These days there is a lot of internet banter about obtaining “perfection” when building a sauna and often dogmatic rules pertaining to bench heights, ventilation, wood selection and so on. I also see frequent reference to a quote that says the only good sauna is a Finnish (made in Finland) sauna and that all saunas made in the US are bad or worse. Mostly I to try ignore it all and stay focused on continuing to build quality saunas.
This week we are taking a break from all of it by doing a Nordic ski Vacation at Lapland Lake—a wonderful family oriented Nordic skiing center in the lower Adirondacks where incredible amounts of snow are still on the ground in March. The center was built by Olavi Hirvonen, a Canadian born Finn who was raised by his grandparents back in Finland then came back to the US, eventually skiing (cross country) in the 1960 Olympics before continuing on as a carpenter near New York City. A family tragedy made him re-evaluate his life goals and led him north to Lapland Lake where he bought a chunk of the forest, built a lodge and guest cottages, and developed some of the finest Nordic ski trails in the Northeast.
Everything here bears of the mark of a Finnish carpenter, much of it reminiscent of Podunk, which was also built by a Finn. The simple construction, low ceilings, unique trim detailing, and pragmatic design prevail. When you come upon the lodge after driving miles on rough forested road the unfamiliar will be taken aback by the lack ostentatiousness. This is not built in the tradition of the great Adirondack camps, such as Sagamore.
The Finnish flag flying out front (next to the American, Swedish, and Norwegian flag) is the most obvious clue that you are here.
The lodge is an oddly proportioned structure with an asymmetrical gable roof and randomly placed windows. This is snow country where the snow often reaches the second story of houses; things are built to survive that and roof lines often extend to cover adjoining walkways or combine buildings into one. It also an economically depressed area; people make do. I’m sure when Olavi settled here, his carpenter’s salary did not leave him with piles of money to spend on fancy embellishments.
His dream and his Sisu were his capital and hard work went into everything. It is obvious, from the level of upkeep, and signs of industriousness, that the current owners continue that ethic.
Inside, the main lodge is homey and comfortable, a modest main room with a fireplace to relax after skiing, a very well stocked ski shop, an upstairs cafeteria, and a sauna down in the back. It is here that I want to focus my thoughts. At first glance the sauna is a rough affair- it has an ample dressing room with a simple phone booth-style fiberglass shower. The ceilings throughout are low, under 8 feet, and the detailing is plain. But it is clean and welcoming. Classic 1980 sauna etiquette cartoons are on the wall as well as the typical signage about adding more wood to the fire and other house rules. The bench lid lifts to reveal a firewood storage; a classic sauna detail.
The hot room door is a heavy wooden affair with a rustic stick hardware pulls. Inside the sauna is about 10 x7 feet with the wood stove ( and a defunct auxiliary electric heater) at one end with a cement block chimney behind the stove. The stove (or Kiuas) is the familiar Helo, same as the Narvia Kota Kuru, similar to the Harvia M3. This is a basic Finnish model wood burner that has been in production for almost half a century. The walls and ceiling are rough #3 cedar, commonly used for fencing, but there is a smooth back rest to lean against. The benches are pine 2 x 6’s, smoothed (butt worn!) by years of use. Heavy rust stains indicate that no stainless steel was used but the benches seem pretty solid. The whole room has that darkened patina of a well used sauna. One could say the style, if any style at all, is dated, but that is not the point, it was clearly pragmatic in design and probably the first thing Olavi built. The rooms suit their purpose today as well as they did 48 years ago. Most importantly, it is kept clean, is able to get hot, and produce a nice löyly; which is more than I can say for many, many, saunas I have experienced. When I peeked back in the following morning, the floor had been rinsed and the duckboards were propped up to dry—always a good sign.
At the end of a day spent skiing spring conditions on perfectly groomed trails, the sauna was as perfect as I could have wanted it to be. It was hot (200° F plus) and ready for me. I did a few rounds of heat and löyly followed by rolls in the snow.
I did the ritual solo but Scarlet had the pleasant company of a new sauna friend during her rounds. There is nothing I would take away or add to it. This was built by a Finnish carpenter, raised in Finland, who had more Sisu than most—how can I even begin to judge that?
The conundrum I face as a builder of Finnish style saunas, is that I would never build a sauna like Olavi did. I know too much now. My purpose now is not to just serve that basic need of a hot sauna at the end of a hard days work or play, but to serve the increasingly diverse needs of a range of clients. Because one client will demand “perfection”, the bar is raised on all of my work. It would be criminal if we did not use the best available materials and accepted building practices. The competitive demands of the web require that each build be not only perfectly functional but photogenic as well. And the economic demands of running a business and supporting ourselves require that we have to balance making a decent profit with making quality products. We achieve that by marketing to a higher level clientele rather than cutting corners—but those higher expectations of what quality looks like and what it costs, cuts out the poorer customers, the common folk, whom we still want to bring sauna to.
Olavi built his dream resort before the web existed and before the current sauna revival. He depended on word of mouth and yet had a steady stream of returning customers and sauna devotees who continue to enjoy the simple pleasures of this modest haven.
Built on a budget, maintained for years on a shoestring and resourcefulness, and driven by his Sisu, or perseverance, Olavi achieved a level of quality that may now be lost to the frenzy of our internet driven times.
Note: Olavi Hirvonen died in the fall of 2024 at the age of 93. The new owners, Kathy and Paul Zahray, are committed to continuing the traditions at Lapland, including keeping the sauna hot!
Recently, on our return trip after delivering one of our mobile saunas to a location south of Boston, we visited the old sauna camp at UKTS in Pembroke. Uljas Koitto (“Brave dawn”) Temperance Society (UKTS), was founded in 1890 in Quincy, Massachusetts.1 The sauna and camp on Furnace Pond started in 1926. The temperance movement was popular at the time in the US and elsewhere and eventually led to the Prohibition Era. It is refreshing to know that temperance (the abstinence from alcohol) is still practiced in many places, including UKTS. The challenges of life that many hard-working Finns endured at the end of the nineteenth century made it essential to have access to a place that was free from excess with a cleansing sauna—especially since many had no other way to bathe.
As it was then, sauna is still the perfect antidote to many of modern life’s excesses.
After email introductions in the weeks prior, UKTS members Kurt, Audrey, Kenny, and John enthusiastically greeted us when we arrived for a tour on Friday. The camp reminded us of the great Adirondack camps open for tours where the clocks stopped a hundred years ago. But also of an intimate family cottage, passed down through many generations, with mementos on every wall and in every nook and cranny. Entry into the spacious main lodge was through the kitchen, which contained two massive vintage wood-fired cook stoves that gave credence to the stories of a full roster of members crowding the dining hall after the Saturday sauna. Audrey showed us the many bedrooms upstairs available to members for overnight or week-long stays. Each was appointed with a specific monochromatic color palette of fabric and furniture in a timeless way. I felt I was in Finland, far away from the generic American consumer-frenzy-driven design aesthetic. Audrey, Kenny’s wife, had hand-picked all the items from various flea markets and other low budget sources—typical of the Finnish Pragmatic Design that I admire and strive for in our saunas.
Each room relieved the eyes and the soul.
John pointed out photos and news clippings about past members that lined the common room walls: parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. Current members had to be distant cousins, at the least. There were also photos of athletic events held at the camp, inspired by a local Olympian. These reminded me of my days at Podunk, training for ski marathons with the help of former Olympian Jack Lufkin. During that phase we integrated daily saunas into our Nordic skiing workouts.
Sauna from the women’s side. Everyone is welcome via invitation.
Finally, we got to explore the sauna: one of the most authentic Finnish-style group saunas I have ever seen. It is a long, low affair, reminiscent of bunk houses and dining halls at any summer camp. There is a symmetry to its design with men and women entering from opposite ends. Both hot rooms are fired from the center with a new, massive, twelve-hundred-pound steel stove (Kiuas). Almost center, that is; careful investigation revealed that the stove was off center by quite a bit, favoring the men’s side.
The stove holds an equally hefty pile of sauna rocks—the one product imported from Finland. Amusingly, the saunas are connected by a small door, to be used only in emergencies. I can only imagine the mischief this might inspire in a less reserved group. The exterior siding is Pine Cove shiplap, which has that classic rustic camp look, painted green to harmonize with its woodsy surroundings. (Many of my sauna builds have this same siding.)
There are no plate glass windows or dark stained imported woods, no glass doors or polished stainless steel, and no fancy tile work. The sauna is basic and functional: a dressing room with benches, cubbies, and hooks for clothes; a shower room with plain white wall tile; duckboards on the floor; and shelves for soap and shampoos. The hot room has several tiers of benches made of crude pine 2×8’s, just like the sauna I grew up with. Most telling of the care that went into the sauna was that on our tour day, Friday, the duckboards were propped up to dry, the windows and doors were open for ventilation, and the place smelled clean and fresh. Members are divided into four teams, each team taking a week of the month to maintain the sauna, including the weekly ritual of prepping and firing, as well as cleaning it afterward. Unlike most public and gym saunas, which tend to be dark musty affairs, you could sense the members’ pride in its maintenance.
Inside the Traditional Finnish Sauna at UKTS
We returned the following day for Saturday sauna—a tradition going back almost one hundred years. We were welcomed with the same congeniality. After briefly socializing, we headed to the sauna, Scarlet to her side, me to mine.
There was a moment of apprehension at this point: we’d been separated for the first time in days, each entering a foray of strangers. Yet, at the same time, there was an incredible familiarity in the hot room. Sauna is a ritual that Scarlet and I have known and loved for years. The only awkwardness was over clothing—to go nude or not. Despite being instructed on the local custom (nude inside was OK, outside was not), I wore a bathing suit. It felt strange to have fabric between heat and body, bench and butt. But we weren’t in Finland. Americans long ago succumbed to the oddness of swim-suit sauna baths.
Inside, the heat was just right, hot by my standard, but airy. I lingered, perhaps too long, in jovial conversation. I wasn’t the youngest one present, but the years were weighted heavily beyond mine. Charlie and his slightly younger brother recalled their first saunas at UKTS in the early ’50s—and their recent hockey games! The women were fourth and fifth generation members and still taking sauna every Saturday. They were eager to share the history of UKTS and had many lovely stories of their experiences in the Finnish community. Scarlet and I were welcome and known by our business. Folks asked a lot about our sauna projects. The recognition was nice, but I’m sure they would extend the same warmth to anyone.
“All are welcome to come” via invitation, and they hold the time-honored Finnish belief that “everyone is equal in sauna.” The organization also hosts community events including Queer nights and AA meetings at the camp. They encourage new members and continue to share the Finnish sauna experience with others.
After each round, we dipped in the lake. The water was clear and just cool enough to offer a refreshing jolt but not prohibit lingering. If Scarlet and I timed our rounds just right, we met in the lake. After several rounds of sweating and dunking, we relaxed on wooden benches on the shore, snacking on a fruit plate provided by the week’s working group. There was no plastic furniture or other evidence of our disposable culture at the camp. A nice detail we reflected upon later. Although I’m pretty good at pinning dates on when things were made, there were no clues (other than the new Kiuas) that spoke of the twenty-first century or even the second half of the twentieth.
The experience was timeless. As were the people.
We had a planned stop on the western side of the state that evening, so we had to rush off after two hours; otherwise, we could have basked in the warmth of the UKTS camp for hours, enjoying good food and conversation and surrendering ourselves to sauna time.
Epilogue: Later, discussing our experience, I learned from Scarlet that although the men’s side was pretty darn hot (220°), the women’s, not so. It turns out that the new stove, a beast welded up by DC Welding in Ipswich, NH, was placed in the same location as the old stove, which was offset toward the men’s side. This means that the women’s side is always cooler than the men’s. I appreciate that UKTS honors tradition, but there are some traditions that are worth tweaking.
NOTES:
1. The Uljas Koitto Temperance Society (Noble Endeavor Temperance Society) promotes temperance and healthy living through the benefits and virtues of the traditional Finnish sauna. Founded by Finnish immigrants in 1892, UKTS provides an environment free of the influence of drugs and alcohol. The UKTS is a membership organization and not open to the public. They are a welcoming society and invite those interested in learning more about the UKTS to use the Visit Us form on their website.
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.
Having grown up around and in the waters of Cayuga Lake, whose long finger touched the shores of my childhood stomping grounds, it is no wonder that my dreams often turn to things nautical. When my friends and I first started taking saunas at Podunk in our early teens, the fantasy topic of floating saunas came up frequently. We loved swimming in the lake, but its waters are only warm enough for swimming from the beginning of July to about mid-September. What better way to extend that season than with a sauna? A sauna on a boat! Sweating not just near the water, but on the water. (Oh, but we did enjoy running naked to the creek!)
I’ve had an ongoing affair with boats. Especially a love of canoes that goes back to my discovery of the Adirondack waterways that form an almost continuous route from civilization into the deep wilderness and back (the caveat being that short carries are required).
I started making a boat years ago: a strip canoe affair. Not strip, as in naked, but strip as in thin bands of cedar, all joined and sandwiched between two epoxy and fiberglass layers. I never finished that boat; its progress was aborted midstream after I broke my collar bone in three during a trail running race. The unfinished shell still looms over my shop as a reminder, high up in a loft space. So, suffice it to say, that when a client approached me about building a much bigger boat, I had my hesitations.
Mark initially wanted a beachfront sauna. Then zoning and other issues steered us to thinking of a floating sauna. My childhood fantasy! Granted it is not a new idea; in fact, there are several in Norway and other places. But on Cayuga Lake? This was to be a first. It made sense, in a fantastical way. He had ample dockage but limited beach. He was willing to invest in the idea and take the risk, and he was a nice guy, with just enough chutzpah to make it happen.
Client Mark and Family on Maiden Voyage of Sauna Boat, Cayuga Lake, New York.
The design phase took over a year. It was a real challenge because it entailed not just carpentry but nautical engineering. Precision was required, and my hand-drawn methodology needed some sharper pencils. Some thirty pages of drawings later and we were ready to build. We had a great fabricator for the frame, ladder-stair, and railing (Service Machine Tool in Elmira, NY) and some other great help along the way, but the whole thing—all twenty-six feet of it—was assembled in the shop. It was a predicament as the beast took over, floor to ceiling, and there were threads of self-doubt along the way to trip over.
I am not a boat builder, so there was as much learning as doing, but we pulled it off—including the challenging assembly of four round cedar windows trimmed with authentic ship-salvage port light windows.
There were a lot of other finicky details. (I’ve come to understand that boat building is all finicky details.) The biggest challenge was loading and transporting the beast on an oversize low-boy flatbed truck. At one point, we had the 10,000-pound hulk levitating on three forklifts as the low-boy flatbed backed under it. The guys at Lansing Harbor Marina gave us confidence, especially after it passed its initial float test. After a few months of tweaking, we took the maiden voyage, complete with a champagne toast.
A unique feature of Mark’s sauna is that it is a fully navigational boat with twin electric motors. The sauna is heated with a gas-fired heater and has 12-volt electric lights powered by a solar-electric system. Ideally, it will be used on calm days when friends and family can drift out to the middle of the lake, experience sauna, jump into the clear waters, cool off on the roof deck, and repeat until the fantasy has been fulfilled. Maybe even under the stars or northern lights.
Thanks to everyone who helped make this possible. Thanks especially to Scarlet, who believed in the dream, and Mark and Karie, who supported it.
The use of stick hardware is an endearing feature of our saunas that falls under the rustic elegant motif that we employ. This hardware also falls under the category of Finnish Pragmatism that is an influence in my design; whereas, superfluous embellishment is avoided and using what is at hand is always desired over spending for what you don’t really need. In my head, I keep an inventory of all the random parts I have collected over the years and stowed away in my shop. When a need arises, I quickly do a mental scan and see if something in stock will do rather than going to a hardware store or jumping online.
Likewise, I often resort to Nature’s Hardware Store when I need things like door pulls and towel hooks.
It is amazing the variety of parts I can extract from the intricate workings of a tree.
The best is hickory because of the way branches crook when they take off in a new direction, and it is very hard. In fact, they make baseball bats out it. Recently we had to fell a Hickory, so I salvaged all the door pulls and towel hooks I could from it.
wood-fired outdoor sauna
The spirit of the tree will live on, greeting sauna users with a sturdy handshake each time they enter the sauna.
It’s the small personal touches and attention to detail that makes us proud of our work and makes our work fun and enjoyable. By avoiding the cold and the common place, we make each sauna as unique as its owners.
The latest sauna we built is an indoor electric affair. We installed it in a new addition that also holds a hot tub and pool, an enviable combination for a personal home spa. It has an ample window and large 10 kW Harvia Cilindro heater that should make the top bench a real hot spot. I love the view from that bench. Not just any view, but one that takes me back to my childhood.
The property is located on the eastern shoulder of Cayuga Lake, at a point where the land starts to dip dramatically downward to the long snaking shore. The slope is so steep here that you don’t see the lake, only the opposite side a little more than two miles away. Someone unfamiliar with our landscape might not be aware that the longest of the Finger Lakes fills a glacier-carved trough below. While the scene through the window feels close, it is in fact, a long journey away.
The most pronounced land formation is Rice Hill: the old skiing and sledding hill in Trumansburg [or Ulysses?] that at one time had a rope tow run off an old tractor motor. There’s a warming hut and two shallow ice rinks at the top of the hill where many a hockey game was played. When friends and I were too broke or didn’t have the ambition or means to go to the closest downhill ski area, we would go to Rice Hill and practice our S turns. I also recall many tobogganing adventures; it was the kind of hill where serious injuries marked a good run.
Just to the north is a ten-acre parcel my parents bought in the 1960s with the dream of building a house. My dad designed the home with all the meticulous detail he employed on his large-scale architectural projects. It was a three-story modernist affair with a flat roof and cantilevered balconies that would have commanded a view across the lake precisely to the location of this sauna.
In the early ‘70s, things turned south for my dad: there was a recession, he lost his job, increased his drinking, and the dream of the modernist masterpiece overlooking the lake deflated like a balloon the cat clawed. All we were left with was a model of the house my dad crafted out of mat board, with twigs as stand-ins for trees. Later, after I finished grad school and before my parents had to sell the property as part of a bankruptcy plan, I lived on the lot in a tent and tarp shelter, waiting for my dreams to come to life.
I bring all of this up because of the prevailing association of sauna with memory. So many of my clients, who are typically aging baby boomers like me, say they want a sauna because of the wonderful childhood memories they have of sauna time.
Perhaps their family has Finnish roots, and they experienced summers in Finland, or they had a camp somewhere with a sauna. Like my experiences at Podunk, these childhood memories start to loom larger with age. Memory acts as a filter; the important things are retained and the trivial is set aside.
Landscape acts as a placeholder for memory. Living later in life where I grew up, I constantly encounter places that stir memory. While working on this project, with my past literally visible beyond the window and across the lake, I was constantly reminded of my connection to this magical place in the heart of the Finger Lakes. Sauna is a keystone in all of this.
As with so many saunas I build, I stop work and dream for a moment; what if it was mine? But then, I hand over the sauna to the new owners so they can ponder their own dreams. In this case, the owner will gaze out the window at the immediate surroundings: Land that he grew up on.
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