I'm 31 and proud owner of SALA and Joshua is 34 and a delivery director at AKQA.

We met on a dating app in London. On our first date Joshua told me he didn't usually date British girls because he was keen to get back to New Zealand and we drunkenly made a pact that night that i'd move with him. Two years later we were packing up our East London flat with one way tickets to the other side of the world in our back pockets. 

I went back to London and me and my best friends took a boozy canal trip from Kings Cross to Primrose Hill, followed by a champagne fuelled life drawing class of a naked man named Marcus. Poor Marcus, didn’t know what had hit him, hahah!

A self pronounced 'sad girl' at heart i have an appetite for all things nostalgic. Joshua and I really wanted to take our guests back in time with us and sprinkle our day with British traditions. We were married by Joshuas mother at a church on Jervois Road and took our reception party to Alberton, an old farm house straight from the pages of a Jane Austen novel. It was so perfect! I threw the bouquet, wore a horse shoe made by Joshuas mother around my wrist and we danced to a string quartet on the lawn. It was so much fun taking a step back in time together. 

Hmm, well 2018 was wild. We moved to New Zealand, opened SALA and planned our wedding and so by force, we had very little headspace to sweat the small details and in the end it was all so perfect. So I suppose with that in mind I think we can get wrapped up in the performance of a wedding and feeling pressured to deliver this insanely lavish event and in the end no matter how much or how little you plan it, the day will be perfect as long as its built with love. On the day I looked around, here in one place every single person we loved there together and you cant help but feel like the luckiest people on earth. The magic wont happen from expensive wine or dresses but from the depths of your love, and as J-Lo once said, love don’t cost a thing.

One of Joshua’s prerequisites was that he got to decide the flavours of our cake (you have never met a man with a sweeter tooth). He ended up loving all the flavours so much we had each tier a different flavour (fig raspberry and pear, dark chocolate pistachio with a vegan banana cinnamon dark chocolate service cake for all my vegan London pals). Our cake was a classic three tier white iced number with a 1940's bride and groom lovingly saved from a vintage fair sitting on top. We had old photos of our mothers and grandmothers framed on the cake table as a tribute to all the beautiful brides that came before us and the values and traditions they passed on to us. We served the wedding cake as dessert with espresso martinis which really got the dance floor going…

For me SALA is more than just sweating, it was born from a desire to cultivate impactful experiences, community and a dogma free approach to fitness. I hate the 'work hard, be your best self' rhetoric that comes with so many gyms these days. I don't want to be told i need to improve or that my body needs to change. I think it's ironically, very unhealthy. I wanted to create a space people genuinely enjoyed being in; somewhere clean, spacious and welcoming that combined my love for music, dynamic movement and a pressure free attitude to skipping the gym to drink wine with friends instead. I want people to arrive at SALA feeling excited about moving and leave knowing that they are already enough. Keeping fit shouldn’t feel like a chore, it should be fun. Life’s too short for guilt trips. Drink the wine, do the yoga, dance until the sun comes up, tell him how you feel. Simple.

Well as you can imagine with SALA being so new theres always things to be done at the studio. We try and do a class together (usually kettlebells or yoga) then we spend the weekends looking at ways of improving the studio; a new coat hook here, heavier kettlebells there, creating a new class concept for this. We work really long hours at the studio so if we get any spare time we would rather be home eating Uber eats watching game of thrones reruns than at a restaurant these days. Who knew home could feel like such a luxury?