Brendan Ravenhill likes to describe his summers in Maine as half vacation, half working meditation. Most of the year, he’s in Los Angeles, where his design studio is primarily known for lighting fixtures. But when he returns to his family’s homestead on Little Cranberry Island, a short boat ride southeast of Acadia National Park, he tends to personal projects: building wooden boats, a pondside tea house, and, over the course of three months last year, a floating sauna.

Brendan’s sister-in-law, Katie Garrison, had the idea first, after seeing similar saunas while traveling for work in Norway. Next, his sister, Amanda, helped jump-start the project by securing three crucial items, all for free: an old pine-board finger float for the base; a mooring in the local harbor; and a never-used, woodburning sauna stove that a neighbor, now an accomplished jeweler, welded in 1979 for a continuing education class.

“This was a very free project that allowed me to explore my deep love of vernacular architecture.”
—Brendan Ravenhill, resident and designer

Friends then joined in with family to assemble the sauna on dry land, raising a timber frame made of island spruce and adding cedar nailing strips, exterior shingling, and interior benches. Brendan used an old boathouse window for the structure’s back wall, so the only materials purchased off-island were the cedar shingles and pressure-treated wood for side floats. Once complete, the sauna was hauled to the harbor, craned into the water, and towed with a motorboat out to the mooring.

Floating in the Atlantic, the exterior of Brendan’s sauna resembles a classic, if not yet weathered, Maine fishing house: a narrow beige shed with a single gable and porthole window in front. Instead of giving off the pungent odor of bait, however, the interior delights the senses. Fire from the stove warms the six-by-eight-foot space in 20 minutes, and the walls and slatted benches smell sweetly of cedar. The room bobs gently in the waves, which glow a Caribbean green through gaps in the floorboards. Outside the tranquil enclosure, the water is the gray of a Maine day when it might, or might not, storm.

Since completing the sauna in September last year, Brendan and Marjory Garrison, his wife and the marketing manager of his studio, have used it regularly for quick morning sweats. At times, longer sessions evolve into full-blown social gatherings: Friends drop by, heat up, and then brave Maine’s chilly waters. For Brendan, the sauna is as much about solace as the pleasure of creation. “It gave me a distraction from the stress of the pandemic,” he says, “and a chance to create beauty in this strange time.”

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Brendan Ravenhill Studio / @brendanravenhillstudio

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A Designer Builds a Scandinavian-Inspired Sauna That Floats Off the Maine Coast