City Cave West Melbourne

“I’d never experienced silence like it before,” says Tim Butters, co-founder and CEO of City Cave, recalling his first time trying float therapy. “Floating in warm water and darkness gave me this unbelievable relief from gravity - it literally released me from feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders.”

Tucked into the West End development on the fringe of Melbourne’s CBD, City Cave West Melbourne is more than a wellness centre—it’s what Tim calls an “urban escape.” The kind of place you go when the noise of everyday life gets too loud and your mind needs a breather.

Tim didn’t start out in the wellness industry. “My professional background is actually stonemasonry and tiling. I was a serial entrepreneur and I had lots of different businesses in my younger years,” he says.

After a decade in construction and selling a furniture business, a mate recommended float therapy to help him refocus and consider what he wanted to do next.

The experience was transformative. “After just one session of float therapy, I felt like a totally new person,” he says. “That’s when I knew that was going to be my next step in business - I wanted to bring the benefits of float therapy to as many people as possible.”

He wasn’t alone. Tim’s best friend and now business partner, Jeremy Hassell, had a similarly powerful reaction. The pair saw potential to improve on the traditional float experience—moving away from potentially claustrophobic egg-shaped pods to open float rooms that are warm, inviting, and aesthetically calming.

City Cave opened its first centre in Brisbane on Tim’s birthday in 2016. Since then, the brand has expanded to 75 locations, including a recent leap into the US. It is now the biggest float therapy brand in the world.

City Cave West Melbourne is run by a local team and Tim describes the West Melbourne site as “perfectly located” for busy professionals. “There’s a great urban feel about the area, lots of young go-getters,” he says. “We love being around other wellness businesses too, such as Anytime Fitness and Premier Health Partners.”

Each City Cave is a wellness hub offering float therapy, infrared sauna, and massage, with float therapy still their most popular service. “It’s the thing we’re kind of famous for,” Tim says. The experience—lying in a warm pool saturated with 1,000 pounds of hospital-grade Epsom salt, in darkness or with a gentle blue light—offers a unique kind of rest. “You get circulation of blood flow around your whole body, your joints open up, your spine elongates. It’s the only time you truly escape gravity.”

And the results speak for themselves. “We get about 8,000 reviews a week, averaging 4.9 stars,” Tim says. Tim particularly recalls a handwritten letter from a longtime client. “Robert was depressed and unemployed, but he couldn’t even leave home for a job interview. After 30 days of floating, he got a job at Woolworths. He rebuilt his mind from the ground up.”

It’s stories like that which fuel Tim’s drive to keep growing. “We feel like we have a responsibility to keep growing. Our mission statement is that we create nurturing environments that are accessible to everybody,” he says.

“Float therapy isn’t a magic fix, but it’s often the first step to a more holistic approach to health and wellbeing. And City Cave is an antidote to stress - I think we all need that right now.”

Words by Joyce Watts & Photography by Anna Encio