Asta Barry
Co-founder, Almara Maison. Wellbeing built into the building.
The light
Almara Maison is a wellbeing studio in Riyadh, and the work is less about a gym and a yoga mat than about whether a place is built to let people rest. Asta co-founded it. It designs and runs wellbeing programmes for organisations and for residential communities across Saudi Arabia, from the strategy down to finding the practitioners themselves: yoga and Pilates instructors, personal trainers, nutritionists, breathwork facilitators, recovery specialists.
The part that matters to a compound is that each programme is built for the people actually living in it rather than lifted from a template. Residents have their own needs and their own pace, and a calendar that ignores both stays empty, which is the failure mode of almost every wellbeing offer attached to a residential building.
She also shapes the rooms. Almara Maison designs wellbeing-informed interiors for offices, compounds and hospitality spaces, so that the building does some of the work rather than merely hosting it. A home is not neutral. Light, sound, material and the order of the rooms act on whoever lives there, and most of us only notice once it has gone wrong.
Beyond the day-to-day programming the studio runs retreats, locally with Habitas AlUla and Six Senses Red Sea, and abroad in Ubud. The next Bali retreat is announced for March 2027.
What she sells an organisation is not a perk. Perks go unmeasured, which is why they are the first line cut. She builds wellbeing as infrastructure instead, deliberately and with something at the end that can be counted. It is a harder sell and a considerably better one, and it is why the buyers here are increasingly companies and compound owners rather than individuals.