A good sauna (more on this here) is not just a hot room. It is an environment where air, heat, wood, stone, and human comfort work together.
Dr. Lassi A. Liikkanen brings a designer's precision to sauna culture. The conversation is practical, but the larger point is timeless: the quality of the experience comes from the details you do not see at first.
Full transcript from the source video, grouped by timestamp for easier reading.
well here we are on Finnmark Sona the sounder twins of Finnmark sellers inaugural podcast we are very very lucky to have dr. lassi licken of sounder log year fi with us today so without ruining too much of the story al as you're known runs a blog which specializes in trying to understand how to build the perfect Sona so tell us a little bit about how you started sound a log year and what it's about and what people might expect if they were to go in there alright thank you for the invitation I'm happy to be here yeah so I said I started this on a loggia Delphi back in 2016 in February I was at the time being I was in the middle of a process of constructing my own outdoor sauna cabin which would basically it would be a kind of extension to my existing existing like summer home or kind of our villa outside so I'm basically based in Helsinki Finland Finland is the kind of ultimate mecca of the summer culture or at least all the Finnish people like to think so and I had quite recently before that acquired
kind of with our family we bought a new cabin which was equipped with a sounder though but it the Sun wasn't quite much to our liking in fact it was kind of very bad you know how pinyin and I've decided that okay we could probably do some better with the sauna and then somewhere in late 2015 started signing how to create a new one and a better sound well I've been personally using internet since for more than 20 years now and whatever I'm kind of interested in the first thing to do is to fire up Google and go look for information whatever is the topic and trying to follow this parody back in 2015 I tried to find some information about well how do you go about signing this kind of perfect finished sound because I know that by my own experience there were a lot of very bad examples of the Finnish Donna around and I just happened to buy one of those now so I didn't not want to kind of repeat those same mistakes that the previous designers had done and yeah well using Google found some information didn't quite like what I've found then I can decide it that I have to build a sound on anyway so why not make this kind of a documentation project because doing this kind of documentation about design and how to do stuff was somewhat kind of natural for me my background is
I have like I did a doctorate degree in engineering and currently I have still like relationship with the finish altar University in human centered design being that chunk professor over there so I'm kind of been for quite a long time being interested about what sort of aspects make up for good user experience and could usability how do you could products look like feel like so I thought that it would be kind of interesting expedition to figure out that what really makes up for good Finnish sound and I was kind of very convinced at the time being that it shouldn't be that difficult to find the answer it just asked to ask the expert well then I started doing both the design for the sound you know it was on 16 and then also started documenting the things that I found well there was hardly anything to be found online at that time really but I've been started digging up literature I thought I would make some sort of like expert interviews which are always the kind of easiest way to get to know things how unfortunately it turned out that um during the expert interviews was really not that a EEC the first interview I did was with this guy called wrist of Wallachia he's kind of living legends inside Finland for his long extensive work on smoked sounds and their architecture but he was kind of mommy' he was expert on the smoke sauna thing but he couldn't really provide the answers I
was looking for or he provided few answers and left a lot of things too unsettled so I started to looking for further experts but the thing was that I soon found out that the most of the people who'd been for instance contributing we have in Finnish language there's been a what a steady stream of books about sound and sound cultures on the design from 1950s but the people who had kind of a most recently authored books about the Finnish Sun had all deceased within the past 10 years or so so we had like people like a professor at Yale Amma the Capone milla who'd written several books both about sound and sound a stove and things like that but they unfortunately had all kind of passed quite recently so it was impossible to find this kind of expert so this basically meant that I had to kind of complete my own journey but a kind of finishing up the designs for my personal sauna and then kind of continue kind of digging up details about the finished sound design along the way and I think I already back in 2016 I had this kind of vision that I would use this block type of publication sound a low-key identify as an outlet to create this kind of electronic book about how you design a finished sound I think it's an interesting challenge and something we certainly faced with with Finnmark sauna was that this is such a huge amount of misinformation out there online not least in what makes a
proper Finnish sauna so I've I've read things online where people have said Oh a Finnish town is really really hot and really really dry and you know actually the a lot of Finnish traditional Finnish Sounders might be very very humid and certainly it depends on the user as to how they use it typically I found that when female groups go to the sauna together in Finland they have the temperature a little bit lower but with a lot more steam and then guys might go a bit later when it's a bit hotter but you're completely right there's it's refreshing for us to see somebody take a scientific approach to analyzing a number of different traditional viewpoints like I don't think there's one fin in Finland that I've met that agrees on what is the way to build a sound that everyone has like a slightly different approach I don't know whether it's like you know my my grandma makes the best cake the kind of thing you know that my grandfather he built a log sauna in in the woods and it's the perfect sound of steam the perfect low low and and so everybody has a slightly different view of what makes it perfect but what's I mean you'll tell us a little bit more about this but what makes your blog really interesting is
that you actually use a rigorous scientific method to do a lot of the aspects of of what makes a good sound at least I try as far as possible and your writings in saying that I think if you go ask any Finnish person that what is their favorite or the best sound I've ever been so they're usually nominate their own sound at least that's also also what I do but but of course there's some I mean if we look at the things from the Finnish perspective because you have to kind of acknowledge that in Finland which is a country of about like five and a half million people or almost three million saunas we can find quite a big variety of sona's but then again we have some sort of like an shared very like deep cultural understanding that what the Finnish sound is all about and I've kind of these central elements that go into Finnish sauna I think in my opinion is that are in when you go to a Finnish summer you expect to find a place which has benches which has a visible stove which has visible stones there's a ladle and pail which enable this kind of sound our democracy to happen so that basically at least in theory and any anyone's entitled to pick up the ladle and throw some water on stones it's of course considered in kind of public sound settings polite to ask everywhere else in the sound if it's a okay throw in more water on the stove because of course that will
kind of increased the feeling of heat and some people might not want that at that particular moment sore at all that was something I really really admired last time I was in Finland was in the Finnish sound of society I hadn't come across this this kind of sound of culture before this etiquette but we were being guided by he refers to himself as the sound Sherpa but his name is Kimo and he told us that you know as he leaves the room as well you must learn and ask the does anyone want any more lo loo before I leave because obviously as you open the door it releases a lot of heat so it's quite a complex deep ritualistic aspect of sounded that is obvious so obviously so ingrained in second nature to to the Finnish public yeah I think that's that's interesting and although I have to say that in Finland the preservation of the sauna etiquette has been quite exclusively constrained to this like the finished Honor Society okay which have has their can own our own sound effects a ladies which of course make it easier to create your own culture there because in overall we have given so many public sounds all around the place and Finland and also with a great number of private sounds that basically enables us to kind
of spend most of their summer time in private which means that you don't really have to kind of there's no need to have this kind of shared cold and therefore a lot of people never kind of exposed to this type of song I it's a get that you have in this kind of high society so nah it's a shame because I've really enjoyed it I thought it was a heightened sense of community as the you know these Finnish men that I've never met before we're all completely nude and then all of a sudden out you you know from that becomes conversation with someone who I would have just ignored at any other public sound because we had to interact because as you say it was the code I thought that was really nice but I've heard people like in the Finnish sound experience to the great leveler you know like you can be sat next to a judge and a policeman and an army officer and a politician and you wouldn't know because there's nothing that you can wear that differentiates yourself from everybody else and politically speaking there's obviously I mean you'll probably be able to clarify this story but you know people talking about doing business in the sauna and politics in the sauna that there's also something to be said for if you're somewhere that's really hot and humid and you're in a good place but
you're sort of going through an experience which requires some endurance and it's very difficult for you to be flowery with your words or potentially tell some kind of long-winded story much like I am now it's it's fresher yeah you kind of have to say it in the most brasstacks like direct way that you can so yeah I don't know what your thoughts are on that well I think first of all I mean Finland and few of its former leaders so I have been known for this kind of sound of diplomacy mmm particularly the president very long term president dick Coonan who was in office for way too long he was away well we're known for the fact that he had this kind of phone he had like several what you'd call we had this you know some some like luxury sound now or like a sauna for VIPs quite close to the center of Helsinki where he used to take in international guests and including for instance the low thia old Soviet heads of state like Nikita root chef and apparently also he managed to actually sell some stoves and I don't was one of the other key was first the deliveries went to Nikita I should clarify that the idea was is like the I term meaning genuine and qsr meaning stove so genuine sow on a stove and it comes from the the old more traditional
sound setups it looks like a enameled black barrel to anybody who's not seen these before and what they lack in beauty they very much make up for in the experience the steam or the low lieu of the the SONA well you'd say that they have for a pretty classic design because the stove was designed somewhere in like late 1940s and it first appeared in something like 1952 round finished Olympics in Helsinki but yeah we're coming back to this leveling aspect I think then again the the kind of how this precision it gonna use the sound was not necessarily the idea was not that it was necessary that equalizing I mean he was very well known for his preference for extremely hot and hot sauna experiences so he basically also was probably kind of showing off he's it was very strategic yeah so there's you can actually find still online video clips from like late seventies where he's he basically kind of thought that this is saying like like putting everyone else out of the sauna for putting that much water on stove and then he remains there whisking himself and saying that now the proper sound a star when everyone else us being forced
Lee yeah but I think well that's actually yeah this is uh so to some extent this works but I think nowadays the kind of importance of sauna and finished business making has may be reduced for and there's a few few reasons for that one of them probably being the fact that first of all people have unfortunately maybe live less time to do these kind of activities although people do golf so I'm sure yeah makes sense but maybe the more important reason is that we still in Finland have very kind of a clear sex segregation in saunas yeah and that's the amount of for women in politics and businesses in pink increasing it doesn't kind of work anyway anymore in the same way when like back in the days when the guys were making all the decisions and doing all the business so so it's these kind of movements have been going on but I think up as I mentioned mentioned the president cake Conan I think the president can I say it's good example of all kind of basic things that you you're expecting and Finnish sauna or what kind of I think kind of define the Finnish sauna we actually went this there's actually a like a photo or picture from the Sun loggia website where I'm which we could pull up if we get that Cheers as kind of a good reference to things that kind of identify other fingers sauna there we go so he's kind of very basic illustration of the kind of main elements that you expect to see when we're talking about Finnish sauna I said
there are benches rest owns their stove and and there's steam the same is the kind of essence of the Finnish sauna experience really is the loeli loeli yeah yeah which is generated by pouring some water on the hot stones and for those of you who've only read this word before it's l0 with an umlaut y ly so if you were to read it you as an English person you might call it loyally but it's pronounced Lola it's not right yeah hello Lou yeah that's what I'm supposed to say it I'm I'm not personally that kind of particular weather how you want to pronounce this sound now or lo look as long as you are able to enjoy the experience you get out of it her regardless of how you say things but I think this is the kind of essence if you can compare the different kind of sounds around the world people's perceptions of sauna the gunner for possibility to create the steam make load happen is the kind of the important thing about the Finnish sauna this this means that we can for instance hide away the stove which would make it impossible to create low we can hardware we can prevent people from having their pail and ladle in order to create the steam it's supposed to be that everyone can do that it's not in finished acculturation preserved at the any kind of sound of my straw Meister
who's supposed to take care of everyone's Garret yeah I should clarify as well and in Germany they have these sound and Meister rituals where auto sound a master we're almost typically German that at time time interval so every half an hour in a different sound in an establishment there will be a guy who comes in who pours water on and they're often use sound a sense so you know they might say all today's sound has watermelon scent in it and then they use like towels or these big fans to fan heat and steam over and it's also a bit of an endurance thing as well I think as once everybody's in there they all feel like okay I have to sit this out and you know I'm a frequent to sound use and I've been in a few of these where like I'm sitting there going I really got to get out of here but I can't be the one to leave and then this all these like people like particularly if you go in there and you go and sit on the top bench if it's one of these big German sounds where they got like four tiers of benching going to sit right on the top bench like yeah I do this all the time and then I'm just there with this big fan like blowing hot air at you and if anybody's ever like blown gently on somebody in the sound oh they all know that it's it just makes it insanely hot so using a big fan or a towel will make it really hot for you and they do things like come you know they might give you some honey to rub on your skin or some
fruit to eat yeah there's all kinds of funny stuff that goes in in the Central European thing yeah I think in Finland partially to the fact that we've got so a lot of like private Sounders the finished sound culture and some habits have developed into you I'd say like really moderate or you know kind of easy decision or easy direction in a way that I've recently been writing a book which is supposed to be coming out very soon in Finland inhabit here yeah there's a there's something on display already in advance and in which I'm basically like calling that the lolu is like the obedient servants of the finished sound a goer in a way that we basically expect that it does its works and we just kind of sit sit around and wait yes for things to happen and we well in worst case we might be able to require to do the pouring of the water but that's all and then we just kind of sit and enjoy the results whereas us as you've described things happen in other like big places where where there's where there are sounds like in Germany or Russia people behave with a little bit differently yeah so bring it back to its analog year page just here that we've got up the benches are a critical aspect
of you know the sound design what makes her the Finnish sauna and I'm just wondering whether you can talk us through the you know the really critical points in bench configuration or design which is important for the experience in the sauna yes certainly I think we can think about the benches we can think about the kind of old history of the Finnish sauna design because the Finnish Sun has been around for more for longer than history that anyone can recall and I think that some people argue it's been about since the Neolithic with like sweat lodge tents or you know if it's particularly you look at cultures like the Sami migratory herds well yeah well actually the Sami people haven't the Nordic our tribes haven't really you be using the sauna at all that's interesting but the Finland has been kind of intersection of the east and west and particularly people mostly expect that the kind of from the first origins of the sonic culture have arrived from from the Russian direction from the east so anyhow it kind of goes like the history of the world itself the sound now goes back about at least one thousand maybe two thousand years anyhow one of the kind of important things about the Finnish sounded construction how far in past and you look is to understand the gonna be sick principles of physics that govern how the sounds work and there we have you can kind of if you can imagine the most most simple kind of sound I'm possible is that would
be some sort of like if you set up a fireplace just throw up a pile of wood and start burning it I went to put some stones in it well in the final stage is to heat up the stones and then you kind of build some kind of tent around it that's basically already might classify some sort of like pneumatic makeshift sonam the important thing is that you get some sort of like a cover around the this heated thing at the stove or the pile of rocks and one thing that you everyone kind of immediately understands is that the heat it's always kind of going upwards the heat and humidity rise above the kind of colder air and therefore if you kind of create this kind of a specific enclosed space like the sound a room what you're gonna need is to do you want to elevate people as close as possible to the ceiling because that the ceiling is the place where all here is I mean you can achieve pretty much equal temperature in the are in the room from the ceiling to the floor but that takes quite a long time so if you are kind of doing this relatively short-lived sound experience you might want to make sure that they won't ask what I could reach to the highest part the space that is being heated up so therefore you need the benches on your diagram here is it erroneous that you've
put a pitched roof there because yeah yeah that's actually that's or that's kind of for like a bad illustration from my part I actually have the answer yeah on the website you'll find another article about Sona roofs yeah which basically shows you how how you're supposed to do that and actually that kind of model like we have that pitch groove is it's mentioned as one of the bad examples of you know supposed to do that in principle it's that can also work out if particle if it's not that if the angle it's not like if it's like this yeah actually the very good model our force on a roof is if you kind of build this kind of rounded dome shape okay because one of the actions in the finished sound on that roof in a roof has is that it kind of guides steam to go around so actually you get the best possible experience if you have like absolutely rounded shape which that it allows to the the steams you kind of mix and move around very freely so that would be the kind of ideal I didn't know that sound oh yeah of course it's it's kind of difficult to achieve with wooden construction if you do like concrete or something else but you can kind of approximate it and it's not really kind of the differences in that but bad but I think in wooden construction the kind of traditional very good model this way you have like two folded format we can do at some point I have a little have a look at it from from a foreman website yeah
as well but um yeah so if we kind of think about the kind of important things about sound in my book I've basically divided the kind of essence of the finished sound design into four different sections and like these sections are the heat air quality sound room structures and then the fourth one is the sound culture and habits and I think the the heat is really kind of essence of the sound I mean that's uh that's really something that everyone gets yes and you need to have the heat yeah yeah I also like the kind of a metaphor for talking about the end sound of stove as the engine of the sound and then the sound of stove that's kind of engine oil well we could actually pull up another picture this I've got a pretty good collection of different type of sound religious imagery on interest here's a Pinterest board which should be actually this is lacking the English title I probably got tweaked a little bit supposed to be like the finished sound stove's okay basically here we have a pretty good collection of different kind of photos that illustrate the variety of sound stoves that we have on market in Finland you can freely scroll downwards we have a lot of different kind of varieties on the market nowadays and so the sounds topaz is something that has been commercialized in Finland in 1950s and we still have on the market more than 20 different companies almost 30
brands of stoves so you can find all kinds of designs and I overall I think the customers in Finland around the world have we benefited hugely from the kind of some design efforts that people have been putting into making the stoves look a little bit more modern at least on the outside but I said the sound of stove it has several important properties in order to kind of be functional within space I think the most important of them all is that it has to be appropriately effective in terms of the heat power output so we basically need to match the size of the room with the size of the stove and power of it yeah there are a lot of things that kind of influence this but on any kind of retailer who understands anything about the stoves you get this thing right that's that's kind of easy above the math yeah but that's actually not enough as you as we can see that all the finished stoves have or well actually some of the stoves like in like we're still looking here few of the stoves which have this kind of a concealed space or stones you don't actually see the stones but they still exist inside this in the side slope so the three examples you got there was the steam ready the steam master and there's also an ally to us in the middle yeah yeah so these are the gonna bow they're
like a lot of variations of how you can kind of form half this stone mass and the psalmist is kind of important when we remember remember that one of the important qualities of the Finnish sauna is the ability to create lowly and you can recreate lowly unless you have like some hot surface and hot Sun kind of stored heat which can be used to evaporate water and so basically we have like inside these stoves we have few basic variations some of the variations are like we have like the most common variations of stones nowadays in Finland are such that they so-called continuously heated which basically means that if electric heaters or which are plugged into the electricity network you turn the heater on and you keep it on as long as you use the sauna or if it's wood-fired you basically are required to you start hitting it maybe one hour in advance you put in more firewood and once you keep on using the sounder you put in more we're done until new kind of decide to stop and then you let it cool down yeah because the the more traditional style of heaters like we discussed earlier for example was the I Tokyo s yeah I didn't realize until I actually went and tried one in Finland that you you heat up the stones
and then put the fire out and and the stones stay hot for quite some time because it works like a big storage heater is yes yeah that's the idea that's like heat storage stove or single wood-fired stove whatever you want to call it yeah the this is an original idea partically that kind of first finished saunas we're like this smoke sauna was the original Finnish sauna type which basically meant when I was previously made them a metaphor for creating a like a small fire house in would say just basically you could say that it was basically the same thing but you just had the fire inside a building yeah unconstrained so you basically had all the smoke going around smoke went through this and then escape from some small hatch in somewhere inside the sauna building but not during use the fire goes helpful when I talk about savasana or smoke sound or to to English people they're like what wouldn't you just suffocate in so yeah we should kind of yeah that is correct I think although that's actually that wouldn't necessarily happen which is kind of funny thing because people had people when they heat up the sound now they they managed to do that without suffocating and actually the like Native Americans had this sweat lodge tradition in which they were actually burning the fire s they were in the lodge yeah so it's it's possible to achieve this kind
of effect as well but it's definitely much more comfortable if you don't do that yes yeah and less risky in order to achieve than this kind of proper so my experience with this type of stoves are the minimum requirement is that you need to have adequate capacity of thermal storage mass whether it's rocks inside the sound stove or just a whole construction the I took us example for it's just we're just here still looking at its kind of combination of both they have like internal mass out of like bricks which store heat and then the sounds those sound stones themself inside us though so um and if you want to try to do this you of course need a appropriate number so there's a range of different stones that you can use in those heaters as well yeah certainly I think I'd like like to say that um in order to kind of achieve this kind of capacity to for instance to enjoy the sound without heating it up you need to kind of have the appropriate amount and it is stored and in order to do that there are basically just two things you can change or baby maybe like three things first of all is to have enough peak volume of the stones then you can change the kind of thermal capacity in the stones and third you can sometimes change the amount of heat or the mother temperature that you heat the
stones up to and of course the the stones are kind of a visible thing and as I compare them to the kind of engine oil in a car motor that that's kinda I think the important part of this thing is that first of all um it means that it's it's kind of it's moving part it's part that kind of sustained stress which means that it has to be replaced every now and then but it also means that is something that you can kind of experiment with if you feel that it's not performing like you want to in Finland we basically have be using different type of stones that we've been mining from the nature for a long time yeah before this was like the production of sound rocks and stones so became commercial business people just picked up the stones from like beaches and sea sides and rivers yeah I mean I should make a comment about the US sour culture briefly that particularly the Upper Peninsula Michigan community which has a sort of essentially it's the highest proportion of fins out or genetic fins outside Finland they're a lot of the sound as I see built they're using like a pioneer wood stove was like a handful of grout large yeah large granite pebbles then that they're generally they
seem to say that the pebbles from the shore of Lake Superior which I believe now is frowned upon because you know there'll be no pebbles left for anybody but from what I gather you know they just have a few handful of those on like a wood-burning stove but that's granite and having read your blog I know what happens to granite if you use that so I've always wondered yeah the the crown it is so of course it's been very its popular rock in Finland it's very easily find and it's not really suitable for Silas dollars and that's the unfortunate thing so even though people were kind of picking up this kind of stone stones that they were able to find and sometimes maybe even doing some sort of rudimentary testing in order to figure out if it actually works for Sona now this when we've basically been in this kind of more like commercially provided stones and stoves for several decades we basically bent down to the fact that we had for a very long time like since 1950s we had this particular type of rock I like this is like Ignatia igneous igneous in this rock or magmatic rock from the family buried peridotite peridotite inside yeah that was very popular yeah a long time in 1970s this was almost exclusively used because it has several good properties it it's very
effective in storing heat it's also kind of it conducts heat which means that it you can get quite a good lolu out of it because you get the energy inside the rock transmitted into the water quickly but it also is it's durable you can kind of use it for quite a long time it actually turns into being browned pretty quickly but doesn't kind of affect it it stays in one piece for a long period of time and it was good but unfortunately mining it became kind of difficult over the time and it was kind of a lot of the main source is ready pleaded so people will then switch to different solutions nowadays the whole whole of Finland and the Sun powered with this so-called olivine idea parsing rock which is some olivine diabase in English yeah so this is basically from the same family of stones but has a little bit different properties most of all it's not as good as the old one but it's good enough and it's a way available in different sizes different forms and particularly for very cheap so no one in Finland should have any reason so you're not to replace their stones repeatedly and to use anything else yeah it's kind of commercial you created rocks did you say people have moved away from the peridotite because of scarcity oh yeah
yes that's the biggest problem that basically well I've got this core very tiny sample with me but the thing is that basically only thing you can buy from a union and actually you cannot can even get this from most of the stores but in places where you can buy this fuse supermarkets the sizes aren't really suitable for anything else but the electric heaters because uh generally speaking a different type of sound of stoves call for a little bit different type of rocks basically the bigger the stove the bigger the stalls I heard the big I Tokyo s110 so they're the biggest size at the finish town of society outside Helsinki uses peridotite but they're these stones were massive really huge I think they have a secret quarry somewhere everything well yeah no that's actually see it's not not that kind of a big secret well where the rocks come from but the supplier has got a very limited capacity to produce anything so I think they basically sell most of the stuff that they create yeah for the sound Society but yeah if you just go went there and asked to buy something you'd probably get me get something in return if you have your own truck with you to transport the stones but basically the fact that the the good old period side has been kind of vanishing people have been coming up with different alternatives one of them is so-called sir Sunstone we've got basically two
different varieties in Finland this is the kind of more respectable one from producer called Kyrgyz and this has become very popular they've this is basically like a ceramic material which can be made into very different various forms and shapes and sizes this is kind of created in very high temperature I think like 1, 300 degrees which basically means that it will withstand almost all imaginable sound circumstances very well and the only problem is that it becomes pretty expensive because since there's there all parts of the process which require hand manufacturing and then a lot of energy gets used when it's being baked got people listening who can't see see the example it looks kind of like a potato with weird trying triangular indentations all over it yeah the indentation is actually a part part of the design in a sense that they believe that area yeah they increase the surface area and some people believe that it allows because there's the important part of how the heating of the sound works is that when you heat up the heat is coming from the stove and particle in electric heaters it's important that there's air flowing through the stove because what happens is when you start heating something up you create this kind of rising of flow of air loop like hot air balloons or whatever you own the
thing about it this kind of uplift and this means that inside the stove there's always air moving quite quickly and one of the things is that this kind of mmm adding more surface making this I mean this thing I'm holding in my hand could be perfectly rounded ball but then it would have the minimal amount of surface so this kind of basically creates more opportunities for this thing to heat up when it's inside the stove mm-hmm so that kind of helps okay the down biggest out downside is that it's even though it might be like ten times as more durable in some circumstances it's not really forever but it at least 20 times as expensive as the olivine diabase for the same weight yeah and does it actually produce like a different feeling Valu well I think people have very strong opinions about the type of steam produced and for one this doesn't really look too attractive in any way this looks like potato you say at least and so I think but what this has if you think about the kind of objective properties that we can actually measure these are more lightweight than natural stones and the other thing is that they don't conduct heat quite as I as much yeah as stones so as a consequence the steam might be a
little bit different might be not that aggressive which sometimes is good sometimes it's bad but I think there's I mean in Finland for instance I person and then do a combination so does that be using these ceramic stones at the bottom of the stove in my wood fire stove which they are kind of enduring the most stress and then I've basically piled them up and covered them with another stove stone which I like this is called Vulcan eat coconut who cannot yeah this is more like akin to the Buried start and what your pool I like this this is kind of the darkest stone that you can find on the market yeah and it performs at least as well as the olivine diabetes so it's it's kind of good choice and it's not more expensive either yeah so it's good yeah I didn't ask last week for a good friend of ours in the British silence Society we filled the the I guess though the well of the Stone Age stone area in a kata Lewis toe with the catalyst and then top dressed it with olivine diabase and he remark that the lolu felt really incredible so is there is it something that you can blend if yeah there's no kind of rules against that mommy there are very few rules that would actually apply when the sound of
the Sun but few there are but in the rocks I think the most important thing is to keep them in good shape because what will happen is that natural stones will start this in integrating sooner or later yeah and they will come then crumble into smaller and smaller parts and that's partically problematic for the electric stoves because it can lead to the destruction of the stove sooner or later and so on you know the longevity you wanna keep yes it's changed i am i must add as well we're talking about like the nitty-gritty of trying different sound of stones here but as a general rule of thumb one of the things i always say to people is that the more stones and the less metal the better the steam well i think this i kind of captures one of the myths that have been going around in finland as well for quite a long time but uh mmm i person don't quite believe that this holds much true if you kind of look at back from the for the pinterest page that we had you know about the stoves show and then you can tell me that how many stoves can you see which don't have any metal to them sure I mean talking about the I Tokyo s is all all metal yeah this lot of stones inside yeah there are I think what you to sort of clarify the point if you're pouring water onto a stove and it's hitting metal my general experience is that you get a much sharper hit of steam and thus you know and if you can
get that water onto the stones then you know that's a much more soft okay what would I say that I mean there are some people who firmly believe that there might be some sort of like a negative magical properties to iron for instance right inside the stones whereas for instance in Russia it's not uncommon to find stoves that are basically equipped instead of stones they have iron right and pieces of iron inside but of course um the iron has very different qualities than typical stones but I think you can get very good finish some experience when you use stones but I wouldn't kind of disqualify a stove for the reason that it has some metal parts and if you were strong that a single metal yeah yeah it's it's kind of undeniable that you've you had half hot metal parts as part of the stove but uh it's better if you can cover them up with a lot of stones yeah because the temperature differences and as well as because of course the you definitely get different type of lolu if you throw it on like hot iron instead of rock for several reasons so um I kind of agree with you but I I wouldn't be kind of superstitious about avoiding sure sure I mean metal it's certainly true that um unless you go for
like a smoke sound and you can't get away from there being metal on the stove and you know every pretty much every heater that's installed these days is metal but I was talking a bit more about the ratio between you know generally speaking you find essentially around the stone cage particularly those heaters that have less chance of the water having that direct contact with the metal what I kind of liken it to from my perspective as a sound of steam is when I get water onto the metal directly it's a lot sharper faster heat a hit of steam because that water hitting the metal that like instantly boils off whereas when you're pouring the water over the stones then the steam builds much more gradually therefore yeah I mean that's that's totally true so we if you have like a chance for like choosing between two otherwise similar stoves yeah that might be a concern but otherwise I wouldn't kind of rank that very high as well as a kind of property of the stove because I think that there's one interesting part which I've become aware quite recently is that if you kind of if you have a stove which has very like a tall space and volume for the rocks it's how are you yeah yeah maybe more
enclosed than the tower heater but anyways if you kind of very slowly pour down the water so it kind of goes lower the parts of this stove you basically when the steam when the water evaporates in lower parts of the rock space we basically has more chances to gather additional heat when it goes around the stones so you basically might actually get more like heat out of the same steam if you manage to generate the steam by pouring it like lower inside the stove and they actually used to be there so there's an actually photo of this one particular stove called our rink okie was our Sun stove it's not anymore it's pretty tall stove where we could scroll downwards maybe on this page I think it's actually there in the middle a little bit back upwards yeah they're in the middle column if that one we can see it's kind of pretty huge mom like hold oo-on yeah yeah and I think they then incorporate this kind of it still exists in some Russian or Russian stove design so there's kind of like a channel inside the stove which leads the water into the middle part of the stove we would we've recently come across a little gadget called the ruler oh yeah yeah I've also tested that one that they've been these guys have been very excellent marketing the idea but yeah I
don't think once more it makes the difference but the difference is I think unfortunately a little bit too small in most circumstances to make any okay close that principle yeah yeah that's the principle is the same yeah I don't kind of disagree with the basic principles but the devices were just far too small in order to be effective but you can do so various Finns have told me the the slope or method but anyone who doesn't have a specific device or something that can deliver the water deep in the stones the if you just put poor ladle really slowly in the same location the idea being that the surface stones cool down and allow the water to trickle deeper and deeper into the stove until it gets right down to the stones like you're saying yeah that gives you a good head of steam yeah that's really nice yeah but I think now that we've kind of started following the steam I think we could move forward a little bit in the discussion in terms that I said in my book I was basically starting from the heat which we get out of the stove but it doesn't kind of end there the steam is actually important part in dealing with the second big factor which is the air quality because you know as I'm saying that the creation of the steam lolu is integral part of the finished sound tradition and it does several kind of
things happen when you create low loop the lonely or creates it's got a feeling of increased heat and I'm gonna go to details of the physics behind this phenomenon but everyone who's experienced it knows that it's true for several reasons one of the reasons that's not I'd say you it feels like the temperature of the asana is rising but in fact the temperature stays almost the same but instead the fact that we've when we boiled water in a kettle for instance we basically need to consume some amount of electricity or gas in order to do that that's kind of energy that goes into vaporizing the water and when we do that in Sona and then we go on the sound bench the suddenly there's water on our skin which we usually interpret as being a sweat but in fact only probably half of the water that appears on our skin is actually wet sweat the rest is actually the same water that we just poured on stove which starts to condensate on our skin and this condensation process basically delivers the same energy that I draw from the stove and releases on our skin which makes it kind of prickle and heat up our skin and it also kind of heats up for instance wooden surfaces which have this
kind of hydro hydro static I grow something properties okay basically they the wooden surface also absorb water to some extent yeah and heat up yes this is lookin away and so that's um that's kind of said that's a important part that happens but uh also a few other things and besides the feeling of heat we also get additional like convection which basically means that the circulation of air inside the sauna room accelerates because when when the water evaporates and we have hello Luke it basically means that the aphorism if we pour 1 liter of water is quite a lot we get approximately a 101 cubic cubic metre steam yeah and that means that there will be that kind of drives the existing air to escape the sound room if it can sometimes you might even if you have like a loosely hatched door the door might open these are kind of signs that there's something happening in the air temporarily and so one part of why you feel more hot with with the steam is the fact that the air started going more quicker around this kind of temporal like wind almost like you said it it was if someone close to your ear hearing is so an eye you'll definitely feel it yeah
so it's a little bit similar kind of kissing happens with low Lu but so solo is actually kind of one part of achieving good air quality in solemn but unfortunately not really enough you can fix it you can think about its sound you guys here at Finnmark have to be making sure that the UK sounds would also be properly insulated and sealed and vapor barrier barrier eyes - yes and that's all in violation yeah that's fine and dandy but you can kind of imagine that if you if one pulls like a plastic bag on your head yeah I start breathing your you will be feeling very uncomfortable very quickly and basically if you create this kind of a sound particle if it's a relative small one say like under ten cubic meters it's not that much space to live in for a very long time but if it is shared by several people so basically you can't really have this kind of plastic back feelings like the sound instead you need to have some sort of like ventilation you have to have like air moving in and out of sound up frequently in Finland we've had some sort of tries to define how much that would be the kind of official regulations that we've had in the past have had stated very different figures I'd say that from practice we can tell that it's we'd probably need to be able
to change the air inside the sauna at least two or three times an hour maybe even more but then again it's so that the the absolute amount of air that goes in sonna is not enough to describe how things go because you can basically have one hole for the air coming in and the other hole for it going out if it Garrett just directly passes by it's not good yeah so with regard to ventilation to what extent is the location affect the air quality as you're saying well the location it's kind of important I or I'd rather say that the most important thing is the consequence of the location insensate what we looking forward to have is two right mixing of the fresh air with the existing air and of course then that we kind of taking out the old air or the bad air from the right location because so there are a few things that can again and quite frequently go wrong with this thing first of all if you think about the outgoing air I've seen too many examples in Finland of this kind of ventilation systems where you might have this kind of outgoing then somewhere high up in the ceiling and in the worst case what happens is that uh like I had in Y one of our own apartment buildings we had a
sound which there was a very level of ventilation this kind of mechanical ventilation was very high the volume was excessive and there was like one huge outgoing then just in the ceiling and it always suck sucked immediately all load out of the rooms so you it was impossible to get any loaded yeah so even though on paper it might have looked that everything is okay because the number of or the amount of ventilation was at least adequate I'd say excessive it was up to me but yeah the location was extremely bad yeah I'm not that's not to say that uh at some point it might be actually useful to have this kind of vent up high in ceiling we we often call that like a drawing vent yeah or dump in so after use you can open it up so that you can dry off all the benching and make sure the LAN lasts as long as possible I think that's very important part early wood-fired sounds also in sounds which have this kind of natural ventilation because they're like paid to principally very different solutions for achieving the good quality are the mechanical ventilation and the natural ventilation is kind of a little bit more trickier in Finland we've basically even have like or quite credible scientific research made out of the mechanical ventilation but the natural ventilation is more or less of
mystery and very commonly not that well understood or implemented so when I do kind of in Finland give out advice about how do you create a ventilation most of the questions usually concern natural ventilation which is so much more easy to you kind of first screw up yeah one of the things is that it's it's because it's an it's invisible thing you don't read kind of see if it works or if it doesn't work you can have the holes in the wall as many as you like but you can't reconfirm it's not that kind of straightforward to say that if they're going to do the job or not so I basically for my book I made a small collection about like four or five different kind of solutions that you might have in order to kind of firm create good well-functioning natural ventilation because it's awesome particularly if you have this kind of wood-burning stove which is kind of continuously fired so using it while you are you hitting the Sun all the time while using it it basically provides very good basis for having excellent ventilation because the sound of stove itself it consumes so in order to burn one kilogram of firewood you basically need about 10 cubic meters worth of air and that's already quite a lot if you can think about it depending on the size
of the room people know in typically all the air in this you usually consume in an hour almost 10 kilos of firewood that means like 100 cubic meters of air has to go through yeah the so so well if you kind of fend configure the inlets properly yeah it's very easy way to achieve good quality in the zone but if you don't do that properly it's basically all goes to waste because it doesn't get if there are no guarantees that it will automatically succeed yes unfortunately a lot of people in Finland have also been struggling with the system but he in short are the air quality is something that you can achieve or Witkin good ventilation design it's absolutely necessary in order to be creating Joya balsamic series which is I mean we see it a lot and it you know I'm sure we could take you to some some soreness in in the UK here which won't have any ventilation and I've certainly been out to sites where they even blocked the gap under the door with a piece of like plastic and I was like why have you done that they said all the users were complaining that there was too much air coming in through this gap and I was like oh my goodness this is and it was a public sound so yeah in the worst cases we've seen where we had to remove one recently
and whilst removing this sound I came across the ventilation hole underneath the benches and I thought oh great there is someone else in England is actually doing ventilation and I opened this loose the vent and directly behind it was a block wall it went nowhere just cosmetic ventilation so it's like oh well this is how it should look you know so no and this is like with the heat it's one of those things that it's really difficult for me to communicate to somebody particularly somebody who is speculative in their interest or finished sooner ie that they've heard about it they like the idea of it they've maybe tried one or two so they don't really have a connoisseurs appreciation of what a good sound experience maybe is and you know they have to take my word for it when I say look you want to make sure this is properly ventilated you want to make sure that you've got you know most of the heaters will tell you how much fresh air per hour they need and so the idea of an unventilated sounder is not just a non pleasant experience to sit in because it will just feel really stuffy but also it's not very safe because you know you also need fresh air so yeah I think the existence of a good air quality based on ventilation is absolutely necessary in order to have an enjoyable sounding experience I personally take the gas the
kind of number one measure of good sound is the duration of how long you can actually stay in there yeah of course there are kind a lot of personal preferences in terms of how kind of what sort of temperatures and how much humidity people can stand and so forth but I think it's it's very bad sign if you have to kind of leave the sauna which has relatively low temperature after one or two minutes hmm then you know that there's something wrong with yeah because if the air quality is good people can usually sustain even pretty high temperatures for a long period of time yeah but uh it's it's definitely a crucial matter for kind of fun what is it tell a telltale sign if if someone sat in a sauna and they they don't know what they're looking for what's the tell-tale sign in the way that they're feeling in terms of whether it's a good ventilation or bad ventilation well I think a set like a good sign about good ventilation and everything else being in quite good shape is the fact that you can it feels good that you can actually stay there for a long period yeah because it's of course it thinks if you have never been to a sauna I it probably is somewhat shocking experience whether the sound ice objects we should be speaking good or bad when you go there first time but if you have had any kind of prior exposure to sound um I think you pretty quickly figure out that if it's kind of comfortable he or not I
mean it's no secret from us that our our own sort of sound enlightenment prior to that the what we'd tried in the UK I mean currently a lot of people's experience of sound is like something that they go to to tolerate for 10 minutes maybe after a workout in a gym and they consume it like Victorians would consume medicine like I'm sitting here because I know this is good for me but I don't enjoy this at all and I think that's such a shame because when when we tried proper sauna in Finland it was like whoa you know I can stay in here 30 minutes and be like you know and go between a cold plunge and then back in and and I can enjoy this whole experience over the city you know over a series of hours and then afterwards I mean people talk about the euphoria and the the sort of the serotonin hit and certainly from a medical perspective this kind of like huge boost in your immune system that's you know your body chemistry kind of goes crazy after you've had a really good sound experience and it's such a shame because that's clearly what all this health hype is about and sadly like people are kind of dosing themselves on unpleasant sound experiences because they don't know any different and because the market because they don't know any different the market kinda doesn't demand that I often sort of liken it to kind of being a bit nauseous you know like if you go into this sauna and it's like so dry that when
you're breathing you're having to humidify the air with your own breath and there's no vents in that you kind of start to feel this kind of sickness and then that's yeah well this of course there are different aspects also through your why you get this kind of issues one of them being the fact that if you kind of heat up a sauna or like electric saunas can be very easily heated up or saved 24 / 7 you do basically create so one so like try environment that it's very difficult to kind of achieve very nice level of humidity yeah or it becomes easily easily kind of excessive yeah because the more you raise the temperature the moon kind of the higher among the higher absolute quantity of water you need to use in order to achieve similar kind of relative humidity you know comes a little bit difficult yes so I think we could have a quick look at this a picture from one of the few very credible studies and film done around the air quality and ventilation this basically shows you how you do things right if you're building something which has mechanical ventilation basically these principles pretty simple you have like in this simplified version you basically have one inlet which is located above the stove and then you
have one outlet which is located approximately on level of the lowest bench or this kind of feed level benches what this will create is that this kind of a this ventilation guarantees that the air incoming fresh air will be mixed with the existing air and it also kind of draws the the fact that there's the outlet is in quite low level basically means it's sucking in the air from the upper part to lower which makes makes the temperature gradient in the sound also more favorable because for instance if you reverse this setup and have the in Inlet air in the floor and the outgoing in the ceiling you basically get the warm region only in very high above in the sauna so in this case this kind of a combination both makes the heat very nice and also and gives you fresh air so that's a mechanical ventilation so this is mechanical again since the first forced air in yes yeah and this is actually in Finland this is something that we would recommend if you're building your sound in a part of your apartment because the issues with having kind of natural ventilation particularly inside a residential building is that it's very difficult to guarantee that you get be able to get a
get rid of all the humidity afterwards which will then create all kinds of problems and you down we want to have and deal with that yeah so if your house is equipped with mechanical ventilation make sure that you actually plug your sauna into the same system so ah yes is it also um sorry I digress slightly but is it coincidence that in this image it seems to be quite good at representing the lure of lonely yeah yeah this is actually for for some some reason this is how it happens to be also a nice illustration of the law of lowly which basically it's not the law of lowly was originally described by this finish I know you'd call him maybe anthropologists or kind of a scientist but he he was basically who wrote a very I'd say funny book about the sound of cultures inside Finland I was outside in the world and it wasn't supposed to be taken very seriously but the law of lowly still persists and basically it says one thing and the one thing is that when you're sitting in summer you should have all the sound of stoves beneath the level of your toes and that is the heater the top edge of the heater should be lower than the top of the lower bench yes yes that is correct and actually
some people like to say that it will probably be preferable if you even had lower bench maybe like 10 centimeters higher and then the rock level now this this low of load seems to apply mostly in the occasions where you have natural ventilation because um it's not pretty kind of exactly the description of physics how things go because if you kind of heat up the sound for very long period of time particle if you have mechanical ventilation the sound will heat up quite evenly from very low parts to the bottom and actually there's one very interesting variation in Finland which is called like air circulation Sona in which hi the idea is that you place this kind of air are sucking outlet directly above the stove and then you kind of captured the steam and then you redirect the steam to the lower part of sounder where it comes then goes up you do this kind of underneath you basically build channels behind the sound of paneling to do this funny circulation thing that allows you to kind of achieve almost like 95% of the sound I will have identical circumstances for having having steam and learning it's a little bit expensive to kind of create but it's also basically one of the best ways to build this kind of wheelchair-accessible right
I'm solemn because it leaves only about like two three inches from the bottom from from the four colder than rest of the SONA and you'll basically have some kind of loaded experience all through the room without creating having to even create benches so basically at the law of low loom is it's very good principle when you bar building a say like a simple wood-fired sound on backyard or at your cabin but it doesn't kind of strictly apply you know other circumstances but if we can think about we now move on to the third part and in my book my third section of my book are concerns basically all the structures that you have inside a sauna room and the most important structures are actually already somewhat discussed and they are visible in this photo as well and they are the benches and ceiling it's kind of funny that that both both these elements actually play a role in how things in the sound will feel of course the particles the benches are probably the thing that I make most prominent we could actually have a look at Pinterest once more there's a like Pinter sport called sound benches sound unload dead which we can find which has a lot of living kind of illustrations for different types of Sona Sona benches I'm
sure if it might be a pin on AB Toria Pinterest board if you go back yeah it's under the Pinterest board under the sound of lugia I go one more back so you're on yeah now we should be able to find something that looks like bench is there list yeah sonal out that don't that one yeah so uh sound of benches it's like crucial thing in a normally operating sound because we have to have this kind of elevation in order to be in the place where the steam goes and it also is it's kind of like a good the sound of benches is also an opportunity to provide a little bit different kind of sound environment across the sound room there are a lot of different kind of variations of how you can achieve this and of course the sound of benches are very central to the aesthetics of the whole sound of room because you can do them in so many different kind of ways but they will almost always dominate how the thing will look like eventually in Finland you can find a lot of different kind of designs and if you can kind of look go look internationally you'll find even more examples in Finland we basically have very few basic variations which usually occupy at least one one side of the floor nowadays in past ten fifty years in Findley we've got the models
that have basically cover almost all of the SONA area have become very popular but so there are the kind of alternatives are just numerous there are a lot of materials that materials you can use but uh I think I personally kind of the important stuff about the sauna bench is that is the relative height before you discuss the law of Lulu but the kind of most the key figure the number one thing is to take into consideration that what is the height from the ceiling to the uppermost bench because if you like to high ceiling in relatively relatively to the high bench you basically never going to get low Lu and it's very gonna be very energy inefficient of heating up the whole space so busy I also have some where we're not going to look at that but there are examples in a board called Sounders designed to fail in which I've collected few examples of sourness which have like benches on the very low level and then you have like a ceiling going high up yeah because it's basically what's called folding to the wrong direction yeah so it would be technically or physically impossible to get any steam in that comes down so the distance between the benches and the ceiling is the most important thing for the functional thing of course you also have to take into consideration material
in Finland people use wood wood is good because it's us it works as kind of insulation it doesn't conduct heat very quickly if you try to build this kind of legend but the Russian people wanted to have as a war compensation after Second World War they ordered a bench is made out of copper I don't think that that's a legend because I think at some point Finnish people didn't believe that or Bieber Russians know anything about sauna that was not pretty correct but uh all kind of wooden materials are pretty good for sound benches of course there are a lot of they've got many dimensions but a important thing is that you should not be able to should be able to kind of rest on the sound of benches constantly which means you need some sort of dimensions depending on what you want to lie down your back if you want to kind of be sitting there comfortably then it's the kind of basic dimensions how many people you're trying to fit in in Finland we basically think that you needs like 60 centimeters which for every person on board and so forth so there's different kind of like principles that help and rules that help out to design the sauna so up on the screen we've got some examples of different wood materials the can be used on the benching there's quite a few examples of Aspern up there some spruce some sound apply this Kelo or dead wood spruce there as well do you
have any preference over sort of over what types of wood are used on the benching from your experience well I personally choose for my own son arm I choose untreated Aspen which is it's the lightest material both in terms of weight and also in terms of color well the untreated Aspen is kind of it looks very nice when it's new but the problem is that it gets signs of aging it creep in very quickly yeah and it's very kind of sensitive so you have to be able to try it out very quickly or otherwise you will get it'll get darker and gray and spots like that it doesn't kind of makes me yeah it doesn't kind of technically it's not damaged structurally yeah it's kind of solid but it still doesn't look the same so yeah I'm I don't think I would recommend anyone who's very sensitive about how the sound looks like yeah other than that is very nice material I think a person maybe like to draw the attention to the more fundamental question that can you actually make the sound interior out of anything else but wood right because of course the wood and this kind of massive walls of would have been the traditional choice and finished sonar industry for ages and I
think I'd say that 95% of or at least all the finished soundness have been traditionally wood paneled one way or the other nowadays we fire more recently we've had have seen the entrance of more like glass elements in saunas which have like the drawbacks so ideal and then I think heat yeah but then again there's been also the question that can you kind of create the sound of benches out of for instance this kind of ceramic ceramic tiles or materials like they use in steam rooms wouldn't I get really hot yeah the issue is that uh it's not really kind of suitable material for sauna even though it's basically very rough resistance and it's easy to clean but the problem is that in order to kind of keep the sound very hygiene hygienic you need to achieve all the surfaces must should be kind of go about 55 degrees Celsius in order to kill the germs yeah and already around like 4045 degrees this kind of non wooden material start to feel very hot so actually if you try to do we have like in Finland a few public saunas which have like we've actually had just a very like recently launched sauna which has basically ceramic benches or this type of material problem is that you have to cover them up or alternatively you have to install like a wooden dock no sorry yeah you
have to cover them with duct port or then you have to install this kind of radiator or what it's called water cooling system so that it actually decreases the temperature but that problem is that then it comes like total polar ripple to sit on yeah but it becomes a an unhygenic yeah so that's not something that I would recommend because the other thing is that the bench structure also in influences the circulation of air and so it will probably influence somewhat what's what type of lolu you will get in sauna because the the more kind of old less the bench structures actually obstruct the flow of the air the kind of more movement of the air from a lowly you will actually yet yeah I've been to some sort of especially older Finnish houses in the countryside where they actually put like wooden benches upper and lower in a concrete room and it although the sound itself takes a long time to heat up it certainly seems possible to do it in that kind of setup but it does have a different like it's a lot more about the steam for the heat in those cases because otherwise you such got such a large amount of thermal mass to heat up that yeah I mean if you have like there's one formers and one manufacturer in Finland who creates this
kind of underground sauna so this kind of like made out of concrete elements and that kind of song is it's basically it's impossible to get much suited to temp temperature around like 60 degrees absolute maximum it just takes forever to heat up it's just impossible but uh so this kind of a now we're basically talking about the material for the walls but you see it's kind of common that you see kind of matching materials being used to for benches and walls so yeah but I you know overall the influence of the material or the choice for the walls it's not as big as it's for benches and I think the kind of second most important element that we that I consider for inside the sauna room is that is the construction and the design of the inner roof or the ceiling ceiling yes so there we have we could have a look at the there are a few simple illustrations of different types of roofs we might have and I think the basic idea is that we should note basic idea in the roof is that we should not construct a roof that allows the steam
lolu to get outside of reach of the people in the sauna so what we want to do is that we want to have the kind of firm design of of and and of the roof so that enables the steam to move around but freely and reach the people because what will happen is that the steam will go to the highest location it will go to the furthest location from the stove as quickly as possible the steam doesn't actually move in some locations one one sort of like funny thing is that it depends on the temperature of the sound a little bit that will you see actually see the loli coming out of the place the colder your sauna is and the more the hotter the stove is the better chances you are actually seeing how the steam goes around in sauna and the more horror is it more hot it is the less likely you can see anything but if you see it actually actually does go like at a moderate speed and then it spreads around in the sound going are going towards to kind of far and corner and the highest peaks in the sauna so you for instance if you for some reason would create this kind of like in the middle there are like three three alternatives in this illustration I've done in the kind of worst case scenario we would have this kind of somehow like a peak in the roof somewhere totally not
anywhere close to the bathers and that kind of capture and trap all steam inside of it and it would be basically impossible to get an esteemed where you're sitting so this kind of solutions which more or less direct the lowly towards the bathers are the kind of best ones and this kind of rounded dome shape is I think the ultimate one at least in my experience but also even this kind of a thing that has two falses already like a very good hello a very low twin pitch yeah or a totally we don't have up there is the example of a completely flat which obviously oh yeah that's the year kind of most common one yeah or CMS so I guess with the more pitch ceilings is there like a risk that the steam could sit up way above the user's head and kind of get stuck there particularly an example be as you've rightly pointed out you create a bit of a steam trap yeah I think my kind of illustrations where not I'm kind of missing out the kind of most typical flat roof here but I mean that's that's kind of still okay but I think the kind of why these for instance pitched versions are better they also kind of look out these kind of corners where people really aren't and I'm kind of reducing the kind of volume of the sound of space that's still gonna
go unused it's it's kind of good out here mm-hmm so yeah I think the kind of biggest lesson is just to avoid these kind of evidently bad signs yeah and make sure that your benches are appropriately close to the ceiling okay but there are of course yeah now we've basically gone through a few elements of the sunroom design of course the sound has the room has several elements that you have to have like walls windows door floor all these things have some kind of an impact on some experience maybe the one I could say that for instance the windows in film most of people don't realize that the manufacturers actually know how to create windows that are appropriate for sound um but if you don't know what you ask for you're not going to get it automatically because for instance in Finland people use these like triple glass yeah windows and sometimes they might be filled with gases that kind of started expanding heavily when you warm up and they will break the glass so you should definitely know who your SONA and the same thing goes with this kind of what is it called Honolulu yeah it's red hot if it's methyl yeah it's very easy to get one that's made out of wood but you wouldn't get one if you don't know that you can
get one yeah because it doesn't definitely it's not the standard so if the problem with people who say oh yeah I've got this space that I've put a window in and it's like a uPVC window and PVC like will just degrade at the temperature so quickly yeah that's not another kind of safety issues that I II would always kind of from people in Finland quite often use like different kind of wooden materials partically in this kind of more rustic saunas I have known kind of nothing against doing like ceramic tiles so it's gonna more they are can robust material most on a fall but just make sure that the kind of material that you choose it's not gonna be awful slippery yeah because they have like different gratings and you should definitely alright yeah the highest yeah you need to kind of go for that otherwise you'll be breaking your neck falling over sound yeah particularly after you've got a few beers it's uh it's well we saw drinking in the zone so in your book you've mentioned you have four sections and we've talked about the more practical ones and certainly your specialism is in the kind of the mechanics of it and the science behind it but I guess that kind of brings us nicely on to section 4 which is a bit more sort of about the culture and and perhaps some more esoteric aspects of yeah the Sun of culture and habits and company are something that I
mean you can't really have the summer experience without actually spending time in the sound and that usually even in Finland happens in some kind of company even if it's your family your friends or someone else or in public so no god-knows - who it's still something like a place where people come together and share some sort of moment and experience and the way I see it I mean the whole idea of having some sort of sound I experienced you can't really design anyone's experience but you can design space the supports having some sort of experience and that's I think that's been my kind of ideology from the start and the way I see it is that we have like particular sound habits and ways that Finnish people like to use their sounds and that's different from well like what Germans do or what the Russians do but he nowadays when you think about this like what sort of like sound culture and what sort of habits you want to promote I think it's important to take into consideration that maybe you could also consider for instance again the same sound a people are used for different types of sound habits or cultures for instance the whisking thing is something that I personally a little bit like miss it's a slightly disappeared from the finished soundness my own guess is that is because Bieber people nowadays sort of my private sounds and they have to clean them up yeah and whisking creates yeah I'm still
pulling the the birch leaves out the back of my sound from last season yeah because well I think people forget the or in the correct way to prepare it a birch Peter you know you soak them and then you blanch them on the stones but obviously they're there they're going to lose leaves and when they get in the stones and you pouring lowly or your water on the stones to produce lolu it just washes all the leaves into the stones deeper and then for about you know a week afterwards you just smell burning birch leaves you every time little on here yeah that that's kind of um that's one of the unfortunate outcomes of whisking but I think for the kind of general maintenance of the sonar you can kind of think about this but how easy will this kind of solution for instance for sound of benches are going to be clean we have like the locations which the cleaning hasn't been very high priority in design and these kind of benches for instantly quite popular in Finland which make it almost impossible to clean you know beneath them so I think that should be kind of taken care of if or taken into consideration if you want to make it possible to do whisking or or if you wanna do Alf Goose somewhere yeah but you need to kind of think about this Hans the sound is going to be used or could it be you somehow differently then it's been currently used that's also a little bit like love like an accessibility thing that what happens if you break your leg yeah if you have to
get small kids how safe will this environment be that's of course not kind of firm maybe not so much culture but it's a part kind of thinking about that what kind of things will the sound support and if you because uh I mean it's uh it seems that people can come up with new ideas on how to use soundness even in a quite short period of time but sound ask themselves are not that kind of maybe easy to transform once they've been initially designed it's not kind of easy to extend soundness to be bigger or the modifications in logic scale alone three that the easy to happen they're kind of easy T you can kind of change the materials the outlooks but it's very difficult to go and make very major changes if you just incorporate it sound into a building so I think it's good to think about how how the sonic culture is going for instance in Finland we still have like the people who are usually bathed in nude and then we've got this kind of sex segregation which so which basically assume that a lot of the public places people go nude and with the same sex and then again we've got some like public saunas such as the little helsinki in which people go there are the saunas are shared but people wear swimming suits that's a bad parent like one trend we've had in past years and maybe might be getting more popular
the fact that we uh the good part of that is that if we can have like the if the members of the opposite sex can share the same spaces we don't have to make that many similar identical soundness and other spaces it's it's better we can have more variety and people can have to put more like more company so that's like positive thing that only on the other hand using the swimming suits it's let's like unfortunately kind of for shielding your way yourself away from the actual theme for instance and lolu so I'm not kind of a big fan of that hmm but it seemed interesting to see how things go because we have of course the side is changing we've liked this kind of same sex marriages became legal in Finland a few years are back and then then becomes these kind of questions at how how we actually deal with this more complicated things for instance like the third gender or people who don't confer associate themselves with either biological sex and so forth yeah and now this we actually have infant we have one like public swimming hole in Helsinki which has like officially they called family room but it's also kind of a room for the people who are not kind of willing to go anywhere nude yes because of their own thinking but so these are kind of I think themes that go around like the culture and what we expect or the sound on how these things of all the time yeah
I mean this is nothing new to so in the UK like any public sauna you have to wear a swimming costume and certainly there's a lot of like fear a particularly having young people in the cellar as well so they'll often say no children under 16 and things like that but I mean that's that's a different issue entirely I think that's more a case of UK health and safety law combined with sort of these kind of places having an association with a place for adults to spend time so not really wanting to invite children in but that has left a culture of people associating the SONA as somewhere that's dangerous for children which if yes certainly and it's yeah it's very different I think same things like like in Germany is small at most like adults only yeah versa I've just last week I was my son is soon turning two years and he was with me in a sauna and he was very keen on pouring as much water on the stove and he's favorite hobby at the time yeah so but yeah there's a lot of there's kind of cultural things that you need to take into consideration in creating a space that allows for different kind of yeah emerge so he practiced that's all covered in your book which is coming out I know you said you wouldn't make any promises but hopefully this year well I I'd see if we are lucky and
realistic I think we could see in this edition of the book call coming up in about a year okay great but there's still some work to be done on that regard we now I'm kind of now we're much looking forward to half the finished version of the secret of the finished sound design coming up just before midsummer fantastic and and tell me you've spent you've obviously dedicated a lot of time trying to discover the secret to finish sound design do you feel like you know we spoke at start with the sound of that you you had in your summer cottage and renovating that did you find the secret to sound design or you kind of got this Sisyphus complex where it's just it's the whole never-ending we see it's all about the journey and not about the destination well yeah definitely would like to build another song but I'd say that I've found a lot of things on the way and for instance I've discovered why the old son was such bad instance of sona and i actually managed to improve that yeah although I'm still not using it that anymore but uh yeah I think there are it's like plural things so there are actually several secrets and as I've been explaining here it's like and a complicated combination of different kind of solutions that must go together nicely and there's no kind of single way to achieve the perfect finish our experiences but instead whenever you building one you have to take into consideration quite a big number of
variables and then make your choice yeah Linda so before we finish up here is there a particular public sound in Finland that you really love that's you know next time we're in Finland that we should try out well I mean there are a lot of very nice public saunas in Helsinki area but I think I would recommend anyone who comes to visit Helsing's to integrate a Helsinki area at want our city you'll find around 30 minutes from downtown Helsinki the cool CRV beside which has the original smoke sauna okay for public use it opens up in the afternoon and it's pretty unique I don't think you can find that kind of thing anywhere else in the world so I definitely go there yeah brilliant well thank you so much for coming on to our inaugural podcast it's been a real pleasure having you here and to those of you listening if you speak Finnish then definitely pounce on his book when it comes out later this year and if you speak English like us you're just gonna have to wait a year wait yeah be patient remember to like subscribe you press the little Bell button if you're listening to this on on YouTube so that you can keep up to date with all our podcasts as they come out we've got a great lineup of amazing guests coming up and once again thank you so much for your time out and great to meet you thanks guys as a pleasure cheers thank
Transcript auto-generated by YouTube. Verbatim — duplicates intentionally preserved.
3 design foundations: air, heat, materials Loyly steam and atmosphere created on the stones Bench height shapes the heat experience
Ventilation determines how the room breathes. Without fresh air and sensible movement, heat can feel flat, heavy, or uneven.
In a well-designed sauna, the air supports the body rather than fighting it. Breathing feels easier. Heat feels enveloping instead of oppressive.
Loyly is the character of the heat when water meets hot stones. It depends on heater design, stone quality, ceiling height, and where people sit in relation to the heat.
The best loyly arrives as a wave. It has intensity, but also softness. It changes the atmosphere without overwhelming the room.
Wood choice, bench position, insulation, and durability all shape the daily experience. Authentic design respects both the body and the building.
This is where science meets design. A sauna should be beautiful, but beauty follows function: clean air, stable heat, safe surfaces, and a room that invites return.
"The strongest protocol is the one your body can absorb and repeat."
Prioritize ventilation early when planning or evaluating a sauna.
Think about bench height before focusing on decorative finishes.
Choose durable materials that can tolerate heat, moisture, and repeated use.
Sauna quality depends on ventilation as much as temperature. Bench height and heater placement shape how heat lands on the body.
