Scrap Sauna

FIELDNOTES

Transforming Waste into Luxury: ika.architekti shares how they upcycled salvage material to create a stunning sauna.

By Tomáš Dvořák and Lenka Bažík

Photographed by Tomáš Slavík

3 architects sitting on a garden bench — ika.architekti. Photograhed by Tomas Valnoha.

This is what happens when you scroll through second-hand websites and when you love collecting materials that might still come in handy. It might sound like hoarding, but you suddenly have a lot of great stuff to build with when you’re also an architect. And that’s exactly how we sometimes spend our free weekends as architects.

The concept of the upcycled sauna came together gradually: finding the right place, using the collected materials, satisfying the need for a sauna, and the desire to build something with our own hands instead of just clicking and answering emails.

We had the location—a large garden in the city. We had a few wooden sleepers, a pile of planks and beams, a few cement-bonded particle boards, and some leftover mineral wool. We also found super affordable second-hand pallets with a 1x1 m module. From these basics, we created a simple sauna concept and gradually gathered more materials—leftovers from friends and other construction projects.

The foundation is made of wooden sleepers, and the load-bearing structure is built from wooden pallets. The floor was filled with mineral wool and covered with cement-bonded particle boards. The floor’s individual parts weren’t made from single pieces—we pieced it together from whatever was available. The pallets were connected with new hardware—plates and brackets. The roof structure is made from leftover beams and pallets with a slight slope for rainwater drainage.

The most enjoyable part of the construction was insulating the structure with raw sheep wool, which we acquired very affordably from a local shepherd. We manually cleaned the wool of the largest residues left by its previous “inhabitants” (sheep) and stuffed it into the walls and ceiling structure. The inner insulation is covered with mesh and reflective foil, while the exterior is protected by facade foil.

The final interior surface was made from planks, while cement-bonded particle boards were used behind the stove for better heat retention. The exterior layer consists of a wooden grid made from leftover battens and second-hand corrugated fiberglass panels, which were attached to the grid and overlapped like scales. In the corners, we bent the panels into curves to give the structure a softer appearance.