Greenwich Thermal Lounge
A room given over entirely to thermal rest — the Roman tepidarium reimagined as a circuit of contoured, body-warm marble loungers on the lower level of a Greenwich estate.
The brief
The clients had everything a wellness floor usually collects — sauna, steam, a gym — and had noticed that the room they actually used was none of them. It was the bench between them, where you sit, half-cooled, and do nothing. They asked us to design that bench into a room of its own: a thermal lounge whose only program is warmth and rest.
The reference was the Roman tepidarium — the warm room you pass through and never want to leave — and the engineering question was how to make stone hold a body’s temperature without the dry, radiator feel of a heated floor. The room sits on the lower level, daylight-free, so light had to be built rather than borrowed.
What we made
- A circuit of contoured loungers, each an EPS core clad in cream marble and shaped to the reclined body, run with a low-temperature hydronic coil so the stone meets you at skin temperature.
- A wall of jewel-teal glass mosaic with gold grout, lit at a raking angle so the room reads as depth and shadow rather than a lit box.
- A shallow plaster dome overhead, washed by concealed warm light, with a faint steam sill at the floor to soften the air.
- Two facing rows of benches in a symmetric plan, brass lanterns at the axis, so the room composes the same from either lounger.
- A quiet thermal envelope — insulated slab, sound-dampened returns, no visible diffusers — so the only thing the room asks of you is to lie down.
