Rosanna Cooney: I'm a luxury spa consultant and these are Ireland's best

Times

a day ago

Unless you've been living under a hot rock, you'll know that mobile saunas have been popping up at pace around Ireland. From windswept shorelines to city car parks, these wooden barrels and hot boxes have become community hubs for sauna lovers seeking heat, connection and a time-out.
But a second wave of sauna culture has been quietly breaking across the island. These are sustainably built, design-led spaces with privacy at their core, and they are quickly becoming an essential draw of boutique nature-based stays in places like Fernwood Farm in Connemara, Co Galway.
Drawing inspiration from Scandinavian-style cabins, the lakeside sauna at Fernwood was designed by Aidan Conway of Marmar Architects and mimics an oversized birdhouse. 'We were keen to create a unique feeling for our sauna and wanted it to feel like none other,' says the Fernwood co-owner Anne Ashe.
The Fernwood sauna is emblematic of the rapid development of sauna architecture in Ireland, which has gone from standard flat-packs to permanent bespoke structures that work in conversation with their environment. This follows the European trend of sauna buildings as architectural jewels and places that foster a deeper relationship to nature.
At Fernwood guests follow a sauna polku, the traditional Finnish ritual of walking a sauna path that physically takes you from house to sauna, but also prepares you for the transition from one mental state to another. It is an opportunity to slow down and follow the organic patterns of nature along a winding, narrow track.
'The walk to the sauna through our native woodlands gives guests time to observe all the nature on the lakeshore,' Ashe says. 'As with all of our buildings, we wanted to create as little impact on the environment as possible. Every single piece of wood was carried in by hand, and the only time a machine was used was to lift the sauna window. We were grateful we only had to remove one tree in the whole building process.'
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Creating unobtrusive sauna spaces that blend into their surroundings is a key part of this new movement. At the Fermanagh lakeside hideaway Finn Lough, which gained worldwide fame in 2021 when its treehouse domes went viral online, two saunas were added to the grounds in 2017.
Both the lakeside sauna and aromatherapy sauna were designed in collaboration with Rebelo de Andrade, the award-winning Portuguese design studio. To fulfil Finn Lough's brief that the saunas needed to look like part of the landscape, the cabins were modelled on heritage farm buildings. Locally sourced corrugated iron and burnt larch were used as cladding.
The strange thing is that sweat baths are already part of the indigenous Irish landscape. While there has been an explosion in the popularity of saunas on this island in past decade, it is a misconception that this is a new trend.
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Ireland has an ancient sweating culture going back 3,000 years to the Bronze Age, when our ancestors built hazelwood sweat lodges and gathered around heated stones. Hundreds of pre-famine stone sweathouses are still found around the country, and architectural traces of the Victorian Turkish bath phenomenon, a health craze for the bourgeois that began in the 1850s in a hydrotherapy centre in Blarney, Co Cork, are still visible in Dublin and Cork city.
So while the Finnish sauna is the latest incarnation of sweat bathing to take hold in Ireland, it is far from the first. One of the puzzling questions around the interest in sauna culture is 'why now'? There have been Finnish saunas in Ireland for decades, built as part of leisure centres, spas and swimming pools, but these tended to be unloved corners that people used for a few minutes before heading for the hot tub.
That aversion seemed to change when saunas were returned to the wild and the connection to nature was re-established.
It started with mobile saunas that pulled up to the seashore in response to the resurgence in sea swimming during the pandemic years. Those pioneering saunas have now been reimagined by boutique stays where biophilic experiences such as forest bathing and saunas have replaced traditionally indoor-based spa treatments. Saunas offer the chance to slow down and rest, and can also release a boost of feelgood endorphins in the body, helping to fulfil the promise of these places where guests will feel better checking out than they did checking in.
At Deerstone, the sustainable retreat centre near Laragh, Co Wicklow, built by the husband and wife Kevin Nowlan and Kirsty Foynes, a fourth sauna for guests has just opened. By the Avonmore River and surrounded by mature trees, this sauna was specifically built for practising pirtis, the Baltic style of sauna that focuses on bringing elements of the natural world into the heat.
Pirtis originates from Lithuania, where a third of the country is covered in forest, and it tends to be a guided session, using leaf whisks to boost circulation, alongside salt scrubs and honey masks to pamper the skin and the soul.
'Three of our staff have just completed the level two training with the Lithuanian bath master Birute Masiliauskiene,' Nowlan says. 'We are now planning on offering experiences for individuals and couples on site, starting this autumn.'
This use of the sauna as a warm enticement for guests to spend more time in nature and to feel the benefits of connecting with their surroundings is echoed in many unique stays across Ireland, from Common Knowledge, the non-profit social enterprise in the Burren, Co Clare, which has just opened a floating bog sauna for guests, to the garden sauna of the Native micro-hotel in Ballydehob, Co Cork.
Native's sauna was designed by Simon Ronan's landscape architecture studio, Studio SRLA, using alder wood interiors, rock wool insulation and locally grown and milled Douglas fir cladding. Part of the motivation for Common Knowledge and Native in building saunas is to allow their guests to experience nature in all forms and all weathers, so that they appreciate it, respect it and want to protect it.
'Saunas in nature can be beautiful examples of this mutually beneficial relationship,' says Didi Ronan, the co-owner of Native. 'They offer a challenging yet rewarding exercise where one can appreciate the natural setting, but also because you can bring in the landscape's benefits through oils, dried meadow flowers, herbal scrubs and teas.'
Ever since the chaos of the pandemic, when people's concerns about their health and wellbeing surged, investing in wellness has become a priority for those who can afford it. For some this means personal training, subscriptions to meditation apps and splashing out on fitness trackers. For ultra-high-net-worth individuals it means spending up to €5 million on home spas and luxury poolhouses.
Spa4, a spa and wellness consultancy based in Northern Ireland, has worked with the likes of Center Parcs, Adare Manor and the Address Collective, Sligo, on revamping their spa offerings in the post-Covid era. More space, more technology and more of a biophilic (nature-based) approach is now demanded by guests seeking luxury spa getaways, but the company has also built up a client base of people in Ireland prepared to invest millions of euros on state-of-the-art home spas.
'People have been more aware of their health and wellbeing after Covid, when no one knew what was coming and everyone was spending more time at home,' Darren McGarry, chief executive of Spa4, says. 'Before Covid it was nearly a rush to burn out, to prove that you were working so hard, and if you didn't burn out there was a belief you weren't trying. There has been a change in that attitude now.
'In the last two years we've done a very, very high-end poolhouse in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland,' he continues, 'and the total running on that was about €5 million.' Spa4 worked with the interior architects Millimetre Design to create this poolhouse, featuring a sauna, steamroom, snow shower and meditation room wrapped around a pool with a moveable floor so the space can be used as a venue for events. 'Since then it has kind of exploded. You'd be very surprised at the level of wealth in Ireland,' McGarry says.
About 15 per cent of Spa4's project work comes from the Republic of Ireland, where it currently has four multimillion-euro poolhouses under construction, and two more about to come online.
The majority of their business comes from London, where 'there are no budgets', Markus Stasser, sales manager at Spa4, says.
The clients that Spa4 works with tend to want to create spaces that function for their whole family while also reflecting their personal interests. One businessman wanted to incorporate elements from Northern Ireland into his London home spa, so Spa4 looked to the old Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast, sourcing roof beams and doors from the site, stripping the wood back and drying it out. This historically significant wood was then used to build the sauna.
Rosanna Cooney is a journalist and the author of the bestseller Sweathouse: The New and Ancient Irish Sauna Tradition (Irelandia Press €31.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk