Inside A Nordic Sauna Designed To Blend In With Nature

[water lapping] [tranquil music]

[Ville] Loyly is situated right

in the coastline of Helsinki.

As we can see, the coastline is very rocky

and we didn't want to make a traditional building

that is blocking this strip of park

but we more made an artificial land form

and now when the building has turned gray,

it's more like a rock on the coastline.

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I'm Anu.

And I'm Ville.

And we are architects of Loyly

and co-founders of Avanto Architects.

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Loyly is both public sauna

and the restaurant and the place to hang around in Helsinki.

In Helsinki, we used to have

like public saunas everywhere,

historical times the apartments didn't have own bathroom

so you needed a place to wash yourself.

In '50s and '60s, we started building private bathrooms

in the apartments, so most of the public saunas vanished.

Loyly was maybe one

of the first that started the new sauna boom.

Nowadays, when you make a public sauna,

it has different function.

It's not just like washing yourself,

it's more like a social place where you gather

where you meet your friends, have fun.

The tradition is to go to sauna like maybe twice a week

in all families, it's just a part of the life.

Normal, average.

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Not very many capital

of Europe has open sea view horizon like this

from the city center.

This whole horizon is visible from this restaurant.

The architectural idea is very simple.

We have this black box containing all the warm spaces.

That is covered with this wood structure that we call cloak.

Here we can see how it makes also a huge sun shade

for the interior space.

In the summertime, when the sun comes

from a very steep angle,

this space with huge windows, it would be like a greenhouse,

very hot, but now it cuts all the solar energy away.

In the wintertime, like now when the sun is coming

from the horizon, the solar energy can come in,

penetrates this dark concrete floor so we get kind

of passive energy for the building.

We worked on the interior together

with our interior architect Joanna Laajisto.

The cooperation was really good.

For us, it's very important that you don't see any kind

of limit between the architecture and interior design.

As an architect, we often think

about the straight lines and surfaces,

but in this space, she kind of brought the softness

into our minimalism.

[tranquil music]

We are in the showers now and as you can see,

all the surfaces are made of concrete.

All traditional saunas of Helsinki,

they were made out of concrete.

That's why we used concrete also here

because it's traditional material, very durable.

Now we are outside of smoke sauna.

Smoke sauna is the most traditional type of Finnish saunas.

It means that there is actually no chimney.

We had a lot of discussions with the fire department

how we can make the smoke sauna safe

because smoke saunas tend to burn easily,

so we decided that we make the whole sauna

inside a concrete bunker and we have tested it once.

The sauna has already once burnt and it worked really well.

We cut the air and the fire died out.

As you can see, everything is black

and there's this soot everywhere

and during the sauna session, you can also smell the smoke.

[tranquil music]

Now we are in the spa area.

It's kind of a open space

in between these closed blocks that contain saunas

and dressing rooms.

We wanted to create a space where we can go like

all together with the friends

and the family and not care about the gender.

You wear a swimsuit here.

This bench is special piece of wood and it's made

of just one trunk because we want to show the time

in our projects and here it's a perfect piece for that

because you see that it's very, very old.

You see the time in these cracks and everything

and the functional use of this is that when we go

from sauna to the sea and do this avanto swimming,

very often people have a specific type of shoes they put on,

so this bench is used for that.

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This black box contains the smoke sauna inside.

It's an own fire compartment.

If the smoke sauna would burn or when it burns,

then it burns totally safe

and the fire doesn't spread to the rest of the building.

Special feature here is this cold water bucket.

I don't do it now.

[Anu chuckling] Please don't.

But if you want to have a really fresh experience,

it's filled with a really, really cold water.

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It's a bit like a labyrinth or a maze so you kind

of lose your way.

That was kind of intention we had.

So this sauna space is quite a small in this building

and we wanted to have a variety in this space

so that it reminds us from the traditional sauna path

on Finnish countryside.

When we have these closed rooms

and then space in between, we created a similar type

of path where you will never know what's happening

behind the corner.

So you need to ask maybe people which way

is it to smoke sauna?

This is how even as Finns who are very shy,

we take contact to other people.

Now we are in the biggest sauna,

which is a once heated sauna.

This big machine here is the stove where it's 1,500 kilos

of stone heated for five hours first.

Then it stabilizes for one hour

and then you can use this stove

for more than 10 hours after.

In these saunas, we used very massive pine wood,

which is heat treated.

It lasts for a long time in this heavy use.

It's really important in the sauna design,

the proportions of the space.

You need certain distance from the uppermost bench

to the ceiling so that you have the perfect heat.

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We wanted to create what we often have

on our summer cottages, which is a fireplace lounge.

This space is a real social space

in between the sauna sessions and one

of the important features here is that we can have a drink

and that's actually really important to have a drink

in between sauna because you sweat so much

during the session.

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In this fireplace room, we have opened a cloak,

so you have a direct view from inside to outside.

Like in the restaurant.

This sauna is a private sauna.

Here we have a special stove, which heated all the time

during the sauna session

and that makes it possible to hear burning wood.

[wood sizzling]

Nice thing about the sauna space is that you can see out

to the sea but from outside, you don't see in,

so this cloak works like Venetian blind.

It's hot.

[both chuckling]

[tranquil music]

You come from the saunas

and you go to the sea to take a dip.

Normally, the sea is frozen in the winter,

so we make a hole in the ice that we called Avanto.

It's also our company name because we want

that our architecture, it's always an experience.

You really need to feel something

when you visit our building.

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The cloak is made of a very special product.

Normally when you grow forest,

you need to harvest the very small scale tree trunks away

to make space

for the actual trees that are going to stay.

Here we made these very small tree trunk.

We saw them, plant them, clothe them

to make a very nice product

that doesn't twist or bend like massive wood.

[tranquil music] [water lapping]

The special thing about the terrace

is it's partly on top of the water.

It's really nice to sit on the terrace

because you can hear even the sound of the breaking waves.

[waves crashing]

Also, these several levels of terrace maintains view

for everybody sitting here indoors, outdoors.

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Now we are in the lookout terrace,

the highest point on top of the building.

It's accessible for all.

We never block the entrance to the building.

You can climb up here even in the nighttime,

totally public space.

We are on the rooftop of this building.

You can see at the same time the horizon and the skyline

of Helsinki, and from the rooftop of sauna,

you can also see the chimneys of all these different saunas.

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Because we are right on the seashore,

the foundations took like one million euro to do.

In the springtime,

when this ice on the sea is starting to melt and breaking,

then the wind pushes all the huge mass

of ice towards the building.

There are one-meter thick protection against this ice

under the building made out of concrete.

Our clients understood what you can do with architecture.

The building has already paid back all the money

that was invested.

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Loyly is the first Forest Stewardship Council

certified building in Helsinki, in Finland actually.

And our clients,

they were passionate about sustainability.

They wanted to make everything out of FSC-certified wood.

That means the whole chain

of wood production is certified from the forest,

how to grow the forest to the saw mill, how it's cut.

Also, the food in the restaurant is certified.

The fish served here, it's sustainably caught.

[tranquil music]

We have power to affect on future

by making things more sustainable and better

and we feel that we have had a wonderful life

in Helsinki and in Finland and in the world.

We want to preserve that for the next generations as well.

That's why it's important.

[tranquil music]

Interesting thing about sauna culture

is that as you take clothes off in sauna,

you don't have any marks

of what is your status, so everybody's equal in sauna.

It's really interesting to see how it brings people together

sitting next to each other

and having a conversation and that is really important.

Most of the private saunas,

you go there for contemplating.

Here we were expecting to do a little bit

like sacred space where you can be quiet and relax

but it turned out to be very, very social

and that was a bit surprising for us even

that people when they relax,

they start to talk with the people they don't know

and that's quite uncommon in Finland, I would say.

The first time we came into the saunas,

then we had all these people around

and they were really noise and we were like shh,

this is not how you do sauna

and then we actually understood that no,

you can do saunas this way as well,

like there's nothing wrong with it.

[tranquil music]

We want to create a holistic experience,

not only like a design object,

that's really important for us.

Also making things sustainably

so that there is possibility to go

to avanto swimming for the next generations as well.

As architects, we have the possibility

to improve people's quality of life

and that's really the wonderful part of our profession.

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