Sauna is all about perfection. Not over-the-top polished perfection, but a perfect way of being: simple, pure, functional. Perfect living. Harmonious. After all, you enter the sauna naked, our perfectly imperfect bodies exposed but hidden in the dim light. You sweat out the toxins of life and leave with a clean aura. Like the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, the sauna encourages acceptance of the imperfect as natural and beautiful.
When I work on my saunas, I am constantly aware of this balance. Too much perfection will ruin the relaxed atmosphere; too many crisp details will hold tension in the materials. I relax when I work, become one with my materials and try to imbue the building with a human inexactness.
All details are all made by hand or by nature: the pulls on the doors (hickory branches); the handle on the stove (made by me, wrapping stainless rod—like wrestling a snake); the benches (massaged with sand paper) and the funny round window (imperfectly round, like the eye of a whale). The stone facing on the wall around the stove was pulled from a hundred-and-fifty-year old barn foundation and carefully split with whacks from the hammer my great grandfather used to carve head-stones. The dressing room floor is reclaimed fir, every bit as tough as the day the trees were felled. I use some new materials, but they never look like I just pulled them off the shelf in some big-box store.
I’ve touched all the pieces of the sauna many times—each board, each stone, each piece of metal. I carry slivers of each project in my hands for weeks—a constant reminder of the work I do. I think of our physical world built by hands: every brick in every building handled, touched and in the memory of some callus, everything we think of as solid and real created by someone’s toil. Even the rocks that mark the hedgerow at the back of the sauna were placed by hand almost two centuries ago. The sweat of that farmer’s labor infusing with the thick clay soil.
My last project was nearly perfect—which is as close to perfect as I want it to be. Great client, perfect site, easy access, and nice new pond with a beautiful dock and deck. Ok, I did order the wrong color roof but the multiple drives back and forth to Mid Lakes Metal, up and down the spine of the ridge between the lakes, were perfect. With my windows wide open, I could taste the salt of the earth and was reminded of why I call this place home.
All summer long, I have eagerly anticipated this week. I have a cottage rental on the lake. It’s the highlight of my summer, and a much-needed break from all of the projects I have going on. This year, in addition to the usual activities—swimming, canoeing, beach fires, collecting beach glass, and just staring into the waves while sipping wine—I’ve added one more Sauna! I’ve brought my wood-fired trailer sauna with me and parked it ten feet from the water’s edge. Nothing beats coming out from the hot steam of a good löyly and jumping into the cool, refreshing lake. It is perfection.
Mobile Sauna by Rob Licht Custom Saunas on Cayuga Lake
My good friend Daniel has come home for a few days so we decided to take the trailer sauna down to Podunk, his family’s homestead, where, as a youth, I was indoctrinated in the way of the sauna. The old shack built by the original Finnish owner of the property has long since gone to the squirrels. But our memories of sauna-ing on cool summer evenings are still as vivid as the lush green canopies of the giant poplar trees that stand as sentinels in the field by the riverbank, keeping the creek from advancing any further as it swishes across the valley. On a geologic scale, the creek—the same that carved the falls at Taughannock—slithers like a snake, back and forth, carving new paths over years and decades. In our short lives, we can remember when it made this turn or that, turning a rocky bank into an inviting swim hole or turning the old dipping spot—the one we would run down to from that old sauna, hooting and hollering—into a rocky shallow.
There is a new swim hole now. It’s an Olympic-sized pool compared to what we used to dip in, allowing for real swimming as opposed to the slow rolls we used to take in the knee deep water just below where the pipeline crosses. As we lay there with our heads pulsing from the effect we called being sauna stoned, minnows nibbled on our fresh cooked skin. With this new hole, the creek is more perfect for a sauna now than it was then.
I parked the trailer just on the edge of the bank and fired it up. The fact that it was close to the creek, where the spring high water often lapped the trunks of the poplars, did not matter; this was a temporary affair, a brief encounter with our youth, a dip into the pool of nostalgia. Once it was hot, we climbed aboard and were transported back in time some forty years. My little stove holds a hundred pounds of rocks, all glacial erratics, transported here by the great river of ice in a time before memory. When heated, those rocks are capable of producing the best löyly, letting off a burst of steam that sends us out the door and clambering down the banks to the sweet cool water of the creek. It’s impossible not to let out a few whoops.
As a respite to the maddening distractions and over-stimulation of our times, people often seek out authentic experiences. There is often an understated desire to eschew technology and the associated flotsam that pollutes our memories of a simpler time. We laugh when we try to remember when phones were attached to the wall and being accessible meant you checked your answering machine only once a day. Life was slower and I don’t think there is anyone over forty who can’t appreciate that. As far as traditions go, not much can beat the sauna, which has a two-thousand-plus year history.
Often, clients come to me seeking some sort of authentic experience—often tied to some childhood sauna at a summer lake-house or a weekly family ritual. They don’t want just an ordinary gym or hotel sauna, they want an experience deeper and more profound, something central to this notion of life slowing down. I imagine sauna as a slow-moving cinematic experience that is the complete antithesis to Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi film about life out of balance. In the sauna, the heat should melt not only the bodily stress of the day but also the sense of time itself. To be authentic, the experience should not follow a prescribed formula but should simply be what naturally evolves in a Zen-like way of intentional non-intention.
What evolves naturally depends upon the built environment. Like cathedrals, which were designed to encourage spirituality, I build my saunas to encourage contemplation. It’s not just the temperature of the room, but the details that your hand or eye will settle on. The arched roof, views out the window, and selected grain of the boards provide visual distraction so your mind can settle into the experience while your body adjusts to the heat. The surfaces, sounds, and smells of the sauna are meant to awaken your senses.
When I am in the sauna I think about this, but I also try to think about nothing! I simply do what comes naturally— sweat, pour water on the rocks, cool down, look at the night sky, repeat, and then wash up. There is no magical order to the ritual, no rules to adhere to; the point is to create your own. I cannot create for my clients an authentic experience, but I can provide the catalyst in the form of a hot little magical space.
I’m excited about my latest project: a wood-burning mobile sauna.
Unlike all of my other projects, which I design and build to meet the needs of my customers, this one is for myself. Over the past five years, I have been without my own sauna. It’s a long story. Basically, I sold my house (and sauna) expecting to buy another and build a new sauna, but because the lending rules changed after the housing crisis, with a bias against self-employed folks, I have been stuck in renter’s hell. So, while my customers have been basking in the warmth of my creations, I have been languishing in a sauna-less purgatory, dependent on the generosity of my clients for the too infrequent sauna. Like the proverbial cobbler whose kids have no shoes, I have been the sauna builder without a sauna. For renters like myself, the mobile sauna is the perfect solution.
It is a 5’x8′ sauna built on a commercial utility trailer. It is lined with northern white cedar and fired by one of my custom Lämpimämpi wood stoves. It has an arched roof using laminated bent cedar supports and aluminum sheet. It feels a lot roomier inside than you would think and comfortably holds four people. And, yes, it meets the two-thousand pound gross vehicle weight restriction of the trailer, so it doesn’t require a huge truck to haul it.
I’ll use this sauna for promotion—look for it at various venues and festivals including the Ithaca Festival parade (Again! Our first mobile sauna appearance was back in 2014). I’ll be taking this one with me on vacation or to my favorite park or forest stop. So, if you see it, feel free to stop and ask me to show it to you. Who knows, if it is hot I might even have a few spare towels.
