The Brooklyn Bride

Bring the SPARTY! home

By Lee Cabot Walker
for The Brooklyn Papers

While relaxing, luxurious spa treatments are an excellent way for a bridal party to celebrate a coming wedding, you want to spend the time WITH your bridal party, even if your face does happen to be resting in the doughnut hole of a padded massage chair.

Enter SPARTY!, Alexis Ufland’s two-year-old business that personalizes your spa party and turns it into a truly social event. Offering an array of bridal packages, SPARTY! staff members will come to you — turning your Brooklyn home or office into a spa for a day, while providing manicures, pedicures, massages, facials and more along with light snacks and cocktails.

“We’re really known for our ability to completely transform your space,” Ufland says. “We have all the equipment we need, and we have it down to a science. We can turn a loft space into a spa, an apartment into a spa, or a hotel suite into a spa.”

SPARTY! will open a studio in downtown Manhattan by mid-December, which will also be available for personalized spa parties.

Ufland recalled a bridal event she hosted in a Carroll Gardens brownstone.

“Instead of doing the SPARTY! as the bachelorette party, they did it as the morning-after follow-up,” Ufland said. “It was a ‘Mimosas and Manicures’ party. We also served bloody marys, and it was really funny. We got to hear all about the crazy night these 12 girls had had.”

Bridal packages are priced from $175 to $500 per person, with the simpler packages offering “mini” treatments like 15-minute massages and the elaborate packages offering a series of 30- to 45-minute services for each guest.

SPARTY!’s minimum of 10 guests per party will enjoy “decadent” treatments like the “Marry Me” massage, the “Veil Ale” facial or the “Platinum” pedicure. “Bridal Bliss” menus offer “Decadent Delights” or lower carb snacks, and they include mini sandwiches, salads and desserts. Cocktails are extra.

“What we try to do is very social,” says Ufland, who is also the owner of a spa consulting firm, Lexi Design, that develops premier spas in Europe, Asia, South America and across the United States. “[With SPARTY!], we make sure that you can get, for example, manicures next to each other. We were sick of Enya and green tea at spas. This is about having fun — drinking some cocktails, eating some chocolate with your girlfriends — not just about ‘healing your inner self.’”

For more information about SPARTY! or to book an appointment, call (646) 336-5549 or visit the Web site at www.spa-party.com.

November 19, 2005 edition |. Read more about Brooklyn Weddings