San Francisco Just Got Its First Floating Sauna. It’s About Time

If your gym had a sauna, now it has a cold plunge. Contrast therapy is peaking, fueled by the appetite of the biohacker bro. The historically community-oriented activity has become a hyper-individualized pursuit, refashioned by devotees of the Huberman Lab as a crucial post-workout routine—a biometric-driven regimen for an optimized life. (Nevermind that fretting over the data might actually be bad for your health.)

But in KPI-obsessed San Francisco, some are reclaiming the sauna’s spiritual center. This week, the Bay Area’s first floating sauna, fittingly dubbed Fjord, opened bookings for its facility in the docks of Sausalito, meant to provide bathers with an immediate connection to nature and each other. For about the cost of yoga class, bathers can share one of two saunas on the float to relax, socialize, plunge, steam, and repeat. In other words, wearing Airpods isn’t really the vibe. "We wanted to take more of the Nordic approach, which is more of a wonderful, healthful practice that’s joyful and social. Just as much of this is about building a social, third space," says Alex Yenni, one of Fjord’s cofounders.

Starting the company was somewhat personal for Yenni and his business partner, Gabe Turner, who met when they were both feeling unmoored in their careers. Turner, who was in tech investing, had been a long-time sauna enthusiast, and Yenni had been using them to mend nerves frayed by an advertising career. A hot shower in the bracingly cold air at a beach in Marin, with a view of Mount Tamalpais, was an epiphany for Yenni—being outdoors was it. "We really wanted to focus on being out in the elements, feeling the wind, and the cold air, and the water. That’s why we’re doing the plunge in the bay," Turner adds.

Across the water at Point San Pablo in Richmond, bathing facility Good Hot is an outright rejection of the kind of scientific wellness prescribed by the likes of the world’s top bro podcasters. "We were always about the lazy pleasure of sauna," says Cooper Rogers. He and Lou Tamiye, who met in a masters of architecture program at Cal Berkeley, created Good Hot during the pandemic for those who might feel ostracized or excluded from bathing spaces, specifically queer communities and people of color. Good Hot would give anyone and everyone a place to gather, if, in that moment, only with their Covid pods.

"We talk a lot as a group about how to receive all of our guests with care and how to cultivate a sense of safety in our space," says Tamiye. "The majority of us who work at Good Hot are people of color and queer and trans ourselves."