Right off Greenwich Avenue in Greenwich, Connecticut, there’s an old, dilapidated building with a leaky roof that once housed a radio station. The building is an odd sight because Greenwich Avenue isn’t your average Main Street: lined with exorbitantly expensive stores, it’s the center of this famously moneyed enclave for New York’s financial elite. But the old radio station is being completely renovated, no expense spared, and in April it will open its doors as a modern yoga studio—and not the kind with stinky incense and smelly bodies, but rather with space, light, and a stylish boutique. The studio will bear the name Jois Yoga, in honor of Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois, an eminent yoga teacher whose many students called him Guruji, and whose death on May 18, 2009, occasioned lengthy obituaries in such important newspapers as The New York Times and London’s Guardian.

The money behind the new studio comes from Sonia Tudor Jones, whose husband, 57-year-old Paul Tudor Jones II, runs the multi-billion-dollar hedge-fund empire Tudor Investment Corp. Tudor is one of the oldest and most respected hedge funds—its flagship fund, Tudor BVI Global, has averaged annual gains of 21 percent over its 25-year history, according to The Wall Street Journal—and while very little about it is public, Forbes has estimated Paul Tudor Jones’s net worth at $3.2 billion.

Jones is also a noted philanthropist, the founder of the Robin Hood Foundation, the oh-so-stylish charity for the hedge-fund set. The Joneses live in Greenwich. This will be his wife’s fourth Jois studio, or “shala” in yoga lingo, and that’s only part of her far-flung project. In partnership with Pattabhi Jois’s daughter and grandson and a friend, San Diego-based entrepreneur Salima Ruffin, she’s also launched a Jois line of yoga clothes, and she is setting up charities to bring yoga to everyone, from charter schools in Florida to villages in Africa. Ruffin likes to say that Sonia is the “Mother Teresa of yoga.”
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