Custom & DIY Saunas
Built around your room,
not the other way round
A prefab cabin has to fit your space. A custom sauna is the other way round — the room comes first, and the cedar, benches, glass and heater are milled and specified to suit it. Under a stair, in a garage bay, along an awkward basement wall: if it can be framed, it can be a sauna.
Four rooms a prefab cabin will never fit
Custom works for new construction and renovations alike. It is almost always the answer when the space already exists and cannot move.
A basement or spare room
The framing, the floor and the drain are already there. A liner kit turns a stud wall into a sauna without adding a building to your yard, and without a permit for a new structure in most places.
A garage bay or pool house
Half a garage becomes a full six-person room. Concrete floor, an existing 240V run, and a wall you were never going to use for anything else.
An awkward footprint
Sloped ceilings, a chimney chase, a 5-by-8 leftover behind a stair. Custom lengths are cut to the room, so nothing is wasted working around an obstacle.
Replacing a tired old room
The shell is sound but the cedar is grey and the heater is thirty years old. Strip it back to the studs and re-line it — usually the cheapest way to a room that feels brand new.
Four steps from a tape measure to first steam
Measure the space
Interior width, depth and ceiling height, plus where the door needs to go and which wall carries the electrical. A photo of the space helps more than a drawing. If a wall is going to move, tell us the finished dimension, not the one it has today.
Configure it, or let us do it
Use the Sauna Builder to pick your cedar, bench layout, door, glass, heater, control and lighting and watch the total move as you go. Or send us the dimensions and we will come back with a full parts list and the right heater size — free, no obligation.
We check it before it ships
Every custom build gets reviewed by a person before the order goes out. We check the heater kW against your room volume and glass area, that the control matches the heater, and that nothing obvious is missing — vapor barrier, foil tape, vents, fasteners.
Build it, with the guide open
The kit arrives by freight with instructions. Our Sauna Guides walk the whole job — framing, wiring runs, ventilation, vapor barrier, batten spacing, cladding, benches and heater guards — in the order you actually do them. All heater wiring goes to a licensed electrician.
The wood decides how the room feels
Clear vertical-grain cedar is the classic: warm, aromatic, and it never gets too hot to lean on. Thermally treated aspen runs paler and stays cooler to the touch. One patterned panel behind the top bench changes the whole room.
Where people sit sets everything else
Heat gathers at the ceiling, so the upper bench is where the sauna actually happens. Get its height right — roughly 41 in off the floor, with the lower bench near 24 in — and everything below it follows.
Sized to the room, not to a catalogue page
The rule is roughly 1 kW for every 45 cubic feet of insulated cedar room, and every square foot of glass adds load on top. Undersize it and the room never gets there; oversize it and the heater cycles and dries the air out.
The details people actually notice
Sauna doors always open outward and never lock. Glazing is tempered and dual-pane. Light belongs under the bench or behind a backrest, never overhead in your eyes.
Eleven footprints to start from
Interior dimensions in feet. Pick the one closest to your space and adjust in the builder.
What arrives, and what you supply
In the kit
- Thermally treated cedar tongue-and-groove wall and ceiling boards, cut to your footprint
- Bench framing and bench boards
- Corner and ceiling moldings
- Door casing and trim
- Vent grills
- Fasteners and installation instructions
- Everything else you added in the builder — door, glass, heater, control, lighting, vents, vapor barrier
You supply
- The framed shell — studs, subfloor, exterior finish
- Insulation (sauna-rated boards are available above)
- Finished flooring and any drainage
- Electrical rough-in and a licensed electrician for the heater circuit
- Ventilation duct penetrations through the shell
- Basic tools: level, drill, mitre saw, staple gun, clamps
Send us the room, we'll send back the build
Give us the dimensions, the ceiling height and where the door goes. We come back with a parts list, the right heater size and a price. No charge, no obligation, and no pressure to order anything.