EXERCISING POPULARITY

By S.L. Wykes
^© Mercury News 2003

When Catherine De Los Santos unlocks the door to her 2-month-old yoga studio, she's greeted by two marble buddhas, the heavy fragrance of a gardenia blossom and cool light filtering through a glass atrium wall.

It's a big improvement on the former software company office space that stood empty for more than a year before De Los Santos went looking for a new studio at a propitious moment. What's died down -- the raging fire of dot-comism -- met what's coming up -- yoga, a practice that is so mainstream, one almost expects to find the sticky mats in middle school gyms.

On the Peninsula, yoga studios have become a very visible part of the landscape -- increasing options for yoga students. De Los Santos' Darshana Yoga on Palo Alto's High Street is just blocks away from Yoga Source on Hamilton Street, which leads on to the Yoga Center of Palo Alto on Cowper Street. Yoga Source moved into a defunct printing shop.

In Palo Alto's homier retail neighborhood, California Avenue, Paul Crowl took an old florist shop and built Avalon Art & Yoga Center. In Menlo Park, Hot Yoga 101 replaced a dance-wear store, and Devi Yoga overlooks Draeger's grocery store parking lot from its renovated second-floor insurance office space.

And wherever they are, these newcomers to the service industry are widely welcomed. ``The other businesses are ecstatic I'm here,'' Crowl said. ``They realize the volume of people I have come through the door who finish a class and go to eat or shop.''

Crowl estimates 300 to 400 students go to the studio each week.

Menlo Park welcomed Nicole Perkins when she applied to move Devi Yoga into her Santa Cruz Avenue location just over a year ago. She was near University Drive, a busy corner. ``I was really concerned'' about the response from city officials, she said. ``I didn't want to get my hopes up. I even offered to offer classes in non-high traffic times, but they said, `We want you to offer as many classes as possible.' ''

Devi Yoga's schedule has more than 40 classes, seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to 7:45 p.m.

Yoga Blu owner Erin Reiser, who renovated a high-ceilinged stationery store on Laurel Street in San Carlos to open a space last week that includes a water bar and clothing, is still working things out with city officials. They've only allowed her two classes a day, she said.

Crowl is a bit nervous about the number of studios available. The community is saturated, he thinks.

But Robin Jamplis, owner of Hot Yoga 101, doesn't agree. Her Hot Yoga studio offers a strenuous style of yoga called Bikram, usually practiced in studios heated to 101 degrees, and she knows ``that hot yoga is not for everybody, but there is a yoga for everybody. I think there's so much variety, it reduces competition. It's like restaurants -- there are Greek, Italian -- it's always nice to have a variety.''

``You can get something from every style,'' said Perkins, whose classes at Devi include everything from restorative yoga to Iyengar, Anusara, Ashtanga and Vinyasa -- each with its own emphasis.

De Los Santos' landlord, Palo Alto architect Tony Carrasco, did not need much convincing when he learned she was looking at a space he owned. In Palo Alto, leasing to a service business in an office space means that space can never be rented out as an office again, but Carrasco said this was a case of improving the space and following his company's office philosophy.

``She was enhancing the building, and I knew she'd do a good job,'' he said. ``A yoga studio works well for a ground floor. We're doing a project in East Palo Alto where we have a mom-and-pop store on the ground floor and an office above. It's our mantra.''