Sustainable Saunas

To provide high quality outdoor saunas, that are built with local, sustainably sourced materials, that are free from plastics and chemical treatment.

The building industry is one of the top consumers of plastic, and since fossil fuels are used to create plastic, this is not good news for the climate. Plastics are used in insulation, roofing, windows, doors.. the list goes on. Even building paper is made of plastic. So we are doing our part by building our portable and home saunas completely plastic free, providing you with a high quality, durable product that you can feel good about.

We build mobile saunas on trailers, so you can drive them to the beach, lake, mountains, or operate them commercially.

Chromated Copper Arsenate (CCA) is banned in Europe, Australia and the United Sates. However, CCA is still used to treat a lot of timber in NZ. Due to its carcinogenicity and environment toxicity, we choose not to include it anywhere in our outdoor sauna builds. Our thermally modified NZ timber cladding has a hazard rating of H3.2 from the thermal modification alone, while our our Magnesium Oxide flooring replaces typical CCA treated plywood.

Cedar and Spruce are two great timbers to use inside a traditional Finnish sauna. However, the trees grow too quickly in NZ, producing knotty timber that is no good for a dry sauna. So this timber is imported from Canada, the US and Scandinavia. At Sustainable Saunas we are doing our best to minimise our carbon footprint, so we use NZ grown, thermally modified timber. During its thermal modification process, the timber transforms into one of the best timbers that can be used in a sauna and gains a wonderful scent similar to cedar.

Our saunas are built with a timber frame, the same way your homes is built. This creates a more durable traditional sauna and allows the walls to be properly insulated. Our locally crafted saunas are designed to endure the harsh sun, wind, and rain of the NZ outdoors. Without using any plastics or chemical treatment, our saunas are built by licensed builders, creating one of NZ's most durable outdoor saunas.

All our saunas are fit to run commercially. Ready to start your own sauna business? We offer a one hour complimentary consultation, upon purchase, to make sure you hit the ground running!

We priorities local, sustainably sourced, high quality materials. These include, thermally modified NZ timber, NZ sheep's wool and magnesium oxide mineral board. See our 'Materials' page for more information.

Our saunas are built to the Foreverbreathe Specification, a standard developed for healthy and sustainable homes, focussing on improving air quality, energy efficiency and passive ventilation.