When the client for my latest mobile sauna project contacted me, he told me he needed something that would look and feel like a sauna from back home in Finland. He wanted it to be wood-fired and to get really hot. He wanted the clean lines and rustic charm of Finnish design and even requested a traditional pine tar finish like what the Vikings used on their boats. As small as it going to be, it was to have the standard two rooms: the sauna room and a dressing room. He also wanted to use the latest solar technology to light it with a soft glow.
But working for an American company where he might get moved from time to time, he wanted it to be untethered to his house and portable, so he could always bring it with him like a cherished possession.
I enjoy challenges. In fact, I thrive on them. One of the advantages of having my own company is that I get to decide how much to put into each project and which projects to really focus on. On some projects, like this one, I get to expand my repertoire. The goal, as always, was to bring my client’s dreams into reality. The result did just that: a mobile sauna on a 81″x120″ trailer, under three-thousand pounds, with a dressing room, solar-powered lighting, custom wood stove, northern white cedar interior, and pine tar exterior finish. I created a little oasis—a reminder of Finland—that my client can park in his back yard. A dream come true.
Saunas are like that. When you have your own, it is a dream come true, a special place to escape into, to relax and unwind. Though tied to old traditions, for many, sauna is a new experience and can be life-changing. As designer and builder, I get to be the midwife for people’s dreams and help them usher in a new way of living or rekindle a past love. As we turn the page to a new year and think about resolutions, what dreams do you want to come true?
Mobile sauna by Rob Licht Custom Saunas.Solar powered lights on mobile sauna by Rob Licht Custom Saunas.
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.
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.
The stove, heater, or as the Finns call it, the kiuas is the heart of the sauna.
The role of the kiuas is to heat the room. But not like a wood stove, but by heating the sauna rocks, which in turn provide the heat and the löyly, or steam, that make a sauna what it is. In the savusauna, or smoke sauna, which arguably offers the most authentic experience, there is neither stove nor chimney. There is simply a pile of rocks made into a hearth. A fire is burned within (filling the room with smoke) until the rocks are hot. Once the fire is extinguished and the room cleared of smoke, the pile of rocks does its thing. Likewise, any sauna, whether it is wood fired or electric, is only ready when the rocks are hot.
When building a sauna, the choice of heater is important. But the rocks are even more important. A good heater will hold a hundred pounds, and thus, will make good löyly. A cheap heater will provide a few decorative stones, and you will feel like you are sitting in an electric oven. I have seen many well-designed saunas in my years and I have seen many poorly built saunas, as well. The worst use some variant of a cheap wood-burning stove with a dented pot of rubble or brick on top. In the best, the rocks are the focal point, and they get red-hot. Pick one up (with heat-resistant gloves, please) and drop it into a pot of water and you can make tea.
Left: Rocks shipped thousands of miles—only to explode in the sauna! Right: Cayuga Lake beach stones—can you spot the erratics?
The type of rock is critical: they should be igneous in origin, formed deep in the hot earth or in the furnace of a volcano. Think of these rocks as heat loving. Granite, grabbro, and basalt are typical examples. The Finnish and Swedish units might use grey peridotite. Then there is shape: smooth and round potato shaped rocks or jagged and broken pieces. I prefer the smoother rocks, but there is argument for using the jagged (more surface area). You can order a box of the latter from Tylö that will come all the way from Sweden. Once I opened a box to find a nice hand-written note from the fellow who packed them. Another heater company sent me a box from their supplier in Central America. Apparently, they needed a geology lesson. The polished siltstone rocks, once heated, started exploding! If you don’t want to have a box of rocks shipped half way around the world or risk getting impaled by rock shards, you can find your own.
Unfortunately, our local stone, meaning the rock that is cemented to the landscape here in Central New York, makes horrible sauna rocks. It is all sedimentary: shale, limestone and sandstone. Born in the bottom of ancient oceans, these rocks do not love fire and will complain by exploding if thrown into one. By the way, baptism by fire is a good way to test your rocks if geology eludes you—a good rock will happily glow red-hot. Thankfully, the glaciers that plowed through here brought with them piles of stone from places north that serve the sauna well. These are glacial erratics. As the glaciers retreated and melted, these stones were left behind. The resulting floods that carved our landscape left piles of these smoothed rocks (mixed in with plenty of local stone) in deltas, drumlins or moraines. I find them in the local gravel pit, which mines an ancient delta, or along the lake at my favorite park (another delta) when the water is low. Sometimes I take milk crates with me when I travel through the Adirondacks and fill them with potato-sized anorthosite rocks—which is what the moon is made of—and other pretty granites.
More important than the geology is the significance of the rocks. A Finn, even if they are using a heater with rocks packed in Sweden, will add a spirit stone or two: stones that come from home or some other special place. Stones all have distinct place markers and are borne of this earth and tied to a particular landscape. Except erratics. These have been swept from their homes in a geologic diaspora and found new homes as immigrants, oddities, and beautiful accents against the dull grey of the indigenous rocks. Even though I am made of local stone, coming from generations of Central New Yorkers, I have always related to the erratics: the outsiders, the immigrants, the atypical people. They bring us diversity, new culture and traditions like the sauna. In my next sauna, you will certainly find plenty of erractics.
Redhot Adirondack rocks / My Lämpimämpi stove / Stove wall faced with local field stone including shale.
THANK YOU for you enjoying my blog about saunas and sauna building. If you value the info you glean from my sauna blog consider dropping me a TIP via Venmo or via PayPal @RobLichtStudio or writing a google review. For press Inquiries please contact me directly.
