From the Ground Up at LuxGym
When it comes to building the perfect training space, most people obsess over the equipment. John Caruso learns why they’re starting in the wrong place.
Walk into almost any gym in the country and your eyes will go straight to the equipment. The racks, the cables, the rows of dumbbells catching the light. It’s understandable. Equipment is visible, tangible, aspirational. It’s the thing that gets photographed for Instagram and listed in the brochure.
But according to Jason Robertson, the man behind LuxGym, that instinct, however natural, is precisely where most gym builds go wrong.
The floor, Jason argues, is where everything begins. Not the squat rack. Not the brand of the plates stacked neatly on the weight tree. The floor!
“You can move equipment in and out, it’s a competitive area, but if you haven’t got your flooring right, it’s a massive problem,” he says. “It’s got to look right, it’s got to perform, and if it’s not done properly, you will impact the look and feel of the training environment and experience.”
Jason has spent 35 years in the fitness industry and has watched equipment evolve from clunky chrome to carbon-fibre precision, and built spaces across Queensland for boutique gyms, luxury hotels, and high-end residential clients.
And, for most of those years, he admits, the floor barely crossed his mind.
“All you’re thinking of is the equipment,” he admits. “Until I was exposed to proper flooring, I never thought about it either.”
That shift in thinking is the animating idea behind LuxGym, a locally-based design and fitout company Jason founded to bring a genuinely considered approach to fitness spaces, from luxury home gyms to hotel wellness facilities and body corporate projects.
Based in Cooroy, the business operates a showroom where clients, architects, and designers can see and feel the difference between what LuxGym offers and the kind of product most people end up with by default.
The problem with cheap gym flooring, Jason explains, goes well beyond aesthetics.
“If you walk into many gyms around the country, you will more than likely be training on rubber tiles, the kind that cost about thirty-five dollars
a square metre,” he said. “The joins are always visible and they tend to shrink and collect dust.
“It looks exactly like what it is, a budget decision dressed up in the dark.”
But the visual shortcoming is almost secondary. Jason raises an issue most gym-goers have never considered, the health implications of a floor quietly disintegrating beneath their feet.
“Cheap flooring stinks. It’s breaking down and you’re breathing in those micro-particles,” he says. “You’re training for health benefits and fitness, and yet you’re sucking up all this stuff. That’s a big issue, and one that a lot of people don’t think about.”
LuxGym’s answer is performance-grade, commercial flooring, the kind used in elite sport and fitness facilities around the world, not the rubber tiles that end up in budget fit-outs.
As an authorised installer and supplier of leading international flooring systems, Jason specs the right surface for each unique space. Seamless, certified for safety and sustainability, and built to handle sweat, impact, and heavy equipment without breaking down.
“You can’t see the joins. It’s made properly, done with all the certifications for safety and recycling, covering off sustainability and environmental requirements, and it’s durable,” he says.
The cost difference is real. Premium flooring can run to $200 or $250 a square metre compared to the $35 rubber tile alternative. But Jason is emphatic on the return: once it’s down, it’s down for good. It won’t shrink, won’t degrade, and won’t be destroyed when you shift
a 200-kilogram rack across it.
What separates LuxGym further is the breadth of what Jason, and his team bring to a project.
The floor is the foundation, but the thinking extends in every direction from there. Colour ranges, custom inlay logos, turf strips for sled work and mobility, each zone designed around the specific movements that will happen within it.
Jason talks about the difference between doing lunges on hard rubber and doing them on proper turf with the kind of quiet conviction that comes from someone who’s stood in both environments.
“You do a set of lunges on our flooring and it’s amazing how much better it feels than just doing it on the hard rubber,” he says.
Then there are the inlay lifting platforms, a detail that speaks directly to Jason’s obsession with getting every element right.
Traditional raised platforms create a 50-millimetre trip hazard and consume floor space that’s only useful when someone’s deadlifting. LuxGym’s inlay approach eliminates the hazard entirely by building the platform flush with the surrounding floor, leaving the area fully functional when not in use and safe regardless.
For hotel and body corporate projects, acoustic performance is another layer entirely. Jason works with specialist treatments designed to meet specific sound attenuation requirements, critical when a training space sits above a guest room or a shared living area.
“We can do acoustic testing and create the floor to meet that specific sound requirement and performance requirement,” he says.
All of it, the surface preparation, the grinding back of existing epoxy floors, the priming, the laying, is handled in-house.
Jason and his tradespeople understand both the design intent and the technical execution, which means nothing falls between the gaps when the architect hands over to the builder.
It’s a long way from the standard gym fit-out playbook. But then, LuxGym was never built around standard.
“At LuxGym, everything begins with the floor beneath your feet,” Jason says. “Flooring is more than a surface, it’s the foundation of performance, safety, and experience.
“Step onto the right one, and everything changes.”
Before you set up your gym space, whether at home or for commercial use, it’s best to start from the ground up.
