Echo Padel Club: A Premium Padel Destination Built to Perform

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Working with Echo Padel Club, Zero Gravity Design delivered the interior design and FF&E coordination for a landmark indoor padel club in London — a hospitality-led destination that treats the court as one part of a much bigger commercial model.

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Echo approached ZGD off the back of a wider shift in the UK padel market: courts alone were no longer enough to win membership loyalty or justify premium pricing. The brief was to convert a former industrial unit into a facility that could compete on experience as much as on gameplay — somewhere members would want to arrive early, stay late, and bring guests back. That meant treating hospitality, wellness and materiality as design priorities from day one, not afterthoughts bolted on once the courts were specified.

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The design language pairs a deep jewel-green and walnut palette with antique brass detailing and marble surfaces, carried consistently from the members' café and retail bar through to the changing rooms and lounge. A barrel-vaulted, brass-lit ceiling frames the court itself, turning the walk to the glass from a corridor into an arrival sequence. Bespoke joinery, a full-service coffee and retail counter, boutique lockers, a steam pod and a leather-clad lounge with court-side seating were all specified and coordinated as part of the FF&E package, alongside lighting design, signage and acoustic treatment for the 7m-clear-height court enclosure. Delivered across RIBA Stages 2–6 with FF&E and delivery coordination through to opening, the scheme was built to be commercially resolved as well as visually striking — buildable within budget, not just impressive on a rendering.

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The Result:

• Peak-hour court utilisation reached 92% within four months of opening, well above the 60–65% typical of court-only facilities.

• Secondary spend across café, bar and retail reached 41% of total revenue — nearly double the sector norm for padel venues without a hospitality offer.

• The founding membership tier (250 places) sold out within six weeks of launch, with a waitlist of 180+ following.

• Modelled payback of 3.8 years, comfortably inside the 5-year benchmark considered a strong result for UK padel developments.

 

For developers, landlords and operators evaluating padel as an investment, this project shows what's achievable when the court is designed as one part of a wider commercial model rather than the whole of it: a facility that performs on utilisation, on secondary spend and on membership retention, not just on square footage.