During the first weekend of May we held another incredible sauna building class at the Rob Licht Custom Saunas shop with participants coming from as far away as Tennessee. It was a jam-packed four days, as I went over everything sauna related from layout and design and function of the sauna to installing cedar tongue and groove as well as bench, window, and door details. We capped each day with a sauna and even took the mobile sauna down to the lake for a Friday evening picnic.
Master sauna builder Rob Licht teaching an intensive four-day class at his sauna building shop in Ithaca, NY
We were lucky to have two projects underway in the shop for demonstration, and students got a chance to practice a little hands-on building. We also offered several small informational projects so everyone could see close up how details like chimney assembly and stucco firewalls come together. By the time everyone departed on Sunday we had made a group of new friends.
During the Pandemic, access to public gathering spots was denied and people rearranged their lives around home. Many worked at home and most, no doubt, played at home and socialized at home. When the dust settled, people saw advantages to this reclaimed space in their lives. Home improvement contractors and suppliers, including me, were big winners in this collective adjustment. My phone has not stopped ringing since 2019.
The home gym market has become a strong area of growth for sauna culture. Even now, when most public gyms are back in full swing after a few years of cautious access (including restricted sauna use), people still approach public gyms with trepidation. Tight, airless locker rooms, equipment shared by hundreds of people, and saunas with a little too much patina all went from being tolerable to a complete turn-off. A shoulder injury while riding my road bike has sidelined my stationary pedaling to recliner bikes at my local Y. Sitting in a room full of people breathing heavily, in isolated headphone bubbles, is not what I call exercise bliss. The facility’s sauna can’t begin to approach the rich experience I write about in these posts. I avoid it completely.
So, it is no surprise that those with the means are investing in their homes and building elaborate gyms with saunas and even pools, where exercise and sauna can be a blissful experience. Where one knows they are breathing only their own air in a space that has been cleaned to their standards and where they can sit meditatively in the sauna and not feel the whoosh, whoosh of the treadmill on the floor above. The blue light screens of illicit cell phones are gone, and conversations with random strangers can’t stray into political abrasiveness.
After the pandemic gave people pause and the opportunity to reflect upon what is essential in this life, it is no wonder that I have been so busy helping people realize this vision of a home sauna. Sauna is essential just as is control over your own health and fitness. Creating the personal environment for it all to come together is a luxury beyond financial means; it is a luxury of thought and intention, of knowing what to value first. If you want to have a quality of life where being healthy and fit means taking advantage of the full potential of your body, then make it a priority to have a space at home where you can exercise and practice mindfulness. A yoga mat in a corner and a few weights or resistance bands is all you need to get started; adding a sauna is icing on the cake.
Recent client’s priorities of fitness, health, and family led them to me. I built a roomy sauna in their home gym, which is one to die for. But what mattered most was not the nice setup or expensive equipment, it was that they had made being healthy together a priority—and that is something we can all afford. Even though I would love to have their gym setup when I am cranking it out, sweating buckets on my old bike-on-a-trainer next to the water heater in our basement, I am just as happy and alive as I would be in their gym (and my wood-fired sauna out back rocks!). As we age, there is no going back to reset the clock; we must simply keep moving and use the body we have. Movement and exercise can be done with little or no equipment, and having a Sauna is a nice reward and perfect compliment. Your body will thank you!
Growing up in this land between Seneca and Cayuga Lakes, I spent my share of summer days loafing about the shores, swimming, skipping the water-worn shale rocks, or just sitting and enjoying the view. Many friends had lakeside cottages, and I always dreamed of my family having our own. Now, with a property in Scarlet’s family (passed down from her grandmother Dede), that dream is a reality. An authentic cottage, in my book, is more than just the simple, rustic building by the water, it is a multi-generational gathering place steeped in family traditions. At times it may be used by a single-family group or even a solo practitioner, but at any other time it may become a gathering place for a large group of cousins, aunts, and uncles, hopefully announced but sometimes not. Sleeping situations may require creative solutions: every couch typically opens out into a bed; hammocks are strung between trees or porch posts; and daybeds are standard for every room. A one- or two-bedroom cottage can sleep ten or more in a pinch. Life is communal and privacy is found on solo swims or paddles toward the middle of the lake. The minimal privacy is not a detriment, but an expected condition taken for granted. This situation may not be much fun for an adult who needs undisturbed sleep, but heaven to a pre-teen who can stay up late and giggle under the covers with cousins for hours.
There is a code of maintenance with cottages. Upkeep is essential as with all dwellings, but here, the maintenance must be almost invisible so that the status quo is also maintained. The human efforts to push back against the forces of nature, which constantly threaten to erode our existence, must be kept in a delicate balance with nature’s chaos. On the shores of a lake, those forces can rear up unpredictably—like when the boathouse roof was sheared off during a storm this spring at Scarlet’s family cottage. But the new roof looks like it has been there for fifty years. The weathervane, with its lake trout constantly swimming into the wind, was rescued from a neighbor’s beach, untangled from water weeds, and replaced after a fresh coat of paint (stressed to appear weathered). Use older materials (or old looking), use minimal effort, and keep polished professionals out of the mix (unless they are capable of slightly shoddy or hurried work like the kind that comes with working with a beer in hand). Keep the markings of family history, especially those pencil lines measuring the growth of generations on the kitchen door jamb, and the cutesy painted signs, but repair the inevitable rot that seeps in, seeking to destroy all history.
There is a term for all of this: cottage life. It means paring down to the essentials you can fit in one bag (never a suitcase, which has implications of a hotel) and always having a good book or crossword puzzle to kill time with or signal that you are having alone-time.
Pitching in for meal prep or clean-up (choose one) without question is required. Dishwashing machines are forbidden in cottages since washing dishes is another way for family members to share in the collective industry, one washing and one drying. The kitchen is always small, requiring dance moves to navigate around one another, but it is wholly adequate, and the utensils are spare but serviceable. Most cottages have a few months set aside for seasonal rentals, so nothing of great value is kept there although everything there has sentimental value. Family history is written in the worn edges and missing parts: the knife that grandpa used to clean fish, the cutting board that is bowl-shaped from a half century of use, or even the trinket on the windowsill—God only knows where it came from—which no one dares to get rid of at the risk of disturbing the delicate balance of cottage hierarchy.
There is no visual way to capture cottage life. Photos won’t do. The family cottage is more of a scene than a structure, more of a shared history than individual experience. You can’t buy into it, and it can’t be sold. Sadly, many cottages do have to be sold, due to rising taxes; but hopefully, the new owners realize the value of their acquisition and tend to the history of the place with care.
Even with all a cottage has to offer, like the family cottage Scarlet has been visiting since childhood, the addition of a sauna is like ice cream on the apple pie. Not completely necessary, but it sure is a good combination. Saunas are gathering spots for communal experience. They enhance the routine of cottage life—morning sauna, evening sauna, all-day sauna—and their heat extends the swimming season indefinitely. On Cayuga Lake, the swimming season is typically two or three months (depending on how much polar bear is in your DNA). With a sauna, lake dipping is possible all year!
So, with all of this in mind, we recently converted a small room in the walk-out basement of the cottage into an electric-stove sauna. Never mind that the floors above all sloped several inches in ten feet or that the headroom is barely six feet, we worked with what we had and created a perfect oasis of heat. Some family members will have to work on their bad posture to avoid bonking their head, but once on the bench—whose height is always measured from the ceiling down—all is well. An existing steel framed basement hopper window was converted to cedar and now frames a perfect view of the lake. The 9 kW Harvia Cilindro heater with its two hundred pounds of rocks holds the heat to make the sauna usable for hours with repeated löyly.
Now that it is mostly done (cottage projects never seem to get finished), we have been using it daily while there. It is making our late summer stays at the lake perfect. I can’t wait to come out later in the season, or even in winter, to enjoy a jump into the lake and tease my inner polar bear.
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