The other evening I came home from work, stressed out about the coronavirus, as many of us are, and decided to light the sauna to ease my anxiety. As it was a nice day, I decided to use the time it took heat the sauna to rake up some leaves that got matted into the lawn under a November snowfall. The breeze, which was out of the south, helped push the leaves into the hedgerow, but it also apparently helped fan the fire on my mobile wood-fired unit. By the time I put my rake down and stripped for a relaxing sauna, the thermometer was pinned at 235° F! Not one to shy away from heat, I jumped on in anyhow.
Always inquisitive, I use such opportunities to add to my knowledge about the sauna. I wondered how hot different surfaces really were with the heat so high. With only a towel on, I ran to the shop and grabbed my digital temperature gun. I use this gadget to test my saunas to make sure they are hot but also safe. The ceiling and walls were close to 300° near the stove, the walls were 230-250° above the bench, the benches were 200° and the lower benches were about 175°. The rocks were 450°—perfect for a good löyly—and the stove body glowed visibly red in the afternoon light, so about 1000° (the brightness of the glow corresponds to specific temperatures). The floor was predictably the coolest surface at 125°.
According to the Center for Disease Control, viruses cannot tolerate heat above about 167° F.1 Therefore, everything in a hot sauna from the lower bench up is guaranteed to be virus-free! No fears or worries as I bask in the heat.
That being said, despite what we all wish, the sauna will not kill a virus that has already infected you, nor will it likely destroy a virus ejected in a sneeze. The sauna will not cure you or protect you if your sauna mates are sick; in these desperate times, it’s probably best to avoid group saunas with strangers. But, taking a regular sauna will lower your stress level, boost your immunity2, and help you sleep better—all in a virus-free sanctuary.
Notes: 1 Reference “Using Heat to Kill Sars / Cov2” [Article>] 2 Reference: “…Finnish sauna sessions on the immune response…” [Article>]
Sauna is an interesting word. It is both a noun that describes the little structures I spend my days making and the action of how one uses that building. Mostly, I focus on the details of building and let the details of how one uses the sauna fall to the individual taste of my clients. I don’t adhere to a dogmatic approach; everyone has experiences and memories to draw from. Different countries have subtle variations: wetter, drier, hotter, timed sessions, birch vihtas, etc. My memories stem from my time at Podunk, in the old Finnish sauna. I remember the five-gallon joint-compound buckets used to gather water from the creek and few much-loved, battered aluminum wash basins as well as plastic wash tubs, wooden back brushes, loofa scrubbers, and other unique bathing implements. There was always some sort of ladle for pouring water on the rocks (which we always called a kipper in some misappropriation of Finnish-ness). And there were various soaps and shampoos—some common, some not so, like the dark-brown Finnish pine tar soap, which, despite its comparison to the sticky pine tar we brushed on our skis, actually felt pretty good.
Once the sauna got good and hot, we stripped down as unceremoniously as possible and went in. The first round would always be pretty talkative and end with a healthy ladle-full or two of water on the hot rocks until we had to bolt out the door and head to the creek. If someone were annoyingly loud, sometimes a good löyly would be timed to quiet things down. In the second and third rounds, if someone had bothered to make a birch vihta from the tree outside the Podunk sauna, we might take great pleasure in thrashing each other (gently) with the leafy switch. The old Finns would make vihta in the spring out of fresh, soft birch leaves and keep them in the freezer. Now, you can actually buy them from Finland, dried and vacuum packed for a reasonable sum. After softening them in water for twenty minutes, they smell just like a fresh birch tree.
The last round in the sauna was the time to wash: after getting hot again, we took turns on the little washing bench, scrubbing ourselves (or each other) with the loofa or stiff sauna brushes and some sauna soap. Finally, a rinse with warm water washed off all the dead skin and residue of a week’s hard work, and we would leave the sauna all fresh and natural smelling. None of us ever had to wear deodorant or poufy colognes.
Sometimes I sauna with friends, sometimes alone. Always, it is the same: get hot until sweat just pours out of me, cool off, repeat; scrub my skin, maybe switch my back with the vihta, wash up, rinse down the sauna. It’s a ritual of sorts, but not like how a ritual in the church is dictated to you. As in church, there are ritual objects that create focus and help direct the actions, but instead of incense and gold, they are plastic and wood. And unlike church, there is no sin in doing it anyway you want to. The brushes, basins, ladle, soap, and vihta are there to help maintain the flow of the sauna experience. To the uninitiated, it may seem strange, but after a few times in a sauna, it all makes sense. It is just a bathhouse, after all.
Lately, I have found that the top of my noggin does not have so much insulation from the heat of a good löyly, so I have taken to wearing a felt sauna hat, which is sort of like a Shriner’s Fez, which is to say that it makes you feel just a little goofy. But then again, I wouldn’t want to be accused of taking the sauna ritual too seriously!
I just completed this bright blue, yellow, and white gem of a sauna situated on a red deck. The color was the client’s choice; he wanted something that would brighten things up and be in stark contrast with the usual suspects of taupe, dull brown, and moldy blues that afflict his neighborhood and so many other American housing developments. Why are builders so afraid of color?
The use of bright color in homes is often associated with places like seaside Baltic towns and Reykjavíc, Iceland—and for good reason. In the deep of winter these places are plunged into darkness as the sun hovers near the horizon or barely makes an appearance at all. Battling the winter blues makes the use of bright colors almost mandatory. Of course these places all have saunas (or in the case of Reykjavíc, massive public hot springs), another way to survive the depth of winter. I learned when I was an artist-in-residence in Nova Scotia that fishermen traditionally used bright colors in their houses simply because it was a way to use left-over boat paint. Boats are painted brightly so they can be uniquely identified at sea, so in a way, the house colors express something unique about the individuals who live within. Now, of course, the brightly colored fishing village is almost a tourist mandate.
Looking back on recent sauna projects, I see a shifting trend in color choices made by my clients: from authentic dark-brown Viking tar to blue-grey, then brighter reds and blues and greens, and now this latest color feast. There is also a trend in current design to use more bright colors such as on the eye-popping florescent orange running shoes I saw in the gym yesterday. I have been following the designer Ingrid Fetell Lee. She writes about creating joy with color in her book The Aesthetics of Joy. She is persuasive about using more color for the simple reason that it creates joy. Although I teach color theory, I have a tendency to stick to blacks, grays, and low intensity colors in my art, a trend that I have been trying to evolve out of. Perhaps I can take some cues from my clients and take some color risks in my own work. This latest sauna project actually makes me think of late Mondrian paintings such as Broadway Boogie Woogie in which he reduced his palette to the three primary colors and sought to use color as the basis for expression.
In this latest sauna project my interest in sauna and art actually converged. The warm interior heats your body, and the colorful exterior warms your spirit. Thanks, Karl!
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Looking back on recent sauna projects, I see a shifting trend in color choices made by my clients: from authentic dark-brown Viking tar to blue-grey, then brighter reds and blues and greens, and now this latest color feast. There is also a trend in current design to use more bright colors such as on the eye-popping florescent orange running shoes I saw in the gym yesterday. I have been following the designer Ingrid Fetell Lee. She writes about creating joy with color in her book 
