As a child, Kayla Sibilia had the important role of fire-tender in the sauna at her parents’ house. Not yet allowed to join the winter bathing, she would chop the wood and keep the flame alive. She distinctly remembers the first time she was invited inside with her mom and aunt when she was around 13 years old. “They were talking to me in this tone of voice that was so different from the tone they used outside of the sauna,” she recalls. “They were sharing stories that they normally would never share. They were swearing! They were complaining!”
From an early age, Sibilia understood that the sauna was a place where you were released of expectations, around your relationships and yourself—where you were able to let them melt away. “Everybody was at their truest form,” she says. So, when she started her own sauna business many years later, this sentiment felt especially important: not just creating a space for bathing, but for community.
Last year, Sibilia opened Altær, a community sauna on the beach in Little Compton, RI. “I feel that humans right now are desiring this kind of connection: a connection that is not based around their economic standing, what they look like, what they’re wearing, or what their political views are,” she says.
In the years since COVID-19, several community saunas have popped up nationwide, offering accessible wellness spaces to gather amongst strangers and sweat. Despite the recent uptick of bathhouses and saunas in the U.S., this is not a new phenomenon. “Call it a trend, but it’s an age-old cultural tradition that’s been here forever,” Jaclyn Ryan of Madison’s Kindled Community Sauna notes.
After all, there’s a sweat bath practice in almost every culture worldwide—from the Turkish hammam to the Japanese onsen and Russian banyan. In these spaces, socializing is a key element of the bathing experience: spaces for family and friends to gather, gossip, catch up, to cleanse the body and the mind.
Curiosity about communal bathing has been rising in America for some time, with bathhouse and sauna experiences popping up across most major cities. This growing sector of community saunas seems to offer something that many of the larger-scale bathhouses and national sauna franchises can not: the chance to meet a stranger.
At a community sauna, there’s a concerted effort to foster space for collaboration. At Big Towel Spa in Hudson, NY, founder Kelly Crimmins offers a variety of events to activate the community, including collaborations with artists and local chefs. “I think of it as a generative space,” says Crimmins. “It’s not just: come, and sauna, and leave. Many people have met here, and projects have started because of it. I haven t heard of any romances yet, but I hope!” On a recent weekend, I huddled around a fire, dripping in sweat, slurping pickle-dill soup from local chef Hannah Black as part of a fundraiser for the LA fire relief. “I feel like it gives people a reason to come,” Crimmins notes of the events. For those who might otherwise be skeptical of sitting in a sauna with strangers at a public dormant park as cars drive by, events like this create the perfect opportunity to try it. Ryan has adopted a similar ideology at Kindled, popping up at breweries and restaurants, recognizing, as an ICU nurse, that like sauna, “food is certainly another way that we can care for one another.”
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In an attempt to boost social engagement, founders Daniel Ratner and Evan Routzong of Drip Sauna in Asheville launched their “Sunday Socials” event series, inviting people to spend the day sweating and cold-plunging alongside local breathwork or yoga instructors, musicians or DJs, and amenities like local coffee roasters on site. “I think people are yearning for something, an alternative to the drinking culture,” Routzong observes. “How am I going to go and connect with people or meet new friends in this city?”
Many have found the answer to that very question through their community saunas. “We’re all so stinking isolated from Covid still, that I think a lot of people are just craving being near other people,” says Jackie Stratton, who founded Cedar Grove Sauna in Montville, Maine. Observing that most socializing happens in private spaces where she lives (about an hour north of Portland), she sees her sauna as a space for an otherwise isolated community to gather. “It’s been a really beautiful community that’s formed out of this, like a huge gathering space.” she notes, “It’s been a hot spot for newcomers to come and make friends, and it works.”
It works partly because these saunas are small—much smaller than the bathhouses you might see in a city. “The scale of it dictates the experience,” Says Big Towel’s Crimmins. “I don’t think a sauna filled with 20 people is as intimate. It doesn’t create the possibility for new connections because there are just too many bodies.”
Surrounded by 20 people, you can slip into anonymity. When there are six or fewer of you in the room together, one almost can’t resist the urge to talk. And that’s the point. “You don’t always know who’s going to be in the session with you,” says Jessica Nelson-Roehl, the operations manager of the 612 Sauna Cooperative, a cooperative sauna in Minneapolis, “But there’s usually something you can connect on. People have made long-term friends with people they’ve met inside the sauna. It’s about creating community and bringing people together.”
Part of the mission for many of these sauna owners is to find ways to create space for every body, especially those traditionally excluded from the wellness space. “It became really important early on in the project that for something to be for everyone, it had to be centered around individuals who are typically alienated from these types of spaces,” notes A Louie (Lou). Lou is one-half of the architect duo behind Good Hot, the sauna operation in Richmond, CA. To create an inclusive space, many of these community saunas will host nights for specific groups of people, like Queer and Trans Sauna, BIPOC Sauna, 612 Sauna Cooperative is now offering Native + Indigenous Heat, and in the past, Cedar Grove has offered Bigger Bodies sweats for those who might feel concerned about taking up space. “I’m all ears for my clientele and what people would want to make them feel comfortable,” Stratton says. At Good Hot, the accessibility mission extends to the physical space of the saunas—they’ve built ramps, and even have a plastic sauna-safe wheelchair available.
Almost all of these operations are no-frills, and many are built for mobile use—this is a seasonal bathing experience, after all—while the saunas themselves are all designed with their specific mode of use in mind. (For example, at Big Towel, there are no clocks, to take away the regimented feel of many urban bathhouses.) So too does the location often instruct the experience, with floating saunas proving especially popular. “Being in a natural body of water is liberating, whereas sometimes climbing into a cold plunge tank, it feels like a health and wellness thing,” says David Jones, the founder of Von Sauna outside of Seattle. “Everyone should have access to this kind of special experience.”
This connection to nature and the feeling of escape it fosters is one reason for the sauna’s rise in popularity—but perhaps the most incredible escape is that it forces you to abandon technology. “You have a very primitive response to fire—we all do,” says Crimmins. “Having to separate from technology in that way allows you to have these rewarding moments of connection or even self-connection. It’s almost like a drug.” It can also be tied to the increasing popularity of devices like Brick, which encourage us to spend less time on our phones and computers and more time connecting with the world around us. “As saunas are too hot to engage with our devices, this omnipresent urge to do something productive or mindless completely vanishes,” Jones adds. “It is such a freeing feeling and allows you to either zone out or to engage with others in the room with your full attention.”
In many ways, these community saunas are becoming a third place for those living in these cities—much like they’ve been across many Nordic countries for centuries. For this reason, there’s been what some have described as a “gold rush” mentality around small sauna businesses right now, as sauna owners large and small are teaching masterclasses on best practices, setting up businesses, getting loans for a sauna space, or even how to build a sauna.
While some fear the “Soulcycle-fication” of the community sauna, for now, these spaces remain, for lack of a better word, sacred. Devoid of technology, of clothes, of clocks, and of expectations, strangers do behave differently. “They start out a little shy.” Sibilia says, “And then, after they do the rotations [in the cold ocean and heat], they’re giggling, they’re laughing, like kids at a playground.” The Finnish have a saying: Everyone is created equal, but nowhere more than in a sauna. Find your own community sauna, and you’ll see what they mean.