Wood-Fired Mobile Sauna by Rob Licht Custom Saunas.
Although Glamping is a term that was coined in the early 2000’s, the concept of an adventure in nature bolstered by all of the modern conveniences one could muster, or have mustered for them, has been around for well over a century and a half. In 1869, writer William H.H. Murray of Boston, extolled on the virtues of experiencing the Adirondack backwoods in his book Adventures in the Wilderness. This inspired an avalanche of urban neophytes to flock to the woods in search of adventure and commune with nature. These were known as “Murray’s fools”.
People traveled great distances and endured great hardships such as days of travel over log roads (which were literally made of logs placed side by side) to get to the heart of the Adirondacks. Once they arrived, they sought out the services of guides who did everything for them—transporting them in their guide boats, making camp, catching and cooking their meals. In essence, these early Glampers brought with them from the city every expectation of service they would get at the finest hotel.
“The mountains call you, and the vales: The woods, the streams, and each ambrosial breeze that fans the ever-undulating sky.”
—Armstrong, Art of Preserving Health
Glamping experience enhanced with a sauna (banya) in tow.
While part of me chuckles at the concept of Glamping with it’s pretense of tender-footedness, part of me is drawn to concept of rustic luxury. Although I am as far from a camping neophyte as one can be, with years of deep woods experience and many a night sleeping on hard ground, the concept of luxury camping does have certain appeal to me now. I’ll sleep in a tent on a platform—with lights and heat and maybe a commode. But better yet, with a sauna.
The idea of communing with nature combined with sauna is perfection—and something, I bet, even the luckiest of Murray’s fools never had.
View of the mobile sauna looking out through the dressing room to the campsite. Pile of rocks sit on the Lämpimämpi stove.
Recently I posted a picture of the sauna fire burning hot and mentioned Sam McGee. For those who don’t know, Sam McGee was the sad character from Tennessee who could not take the cold of the Yukon in the poem by Robert Service: The Cremation of Sam McGee. His last wish was to be cremated, a task his friend dutifully tried to complete. The ending had the narrator peeking into the make-do crematorium in the boiler of the derelict ship stuck in the ice on Lake Lebarge and finding his late friend as warm as could be and calling out to shut the door.
Whenever it is extremely cold out, as it has been recently, I think of this poem and the warming power of a hot fire. I love it when the mercury dips below zero. There is something invigorating about having your snot freeze when you breath hard or having sweat icicles dangling off of your brow. I love cross-country skiing in the dark, in the cold, when two hats and two pairs of gloves are needed. One false move and the night might end like “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, another favorite read from Middle school—when I would dream about all of the great explorers who ventured into the frozen lands.
walking through the snow towards a hot sauna fire
I remember my senior year of high school when Cayuga Lake last froze over. That was a cold year. We did a lot of cross-country ski races that year. With our skimpy race suits and tiny boots we had no protection other than the fire in our hearts to keep us from freezing to death. During the Canadian Ski Marathon that year it was minus 40 at the 8 a.m. start. Celsius and Fahrenheit. If you blinked too long your eyes would literally freeze shut. Old lady volunteers would slap our cheeks at checkpoints to make sure we didn’t have frostbite (and we still wore our skimpy suits.) By the end of that year my parents had moved to the heart of the lower Adirondacks. Our house, in the Black River valley, was often the coldest spot in the lower 48. It was minus 25°F for days on end. Thunder would boom from the river each night as the ice expanded. The ice was several feet thick; I have no idea how the fish survived. I loved to be out in that: skating, skiing, or snowshoeing. It was the cold of a Jack London Story. Your spit would literally freeze in mid air and hit the ground with a crackle.
I had a hot sauna to crawl into after our ski races during that cold winter in high school but not in the years after. When I moved back to the area after college, I went back to that sauna at Podunk weekly until I could build my own and have kept up the ritual ever since. On these freezing nights it is never too cold for a sauna; in fact I relish those times when you can experience the 200° (or more) difference as you go from the hot room to the night air. Your feet freeze to the ground and your hair forms punky icicles.
There’s no need to wait until you are cremated to be truly warm; Poor Sam McGee, if only he had a sauna!
It’s been a busy year at Rob Licht Custom Saunas and as the holidays approach it is a good time to look back everything that’s been accomplished, the hurdles we’ve gotten over, and to be thankful for the blessings we’ve received.
We started the year in the midst of the pandemic which made for some challenges but mostly the pandemic has meant a huge uptick in the sauna business as we all became more centered on home life and more reluctant to go out into public for things like gyms and saunas. Besides the several projects I have completed locally and around central New York I have fielded calls and emails from folks desperate to have their own saunas from as far away as Europe and Australia. I never set out to become a sauna expert, but here I am, 25 years into making them, and people are seeking out my knowledge from all over. In the process I feel like I have made many new friends. The global sauna community is alive and well. At the same time, due to the pandemic, I have mostly refrained from seeing all but my closest friends and family. It’s a strange new world but I am thankful to be connecting to so many people, if only on Zoom.
For my new friends I have designed and consulted on saunas from Maine to California— that has kept me busy when I was not getting my hands dirty. But whenever I can, I am working with my hands, either in my 3000 square foot shop, which I am ever grateful for, or I am on jobsites. It used to be that builders would simply stop in the winter and spend the dark months sitting around the woodstove reading back issues of Fine Homebuilding, but now we all seem to be out there in any weather. My cut off is 10° F; any colder and I want to be by a fire, in the sauna, preferably. Good gear helps; I’m especially grateful for my boot warmer and insulated pants.
Mobile Saunas showcased in the shop. Lansing, NY
Nothing I do is cookie cutter—I would die of boredom is life was too easy— thus the custom in my business moniker. This year I seemed to run the gamut of sauna permutations: First, a garage retrofit to a Yoga and sauna retreat, then a quiet walkout basement electric affair, then a classic one room wood burning sauna on a idyllic creek, then a more urban collaboration in Syracuse, followed by a tiny personal electric sauna in a bathroom, a rustic elegant wood burning retreat in the trees, and a distance job downstate. Currently I’m finishing up an electric sauna in a historic boathouse on Cayuga lake. I’m hoping to take it for a test drive, with a jump in the frigid water, by Christmas.
Garage Retrofit for Hot Yoga and SaunaClassic Creekside Sauna set 50 ft from swimming hole. Idyllic.Walkout Basement Electric Sauna BlissBackyard Sauna Design, Urban Collaboration in Syracuse, NYRustic elegant wood burning saunaCozy interior of a backyard sauna
In between all of these I have sold a few of my Lämpimämpi sauna stoves and many sauna plans. DIY interests, especially in the mobile saunas which are really big now. I get a kick out seeing my designs being brought to life by many different hands. It is also fun to see all of the other builders following in my steps. The more builders, the better. There is plenty of work to go around and I encourage anyone who wants to take the work seriously to pursue it with a passion. I did offer a sauna building class this year but had to cancel; Covid has thrown a wrench into a lot of plans. But stay tuned: perhaps 2022 will be the year.
Covid also threw into a wrench into the supply chain. We’ve all heard the phrase “supply chain disruption” by now. I bid jobs in the beginning of the year only see to prices on materials I quoted go up by 250%. Some materials simply vanished from the shelves. But now things have settled down and I also started ordering and stock piling materials well in advance. I can keep several saunas worth lumber and supplies in my big shop and insulate myself from some of the inflation—another reason to be grateful for the big work space.
Rob at the shop!
I’ve been working alone for most of the year, which actually suits me fine, especially with Covid lurking. Workers are hard to come by: not only are the skilled trades losing new blood, but, I think, the pandemic relief made a lot people lazy and unwilling to get off the couch. Scarlet, now my partner in everything, has been my greatest blessing. When she can escape childcare duties she has proven to be the hardest worker I could wish for. I could use a few more workers like her: eager to learn, unafraid of dust and dirt and willing to sweat. She also manages all of the marketing, so give her the kudos for the web media you see. The business feels like it wants to grow so if anyone is seriously interested in building saunas and wants to relocate to Ithaca, drop me a line.
For those of you lucky enough to have a sauna, I hope you get to celebrate the New Year in it for there is no better way to bring in the new and shake out the old. It’s been my tradition for four decades now and I hope to continue for four more.
Taking Sauna with Scarlet by the Lake, December 2021.
When building a sauna the first and possibly most important consideration is the location. With a wood-burning sauna, which is free from the tether of an electrical connection, it can be away from the house—not just for safety but also to create a separation from the electrical buzz of modern life. Simple and inexpensive solar options make it easy to provide needed lighting. It should have some of the comfort of home but be integrated into nature; near a body of water is always a good choice.
My latest sauna does all of that and more. The site is fairly close to the house but lies outside the garden gates. It all but hangs on the edge of a small gorge that contains a lively creek in its serpentine confines. Like the basswood and cherry trees that cling to the sides of the gorge, firmly rooted in the ground, the sauna is anchored to the 300 million year old shale bedrock with concrete and steel. The owners built a steep stair down to where small waterfall flows into a perfect bathtub sized hole. Descending it may be slightly perilous but that only adds to the adrenaline to rushing from the steaming of the sauna and plunging in the ever-cold water.
As I build I tweak my design to allow nature into the sauna. Framed and without sheathing I could see the perfect view up the ravine from the upper bench, suggesting the optimum location for a small candle window. The large window allows a view of the wooded hill and brings in ample afternoon light and the view down into the creek through the framing allowed me to imagine the possibility of a small square creek view porthole below knee level that would let in the ambient sound of the rushing creek. Exiting the sauna one faces the woods, not the house; a crude stair-path leads the eye up into the forest while the other leads to the creek.
The sauna is visible from the road and the house, but neither is evident from the sanctuary within. All you hear is the babble of the creek and all you feel is the relaxing heat of the sauna. Finishing a few rounds in the sauna with a dunk in the massaging water is pure bliss.
The site not only perfect for the sauna but it was a joy to work there, listening to and watching the water flow. Daily I took dips in the creek to beat the steamy summer heat. Having a site that allows me to enjoy the process of building lends means I can build a better sauna—one that is infused with the spirit of the place and connected to nature.
You’ve probably heard that I’ve spent a lot of time in the sauna but another hot spot I’ve spent a lot of time around is kilns. Specifically foundry kilns and ceramic kilns. Unsurprisingly there is a strong relationship between the two as they both involve getting things hot. In the lost wax casting process, investment or ceramic shell molds are heated to roughly 1500° F, which burns off the wax original- thus the “lost wax” of lost wax casting. This can take hours or even days depending on the mold type and size. A ceramic kiln can get much hotter- up to 3000° F. That is hot enough to melt steel and many other metals.
I learned how to do bronze casting in Art School. It is an ancient process and we did it pretty much the same way that it was done thousands of year ago. We learned to figure how hot things were by using our senses. All objects emit radiation when heated but at about 1100-1300° it become visible. Peering into a hot kiln (safety glasses strongly suggested) is like looking at another world, perhaps on some alien gaseous planet. Solid objects look like they are transparent. Heat and light become the same thing, the heated molds don’t reflect light but emit light. The blast of heat through the spy-hole is like a ray gun. We rarely used pyrometers (hi temp thermometers) and when we did it was only to affirm what our senses were telling us. We would record the smells of things burning off. When the smells were gone, the molds were clean and ready to accept the molten bronze.
When loading the kiln there is always discussion about the hot spots- certain delicate molds need to avoid the heat while larger molds might need it more. There is always conjecture about how the heat circulates; a whole aspect of kiln building is dedicated to controlling the flow of heat within the kiln. Some of this conjecture is borne out in the results of a firing—whether things fire correctly or not. Ceramicist use cones: small tapering forms that bend at specific temperatures. After a firing these will give a true telling of how the firing went. But, despite the science, there is still a lot of mystery and art to the process, so much so that a firing of a large kiln can take on a ritualistic feeling. Staying up late to tend the kiln, as is done with wood fired and other non-automated kilns, drinking beer and heating up pizza on the kiln, tends to add to the aura.
Thinking of all of this makes me think of sauna. Both have been done pretty the same way for millennia with an aura of ritual and involving community. Both have a focus on fire and heat, and, as well studied and commonly practiced as they both are, there is still a bit of mystery involved in each.
A kiln is like a sauna on steroids. The heat is so amplified that its flow and effects are unmistakable. Observing one is a lesson in thermodynamics. In the sauna building culture there is a lot of banter about how to best heat, insulate, and vent a sauna, yet all of it is conjecture based on theory until one sits in a sauna and feels the heat radiating off of the rocks and the wave of löyly hitting you on the sensitive tops of your ears.
When I design a sauna I draw from my years of kiln experience; I think of the heat as visceral substance, almost visible, as in a kiln. I relish the use of my senses to discern quality rather than depending on technology. Even if the sauna is electric with a digital control panel I rely on feel, not the number on the display. I imagine the flow of heat like the way it flows in a kiln. My foundry experience has informed my understanding of sauna in ways that are hard to describe but suffice it say that I have always been drawn to fire and to the mysteries that it holds.
Candle windows hark back to my time at Podunk where the light in the sauna came from a bare bulb in a porcelain fixture outside a little square window into the dressing room. The sauna i s too hot for a standard light fixture, so this arrangement made sense. Later, after I started building saunas, I learned that this was a more modern incarnation of the original candle window, which was literally a window into the dressing room with a shelf for a candle to sit on. These are common in Finland in freestanding saunas away from the house. The window allows for a special kind of spiritual, summoning light into the sauna. Especially on those dark winter nights.
In the sauna tradition, we slow down. The flickering candle light seen from the bench in the sauna, lures you to relax and reflect. Life and relativity. Could there be a more tranquil way to release the stresses of the day?
Although it is this quality of the light that is so important, the candle is totally pragmatic in a very Finnish way. A candle in the sauna room would melt even if not lit, so this was an obvious solution to the problem of lighting the dark interior of the hot room. Despite its pragmatic origins, I find it is also a chance for a little expressive design: it can be round or square, arched or colored. It can have an organic flare to it. Now, with cheap, battery-operated, multi colored LED lights and even fake candles that look real, the light can be more than a simple bulb on a pull-chain porcelain fixture, and be safe. Even if the sauna has built-in electric lighting, the candle window can be a signature element, one that distinguishes a personalized custom sauna from a generic kit.
It’s in the details.
Finnish pragmatic design inspiration comes from making use of what is available at hand and letting that material influence your design. There are many places to incorporate little details and personal touches: stick hardware towel pegs, stone faced stove wall with stones from your backyard, thresholds of locally cut locust, round windows, etc. Think of decorative elements you can hang above the mantle. In my sauna building plans you can purchase and download, there is more about windows, framing information as well as tips on using windows safely in mobile saunas.
wood burning sauna with candle window to dressing room
Here is a collection of the candle window design and builds over the years in and around the Finger Lakes and New York State.
Join our Mailing list and receive future blog posts like this one! We love connecting with sauna lovers like you. Read more about sauna building, diy saunas, sauna tradition and inspiration.
