I was invited to join into a bigger law firm and we merged. I used to sit in long partners’ meetings wondering, what should I be doing?
Then a friend suggested I see a palmist in Putney. She looked at my hands and asked what I did. When I said I was a lawyer, she said, “No, no - that’s not what you should be doing.”
Half-joking, I asked if I should go back to the office and hand in my notice? She said yes. So I did.
Piper peeking in at the end of the corridor leading to the studios. Jonathan in one of the studios, in BORTE sweater in Feather.
You did? That’s very brave.
Brave or stupid. But I went back, spoke to Leonard Ross who was the senior partner and who had become a friend and told him I was leaving, even though I didn’t know what I was going to do. He was very kind, but I had to give a year’s notice.
During that year, I reduced my workload and tried to work out what I was going to do. A friend was starting Yo! Sushi, so I helped him. Someone else I knew was starting a multimedia talent agency, and I helped them too. I was approached about taking over a health farm in Hampshire – I’m not sure why they thought I would have the money to do it – but it piqued my interest.
One day, walking on Primrose Hill with my golden retriever, Teddy, I bumped into a couple with a dog. We started talking and they asked what I did. I told them about the concept I was working on. They said they might be able to help.
That took me from the health farm to the idea of - a holistic health club, but not a flaky one. A really cool place for people to go. At the time, the health clubs in London were fairly average, but America had Equinox.
So I went to America, looked at health clubs, came back, somehow pulled together people who knew what they were talking about, put together a plan, we were going to call it Tribeca and somehow raised five million pounds.
I think because I was a lawyer, people assumed I knew what I was talking about, which wasn’t necessarily the case. We found a building and agreed everything in principle with the landlord, and then the major investor changed their mind.
I remember sitting on Hampstead Heath thinking, what am I going to do? I rang a friend Bridget Woods Kramer who was teaching at YogaWorks in LA. She said yoga was huge there and suggested I focus on that because that’s what I loved.
I flew to America and visited YogaWorks in LA, Jivamukti in New York, and Yoga Zone. I asked the owners of YogaWorks if I could use their name. At first they said yes, then came back and said no - because I was a lawyer.
It was fine. I had a name for the health club, Tribeca, but I changed the B-E-C-A to Y-O-G-A as a working title. We found this building and raised different funding.
Home Wellness’s shop’s offer has the aim of supporting wellness practice, and has impeccable environmental credentials.
Did you enjoy the Triyoga journey?
I really did. Some of it was challenging, but running a place where everything you offer is genuinely good for people is a privilege. Being given that as a job is a lovely thing.
I probably didn’t appreciate it fully at the time, and I never had ambitions to open more than one. That was never my agenda. My career path was as they say ‘organic’. When you don’t quite know what you’re doing, things still somehow happen.
It was fun until COVID. Then COVID was a different kind of challenge that really made you think. It basically broke so many businesses because people didn’t want to come back into buildings.
Triyoga went online, and our guest teachers, stuck at home, were happy to teach. Suddenly there were no walls. Teachers like Paul Grilley, who used to teach 60 people in a studio, could reach 600 online. It was extraordinary.
The teachers were incredible -, David Swenson, Kino MacGregor, and Richard Rosen - all on our weekly schedule. But afterwards, it was tough. People thought things would return to normal after COVID. They didn’t. It’s a business version of long COVID
Triyoga was then approached by United Fitness Brands. My major investors wanted out, and eventually I agreed.
So you exited.
The plan was to be on the main board and I stayed for about six months but sadly very quickly it was clear that our values diverged, and after six months I gave my agreed notice but my exit became very speedy!
What inspires you
Anything. That might sound boring, but I believe anything can be inspirational. Something you see, something that catches your eye, something small.
Standing by the ocean is inspiring. Wide beaches in Norfolk, where the landscape suddenly opens up. You might see a leaf suspended in the air and not understand how it’s happening. Extraordinary moments.
You might touch a tree and realise it was there before you were born and will be there after you die. Or hear a song with one small moment that just has something in it.
Jonathan by Home Wellness reception area, in BORTE sweater in Feather.
You mentioned your spiritual practices. What are they?
I meditate. I occasionally chant. I occasionally journal. And I see what I do here as a form of practice too. Looking after people is a practice for me.
And what do you do for your wellness?
I practise yoga - not very well, as it comes and goes. I walk the dog a lot. I try to maintain a small home practice with some Pilates and weights. I have been a long time footballer and I have swapped my tennis for Padel. And I like having treatments here. We have excellent therapists.
What treatments do you offer at Home Wellness?
Osteopathy, massage, reflexology, acupuncture, TRE, Ayurvedic treatments, and many more and we have a far-infrared sauna.
We had one at Camden Triyoga too. When we were building Camden, the sauna was installed early, so we held meetings in it with the builders. They were very short once it heated up. Best meetings in the world.
One-word questions
Blue?
Sky.
Timeless?
Moon.
Strength?
Weakness.
Beauty?
Beholder.
