Lanco Saunas

A recent build settling into it’s new home after delivery.

It’s a short walk from the back door with a garden view, trees surrounding.

Just in time to enjoy fall from a whole new perspective this year.

The sun setting before 8pm? No problem.

Shorter evenings just mean the lights come on sooner. The season’s turning, and this is the part we look forward to.

There’s a specific kind of anticipation in the walk to an outdoor sauna.

Walking (or running) across the yard, through whatever the weather is doing, knowing the room on the other side is waiting for you.

Some might even say, the worse the weather, the sweeter the sit.

Tucked in behind the trees, a few steps away from the water. Built specifically to fit on this part of the patio with a nice view to the pool.

This time of year it kind of disappears into all the green. Then the routine pretty much sorts itself out. You get hot, jump in the pool, rinse off, go back for more.

We love using IKI heaters in our builds.

Every one is still made by hand in Finland, in the same workshop, by people who have spent decades making some of the best sauna heaters around. The name means forever, and that is more or less the promise. These outlast the sauna around them.

IKI is also the heater that changed the category. They were the first to wrap the heat source in an open mesh frame packed with stones, instead of hiding a few rocks behind sheet metal. Almost every good heater since has copied the idea. The reason is löyly. All that exposed stone holds a deep reserve of heat, so the steam comes soft and full instead of sharp and thin.

It’s a heater we always enjoy building around.

A window changes how a sauna feels. Without one you’re in a dark room. With one you’re in the backyard, watching the weather move, seeing the light go from afternoon to evening while you sit there.

A glass door does even more. It brings light in from a second direction and opens the whole space up, so a smaller footprint stops feeling small.

And then you start noticing what you would have missed. Wind working through the trees in August. Rain coming down hard while you sit there dry and warm. Snow falling in that quiet way it does when nobody else is outside. Deer at the treeline who have no idea you’re there.

Same sauna, but the view keeps changing.

Hard things get easier with good people around. You push a little further than you would alone, and you stay in a little longer than you meant to. Then it’s over and you’re laughing about it, and it doesn’t feel like the hard thing you were dreading twenty minutes ago.

Find the people who make you want to do the thing anyway.

Aspen. In its raw form it’s nearly white, almost blond. The warm brown you see here comes from thermal modification, a heat treatment the wood goes through long before it’s installed, and it lands a little different on every board. Which is why no two walls come out quite the same.

Finns have always used aspen where a sauna touches skin, and part of it is just how it looks: quiet, even, easy on the eye, the kind of wood that lets the light do the work and the room settle around you.

Some outdoor sites don’t let us take the easy way in. No wide gate, no clear path to the backyard, no way to bring a finished sauna through in one piece, even by crane.

So we bring it in as parts and build it where it’s going to live.

Every board carried back by hand and assembled on site. Same build, same result.

A thermometer and a sand timer. Heat and time, and the rest takes care of itself.