Key Takeaways:

• Luxury dental practices are borrowing from hospitality, beauty, and wellness playbooks.
• Premium services promise affluent patients comfort, convenience, and the ability to multitask at the dentist.
• Luxury dentistry increasingly sells an experience, not simply better teeth.

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...