Smoke Sauna in Inkoo Archipelago
Architects Marko Huttunen, Pauliina Saarinen
Locations Degerölandet, Inkoo
Gross Area 30 m2
Completion 2018
Designers’ Comment – Marko Huttunen & Pauliina Saarinen: Our client, a demanding and experienced sauna expert, commissioned from us a modern smoke sauna, built with the traditional handcrafted log corner joints, for his seafront plot.
The sauna stove is heated from an underfloor heating space. Due to the large sauna stove, the heat-retaining properties of the wall and roof structures, as well as the insulated stove lid, sauna bathers can enjoy an intense steam bath on the same day as the sauna is heated and then a gentler steam bath the following evening. Of central importance in the design of the stove was that the burning would be as clean as possible.
The exterior passage that separates the changing room from the steam room is where bathers can wash themselves as well as cool down after the sauna. Smoke-sauna bathing, involving the heating of the sauna, the settling period, bathing, and cooling down afterwards, is a ritual of silent centring, the most sacred moment of which is felt in the quiet dim light of the blackened sauna room, within the embrace of the heat radiating from all directions. It is also about preserving the connection to a time a couple of hundred years back, when most Finns did not just bathe, but also lived in smoke-heated rooms. ↙
Photos Livady
