The Secrets of Finnish Sauna Design

A Handbook for Experience-Driven Sauna Design, Second Edition

For Builders of Sauna Cabins and Designers of Contemporary Apartment Saunas

The only sauna book featured on Amazon's top rated books on Architecture - Methods and Materials

Are you planning a new sauna, renovating an old one, or just dreaming? Do yourself a favor. Save your sauna project and read this wonderfully illustrated book about the design of authentic Finnish saunas!

New research has identified Finnish sauna bathing as a source of numerous health benefits. To enjoy these effects, one needs a proper Finnish sauna. This book presents the collective wisdom accumulated by Finnish sauna builders, designers, and researchers across centuries, enabling anyone, anywhere, to design a pleasant bath house for family and friend to enjoy. 

This book provides answers to three major questions:

• • What is a Finnish sauna?
  • What you should require from its design?
  • How to design a Finnish sauna in detail? 

The book covers all aspects needed to design a functional, healthy, and delightful sauna, from heating and air quality to interior design. It instructs the reader how to master both tangible and intangible, visible and invisible elements of a sauna. The book puts a special emphasis on the sauna experience, living up to the belief that short-term satisfaction is the first step towards long-term health benefits. It features examples of contemporary Finnish sauna design and outlines why a true sauna experience is so much more than merely 'a hot room'.

Author Dr. Lassi A Liikkanen (Aalto University) is a designer and scholar. The book is based on five years of intensive research and interviews of key Finnish sauna experts. For his sauna-focused website at Saunologia.fi, he has authored over two hundred articles. His academic accomplishments include nearly one hundred peer-reviewed papers, the latest of those around sauna bathing!

What Readers Say

I strongly encourage everyone [...] to read Lassi Liikkanen's Secrets of Finnish Sauna Design - the book that I really wish existed when we built our sauna. If you find any disagreement between what's here and what Lassi says, then Lassi's book and website is the safer path. I also highly recommend Lassi as a consultant.

Walker Angell, author of Trumpkin's Notes on Sauna, localmile.org

For anyone interested in the nitty-gritty of sauna design, or considering building their own, The Secrets of Finnish Sauna Design by Lassi A. Liikkanen is considered the modern bible on the subject. 

Rosanna Cooney: Sweat House. The New & The Ancient 

Irish Sauna Tradition. Irelandia Press, 2025.