Sauna
Forest Sauna Cabin
A free-standing wood-fired sauna cabin set in the hemlocks of an Upstate property, sized for a family of six and a slow Saturday.
The brief
A working family with a young son had restored an 1880s farmhouse on a ridge above the Hudson, and wanted a Finnish-style smoke-trained sauna they could walk to from the kitchen door in winter coats. The clients had spent every summer of their childhood in eastern Finland; the bar was high and unforgiving.
The cabin had to read as if it had always been there — wood-fired, two-room, three-tier — and survive Catskills weather for a hundred years without becoming someone’s project.
What we made
- A 14 m² hand-cut Eastern white pine cabin on a poured concrete plinth, with a black-tarred birchbark roof.
- A three-tier löyly room in heartwood thermo-aspen, faced with a Tulikivi soapstone wood-burning stove.
- A washing antechamber clad in vertical charred cedar, with a copper basin fed by a footing-line well.
- A covered porch sized for cooling-down between rounds, oriented to a clearing in the hemlocks.
- A discreet electric backup element inside the soapstone, for unattended weekday mornings.
