San Francisco Just Got Its First Floating Sauna. It’s About Time

If your gym had a sauna, now it has a cold plunge. Contrast therapy is peaking, fueled by the appetite of the biohacker bro. The historically community-oriented activity has become a hyper-individualized pursuit, refashioned by devotees of the Huberman Lab as a crucial post-workout routine—a biometric-driven regimen for an optimized life. (Nevermind that fretting over the data might actually be bad for your health.)

But in KPI-obsessed San Francisco, some are reclaiming the sauna’s spiritual center. This week, the Bay Area’s first floating sauna, fittingly dubbed Fjord, opened bookings for its facility in the docks of Sausalito, meant to provide bathers with an immediate connection to nature and each other. For about the cost of yoga class, bathers can share one of two saunas on the float to relax, socialize, plunge, steam, and repeat. In other words, wearing Airpods isn’t really the vibe. "We wanted to take more of the Nordic approach, which is more of a wonderful, healthful practice that’s joyful and social. Just as much of this is about building a social, third space," says Alex Yenni, one of Fjord’s cofounders.

Starting the company was somewhat personal for Yenni and his business partner, Gabe Turner, who met when they were both feeling unmoored in their careers. Turner, who was in tech investing, had been a long-time sauna enthusiast, and Yenni had been using them to mend nerves frayed by an advertising career. A hot shower in the bracingly cold air at a beach in Marin, with a view of Mount Tamalpais, was an epiphany for Yenni—being outdoors was it. "We really wanted to focus on being out in the elements, feeling the wind, and the cold air, and the water. That’s why we’re doing the plunge in the bay," Turner adds.

Across the water at Point San Pablo in Richmond, bathing facility Good Hot is an outright rejection of the kind of scientific wellness prescribed by the likes of the world’s top bro podcasters. "We were always about the lazy pleasure of sauna," says Cooper Rogers. He and Lou Tamiye, who met in a masters of architecture program at Cal Berkeley, created Good Hot during the pandemic for those who might feel ostracized or excluded from bathing spaces, specifically queer communities and people of color. Good Hot would give anyone and everyone a place to gather, if, in that moment, only with their Covid pods.

"We talk a lot as a group about how to receive all of our guests with care and how to cultivate a sense of safety in our space," says Tamiye. "The majority of us who work at Good Hot are people of color and queer and trans ourselves."

The idea of bathing together has been a part of Bay Area culture for at least a century. Finnila’s Finnish Baths began in the 1910s as a sauna in the backyard of a Victorian building in the Castro District, welcoming friends and neighbors. It later expanded with bathhouses before shuttering its last standing address in 2000. Sutro Baths at Land’s End is among the city’s most famous landmarks. When it opened in 1894, it was called the biggest indoor swimming pool, but for years now has been a haunted network of concrete ruins filled with mossy, brackish water. In smaller corners, at least one Berkeley resident’s backyard hot tub was free and open to the public from 1975 until just a few years ago, under the condition that you go in the buff. Today, Archimedes Banya, a clothing-optional, Russian-style bathhouse on the southeastern edge of the city, has been operating for more than a decade.

But none of these have engaged directly with the bay, which, if you squint, is actually one big cold plunge. Today, brave groups already take advantage of its year-round mid-50s temps, including polar bear swim clubs in Marin and at Crissy Field. One could imagine it might be nice to have somewhere to warm the bones after a chilly dip.

Up until now, setting up a sauna at the water’s edge has faced thickets of red tape. "We have a legacy system, a regulatory framework that has explicit carve outs and allowances for a very narrowly defined set of recreation, mostly around boating," Yenni explains. "And so whereas anybody can buy a big old boat and buy a parking spot for it and just plop it on the bay, if you want to house a different form of recreation, it’s infinitely harder and requires far more permitting."

"We wanted to take more of the Nordic approach, which is more of a wonderful, healthful practice that’s joyful and social."

—Alex Yenni, Fjord cofounder

For this reason, Good Hot began as a kind of pirate operation. Rogers and Tamiye designed and built their first sauna on a trailer to dance around permitting issues. "We didn’t really know if on any given week we’d get a notice from the city that we’d have to stop operating," says Rogers. "There’s a lot of stuff that scares authorities, health system stuff with water and bodies and sweat and nudity. And then there’s getting in the water and swimming."

So at first, it was friends only. "People were signing up on a Google spreadsheet and Venmoing us and it was all just word of mouth," Rogers says. He and Tamiye closed for about a year to work with the city on permits—they were amenable throughout, says Rogers—and as of summer of 2021, Good Hot has been operating aboveboard with five saunas, rentable for individuals and groups to hang out, steam, and take a dip in the bay. And it’s going well: Soon they’re opening a new location that will include communal bathing, outdoor and rooftop saunas, and soaking pools.

Fjord spent about the same amount of time working with the powers that be to achieve their vision of a floating sauna. While they waited, Turner would meet swim groups at Cavallo Point under the Golden Gate Bridge or at Crissy Field with his own sauna-on-wheels. (He still does.) "Brass tacks, we had to go through eighteen months of permitting and approvals, and eight different agencies," says Turner. "It’s federal on down," adds Yenni.

Their float started with something called a wave attenuator—"a fancy name for a highly engineered concrete barge that chops through waves," says Yenni—that had been left over from the 2013 America’s Cup event. In other words, a perfect platform with which to build a facility and park in the Sausalito harbor year-round. Architect Nick Polansky’s design looks like a floating parklet, with a patio off of each sauna room enclosed by rhythmic wood slats.

In my conversations with the creators of Good Hot and Fjord, each emphasized the idea of a third space—somewhere people could connect outside the home or office. Alchemy Springs, a wellness facility in Lower Nob Hill, which partially opened this year, is billing its amenities as something that goes one step further—fourth spaces. "These are spaces designed for an analog deeper connection and meaning and belonging," says Anne Cannady, the company’s CEO. "In our opinion, that’s really what social, communal bathing is."

If the distinction isn’t totally clear, perhaps it bears out in Alchemy’s programming, much of which takes place in what Cannady claims is the country’s largest freestanding sauna, a circular shaped room with stadium-style seating where upward of 43 people can sweat it out at a time. "It has the effect of a performance theater," she says. "We’re experimenting with bringing programming into the sauna space. We’ve done stand-up comedy and live music in there."

Stand-up comedy?

"A sauna session is typically anywhere from ten to twenty minutes, so it offers this perfect little moment for entertainment," says Cannady. "It helps people kind of stick out the heat."

Mostly, it’s about getting people to put away their devices and be with one another, which, according to Cannady, hasn’t been a difficult sell in very-online San Francisco. Still, Alchemy Springs isn’t being prescriptive about how to use their facilities. "We get people coming in who want to do the Huberman protocol," says Cannady. If someone wanted to have a more data-driven experience—moving between hot and cold with meticulous precision, say—have at it.

But if you’re fixated on devices, you might be missing the bigger picture of these emerging spaces. "We’ve always felt this instinctive rejection of the more clinical approach to this stuff," says Yenni. "I mean, I think there are really quantitative benefits that these processes really yield for people, but we’ve always approached it and looked at it from much more of a classical perspective. If it feels good, intuitively, it is good."

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