Silvie Claes Shetty

Silvie founded Wellness Garden because holistic health was missing a discipline she had spent a career practising. India holds one of the world's deepest concentrations of healing traditions — Ayurveda, yoga therapy, naturopathy, Siddha, Unani, homeopathy, marma, sound and breath work — and Wellness Garden covers more than 70 therapies in all, across thousands of practitioners. For any one person, though, the question is much smaller and much harder: which of these is right for my back, my sleep, my thyroid, and who near me is genuinely good at it? She treats it as a design problem, not a marketing one — and the harder the problem, the more it interests her.

An architect by training with a double master's, she spent twenty-five years designing hotels, spas and wellness retreats across Belgium, the Netherlands and India — spaces built specifically to restore people. She has since sat with more than a hundred founders, physicians and practitioners in their own centres, on the principle that you cannot assess a place from a brochure. That work now extends into the built environment and preventive wellbeing, which she is formalising through the International WELL Building Institute's Faculty.

Outside the platform, she trains for triathlons and makes interactive art installations about human connection, shown at CODAME x Google in Milan, San Francisco and Berlin.