A desk job was never in the cards for Chrissy Dress. Owner of her second Cure de Repos location in Ardmore, she’s spent a whole career working odd jobs to get to this point. From bartending to doing makeup on movie sets to working the front desk at Hand and Stone and jobs at high-end spas around the Philadelphia metro, she’s spent decades bringing this vision to life.
Today, Cure de Repos offers over a dozen treatments to health-conscious Main Liners, from waxing to infrared light saunas, facials, massages and more. It brings a calming atmosphere to the bustle of Ardmore and serves as a place where old-world hospitality, cultivated from Dress’s time working at the Ritz Carlton, takes center stage amid a modern spa backdrop.
The first Cure de Repos opened in 2016 on Germantown Avenue in Chestnut Hill. At the time, Dress was struggling as a spa director in Langhorne. Formerly of the vaunted Rescue Spa in Rittenhouse, she missed the place where she had belonged and strived to create that space again.
Whether it was luck, fate or circumstance that she drove past an empty Chestnut Hill storefront with a phone number on the window, Dress doesn’t know, but it created a lightbulb moment in her head.
“I’m working out here in Langhorne and I’m miserable,” she recalls. “I’m sitting in my car crying, ‘Let me just look at it,'” she remembers asking the real estate agent over the phone. “‘I can put a plan together that possibly in two years I can open something.'”
Just four months later, Cure de Repos was open for business.
Paving a Path to Success
The quick launch was a pleasant surprise for Dress, who, during her early days as a bartender at the midtown Continental in 2006 never would have imagined she’d be so successful in the wellness industry, let alone the founder of her own spa.
At the time, she had been “stalking” celebrity makeup artist Annie Mayo on MySpace and contacted her through the internet, a novel concept at the time. Dress flew out to Arizona just to meet Mayo for lunch. Mayo was so impressed with the young Dress’s drive that a few months later she hired her as a personal assistant.
After two years doing makeup for film and TV stars, Dress moved back to Pennsylvania when the 2008 recession hit with a slew of life lessons and experience in her back pocket.
“The hustle is real,” she says. “Just to [grind] is what it taught me to do. To scale down, like I’m not going out to eat all the time, I was eating Rice-a-Roni for dinner…going out there, handing my cards out, to get people to come to see me. I feel like people in the industry that are new just expect they’re going to be busy, [but] it’s not that way at all.”
Upon her return to Philadelphia, Dress worked at a litany of high-end local spas from the aforementioned Ritz Carlton and Rescue Spa to lesser-known outlets like SPAtini in Bucks County.
She even ended up running a Hand and Stone in Doylestown. Plagued by poor administration from the previous manager who had been signing customer credit cards up for memberships without their approval, the business was in dire straits when Dress joined the team. Just 18 months later, however, Doylestown boasted the eighth-best Hand and Stone store by membership nationwide.
“From that experience, I learned whenever I interviewed for a job to ask, “Why did the person before me leave,'” she says. “Because people were coming in screaming in my face, ‘Why are you charging me?!'”
Beyond her experience-filled career, Dress cites three women without whom she never would have achieved her goals: her mother, Marla Malcolm Beck (the co-founder of Bluemercury) and Danuta Mieloch (owner of Rescue Spa).
“Learning from these women has got me to where I am today,” Dress shares. “[Beck] was business and [Mieloch] was hands-on technique.”
An Exciting Future
With these skills and Dress’s sense of hospitality, Cure de Repos Chestnut Hill has already claimed several awards from Best of the Main Line & Western Suburbs to Best of Philly, as well as an award from Metro Magazine for Best Laser Clinic.
Though Cure de Repos Ardmore is barely a month old, Dress already has plans in her mind for the future of her business. While it may be years or even decades away, she’d love to build a destination resort spa, perhaps featuring equine therapy and casitas somewhere exotic, either in the United States or far off in Spain or India.
Whether or not the future holds this dream resort, Dress’s Cure de Repos in Ardmore brings an upscale European day spa to a community thirsting for wellness. With a comfortable waiting lounge, high ceilings and glass that lets in plenty of natural light, plus a state-of-the-art infrared light sauna, cold plunge and massage room, Cure de Repos looks toward a healthy future on the Main Line.
Cure de Repos Ardmore
65 Cricket Ave., Ardmore
Related: Exceptional Finds Owner Beth Silverberg Has Reinvented Herself on the Main Line
