Paul Black is currently working through permitting for Quench Tubs & Sauna, a private men's club at 381 Venable St. NW on the western edge of downtown, with a target opening of October. The 4,500-square-foot facility is his first venture as an operator, and the reasoning behind it is less about nightlife than about what downtown does not currently offer: somewhere for the LGBTQ+ community to gather that is not a bar.
The programming borrows from global sauna culture, with Turkey, Korea and Finland cited as reference points. Members get a steam room, a dry sauna, showers, hot tubs, cold plunges, lounges, private changing facilities and private relaxation cabinets, plus a small canteen for food and drink. The house rule that shapes everything else is the no-device policy. Black's stated priority is people meeting each other in a room rather than through an app.
The build itself is the most downtown thing about it. Quench will be assembled from shipping containers, with an industrial design that leans on Atlanta's railroad and steel-manufacturing history. The name is a metalworking reference, taken from the quench tub used to cool hot steel, which is a tighter piece of branding than most new venues manage.
Black is candid that clubs in this category already exist in Atlanta, FLEX among them. His argument for another is ownership: a space built and run by someone inside the community it serves, rather than one that merely markets to it. That distinction has driven a lot of recent independent openings across the city, and it lands differently on a block this close to the stadium district, where most new square footage arrives with an institutional developer attached.
Memberships will come in tiers, with founding memberships available before opening. Black has already sketched an expansion path, either growing the building's footprint or relocating to a larger site if demand supports it. For a corner of downtown that empties out between events, a membership business built on regular weekly visits is a meaningfully different kind of tenant than another venue that only fills on game nights.
Original reporting: What Now Atlanta (July 9, 2026)