The boundary between dental care, hospitality, and wellness is getting blurrier. A growing number of practices are replacing clinical waiting rooms with residentially inspired interiors, offering amenities intended to reduce dental anxiety, and introducing services that stretch a dental appointment into a broader wellness experience.
Dental practices like Tend, which first opened in New York City in 2019, set the stage for the new era of oral care that is hitting the city seven years later. Across multiple rounds, it has raised some $260 million in venture funding and has over 30 locations across metropolitan areas. On Instagram, the company uses the tagline “Look forward to the dentist.” A sign outside a Manhattan location reads “We’re like a spa, but for your mouth. Yes, we’re really a dentist.” Tend features ceiling-mounted TVs for patients to watch during visits, and the practice offers injectables to help treat conditions like TMJ. It also openly advertises that it takes insurance. The dental practices and services that have opened since, however, are pushing the spa-dentistry concept even further.
At Smile House in Tribeca, for example, the waiting room was designed to feel “more like a living room,” according to co-founder Cody Levine. That is, if your living room were designed by a fancy NYC architecture firm with moody amber lighting and custom wood furniture, like low sofas covered in cheetah print.
And in midtown, cosmetic dentist Dr. Alex Rubinov has transformed the dreaded dental cleaning into a $3,500 service that combines dental care with IV therapy, leg compression, and myofunctional therapy. Dr. Rubinov had similar inspirations: “The goal was to create an environment that feels far removed from a dental office, because dentistry has this negative connotation: ‘Oh, I hate going to the dentist,’ right? I want people to say, ‘I fucking love going to the dentist.’”
Smile House opened in April 2025, conceived of as a younger, downtown counterpart to the Upper East Side practice Levine’s father, Dr. Jonathan Levine, has operated for nearly 40 years. Upon arrival, patients are offered an “elixir” that the practice says helps “reset the microbiome”—a detail inspired, Levine told BeautyMatter, by memorable childhood stays at Four Seasons properties.
“We're not the office [for people] like, ‘I just want a cleaning, and I want insurance to pay for everything.’ We are a comprehensive, multispecialty team here, [for] folks who want to optimize, or go deeper or who have been asking questions,” Levine said, noting that the practice often receives referrals from doctors treating patients with chronic conditions such as Hashimoto’s disease and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
Some guests, however, might want to enjoy a weighted blanket, or a jaw massage before a cleaning. Unlike most dentistry offices, Smile House was created with a hospitality-first perspective, Levine said. This meant that it could “use space really uniquely to help people feel more at ease, more at peace, and more calm, because dentistry is [typically] stress, anxiety, fear, needles, and pain. It’s all five of those things all at once. So we really wanted to be intentional around the design of the experience.”
Smile House is not alone in this new approach to oral care.
“The way I look at my practice is almost like a plastic surgeon's office, where the cosmetic part or the reconstructive part is essentially the major vertical, and then everything else in dentistry that I do is kind of like the med spa,” Dr. Rubinov said. His approach, while costly, allows busy professionals to make the most of their time.
“If you're giving me an hour, an hour and a half, of your time, my goal is to try to make it as enjoyable as possible,” Dr. Rubinov said, noting that sometimes, for his clientele, enjoyable also means “optimized.” “What I'm condensing in an hour-and-a-half, two-hour time period, is four different services in one place. And if you think about New York, everything is about how quickly and how fast can you make that transaction? How fast can you make that reservation? How can I optimize my time?”
During a Performance Recovery Dentistry treatment, Dr. Rubinov said, “While you're getting the cleaning, you are lying back, the leg compressions are on, and then once you're done with the prophylactic part, the IV gets started. After the cleaning, you have the myofunctional therapy piece, [which involves a] full head and neck evaluation as well as muscle relaxation, tension release, and lymphatic drainage … You come out essentially revitalized from head to toe, rather than just leaving a dental office getting a cleaning.” This type of service fits into a broader trend in which busy professionals are seeking to optimize every aspect of their lives, often seeking improvements when it comes to beauty or longevity.
At the Apa Aesthetic location on the Upper East Side, Dr. Apa, who has long been known in the high-end dentistry space, partnered with like-minded providers, rather than bringing on new employees, to create his take on a wellness-infused dental experience. These include Physician Associate Jill Ketner Villa, founder of concierge longevity clinic Goldhaus Wellness, and Nurse Practitioner Dr. Tiffany Rice.
Ketner Villa administers IV treatments, which are also available at Smile House and Rubinov’s practice. Depending on the patient, she may also prescribe peptides—compounds increasingly promoted in longevity circles, despite many lacking FDA approval. “It's all bespoke; it's not like a one size fits all, where every patient just gets X, Y, and Z,” Ketner Villa said of her approach. The presence of this kind of service within a dental practice points to a larger shift: For some providers, oral care is becoming an entry point into a much broader and less clearly defined wellness industry.
Of course, Dr. Apa also has offices in Miami, Los Angeles, and Dubai. And, this summer, when many of his high-profile patients were between New York City and The Hamptons, he offered a complimentary helicopter service to jet them between appointments and back to their summer homes. After all, that’s just the cost of doing business when veneers start at around $4,000 a tooth.
Dr. Rubinov acknowledges that a $3,500 dental cleaning is steep, but he said it comes down to the level of coordination and number of service providers involved. As of now, a full day of the week is essentially dedicated to this “Performance Recovery Dentistry” service. “Eventually, [this service] will absolutely boost my revenue because in the next year it will grow to at least two days a week,” he said, as he calculated the differences in earnings between a regular $600 cleaning versus a $3,500 one.
At Smile House, adjunct services include the 30-minute jaw tension release massage for $150; a session of Fotona laser with PMB, which targets the TMJ musculature, is $200; IV therapy, which can be added to surgical procedures, is $295; Emface to treat TMJ is $500 a session, with a minimum of four consecutive weekly sessions recommended; teeth whitening is $700; masseter Botox is $1,550.
At Dr. Apa’s practice, IV therapy begins at $325, and Botox injections with Dr. Rice begin at $525. The office doesn’t look at these treatments in terms of how they contribute to revenue immediately, but rather at how they enhance the patient experience, said Diana Sokal, who oversees communications for the practice. “[These services] give patients access to complementary services within an environment and with a team they already know and trust. The broader value is more cumulative. When patients have an exceptional, more comprehensive experience, it strengthens loyalty, encourages repeat engagement, and ultimately fuels word-of-mouth referrals,” she said, noting that, “For us, that long-term relationship with the patient is far more meaningful than the revenue generated by any one adjunct service.”
For most patients, the dentist’s office will remain a place for cleanings, fillings, and sometimes, anxiety under fluorescent lights. But for those who can afford it, these practices are betting that oral care can become something else: part medical appointment, part beauty treatment, part wellness ritual.
For dentists, expanded offerings transform a periodic medical necessity into a broader, and potentially far more valuable commercial relationship. The same amenities may help patients feel calmer and have more positive associations with going to the dentist, while bundled services may convince busy, affluent New Yorkers that they can maximize their time, or kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. And perhaps their best offer is that one thing that is especially valuable to busy, affluent New Yorkers: time.