AITO

There are many existing ready made saunas in the market. However, sauna design requires a lot of expertise in order to create the best possible löyly – steam that comes when you throw water on the heater stones. For example, according to the so called law of löyly, your feet should be higher than the stove so that they don’t get cold. With AITO (Finnish word meaning authentic, genuine and real) we wanted to provide a real Finnish sauna for the export market.

The starting point of the design for AITO was that the readymade space element should fit inside a standard sized shipping container. As the quality of löyly is dependent on the proportions of the space and having enough air volume, we ended up having a timeless and minimalistic box-like building mass. There are three different sizes and several different combinations of spaces as well as colors to suit different needs and sites. In all of them, the architectural idea is simple: one side is fully glazed, opening an unobstructed view to the surroundings, and all other walls are closed ensuring privacy for the bathers. The built-in millwork borders the closed walls and skirts the space, creating an open area in the middle. The benches in the sauna room rise up perpendicular to the walls, creating alternating steps to climb up to the highest level. Moreover, these perpendicular sauna benches enable two different degrees of löyly: a milder one on the lower bench and a hotter one on the upper level.

More info: aitosauna.com.