Words by Jo-Marie Baker, Photos by Ilk Photography, Our Place Magazine
SWEAT IN STYLE
Going from extreme heat to extreme cold sounds punishing but dozens of locals are soaking up the euphoric experience every week at Pilot Bay and Waihī Beach.
The Sauna Project offers hour-long sessions where you alternate between 80˚ C inside their wood-fired mobile sauna before dashing across the sand to plunge into freezing cold water.
It’s a physical shock but surprisingly manageable. Your skin tingles and your heart races, but a sense of peace and calm also descends as you take in the incredible view and completely forget about the worries and stress of daily life.
Contrast therapy (hot to cold) is great for your cardiovascular health. It gets the blood pumping in the same way as moderate exercise, and can help improve your sleep, mood, skin and general wellbeing. The multi-sensory experience is enhanced by the addition of essential oils on the sauna’s hot rocks, and is something that people of all ages, sizes and physical abilities are able to enjoy.
The Sauna Project is the brainchild of three Tauranga friends – David Seidel, Keelan Kanji and Luke Mexted.
David grew up in Germany where having a sauna in your home was commonplace. Keelan’s father is one of New Zealand’s leading pain specialists and prescribes sauna therapy for many of his patients. While Luke discovered the power of sauna when living in Queenstown with his wife, Tish, who worked at Aroha Retreat.
“We started using their sauna one or two times a week followed by a cold plunge. Suddenly our sleep was better, our skin was better, and we were having more in-depth conversations about life,” Luke explains.
When Aroha Retreat’s sauna was occupied by other guests, Luke and David (who was also living in Queenstown at the time) were disappointed there wasn’t another good option publicly available. So when they moved back to Mount Maunganui in 2022 (and into a flat with Keelan) they decided to build their very own mobile sauna.
“We built it in the driveway on a trailer and the space was only just big enough,” David recalls. “We could hardly walk on either side. We had this vision for all these beautiful places we could take it to all over New Zealand – lakes, beaches, isolated spots.”
The original sauna was 3m x 2m and featured a secondhand window and door which they refurbished. Luke is a builder by trade so it didn’t take long to figure out how to design and construct it. The friends then took their invention to NZ Spirit Festival and were blown away by the demand from festival goers.
“We were fully booked for the entire three days from 7am until midnight. New people would arrive for a session every hour. It was crazy. Everyone loved it and we were just buzzing about how many people had joy from it.”
Before the trio knew it, they were regularly booking public sessions for their sauna at Tay Street beside the beach. “We have built a community around this sauna,” Luke says. “Regulars just kept coming.”
These days, sauna sessions (followed by a cold ocean plunge) are held at Pilot Bay on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings (6pm-9pm), and at Waihī Beach on Sunday mornings plus Monday and Tuesday evenings. A third mobile sauna has now set up in Gisborne and a fourth location is soon to be unveiled.
The Sauna Project also builds handcrafted saunas for private buyers around New Zealand, with 10 having been sold in the past 18 months alone. “Our ethos is to use sustainable, locally-sourced materials,” David explains. Timber is harvested from Bay of Plenty forests (typically redwood, macrocarpa or modified pine), and their wood-fired sauna heaters are custom built by Roaring Meg fires in Southland.
“Our mission is to have a sauna in every town in New Zealand. It’s a modality of health that could benefit a lot of different people. We’ve had so much positive feedback and it’s honestly just that classic story of ‘we had a problem that we wanted to solve’ so we just took that Kiwi attitude and ran with it.”
Luke says there’s so much healing and social connection that goes on around the sauna experience.
“One of the coolest things is typically we have random people sitting in the sauna together and over time they become sauna buddies. When you’re inside, you have really good chats with people and you’re just able to connect with each other. There’s no distractions. Your phone isn’t there, you’re just in a conversation with another person. And we found that so many strong connections and genuine friendships have developed from that experience.”
As part of their commitment to growing a sauna culture in New Zealand, David says The Sauna Project plans to hold an annual festival in Tauranga every year. “We held our first one this year and it was a baptism by fire. Next year will be even bigger and we’ll invite other sauna companies to come together to share their craft, so watch this space.”