Sauna Lempnäs

Sauna Lempnäs is a small sauna building in the Turku Archipelago, on Finland's southwest coast. Aki Markkanen conceived it as a deliberate pause from the pace of urban life — a refuge for its owners and their dog. The project rests on a simple premise: that both natural landscape and a carefully made built environment support well-being, and that a building can bring the two into the same place rather than setting one against the other.

The programme is compact: a sauna room, a lounge and an outdoor space for cooling down. Each is oriented on its own terms, so that the interior is drawn as close as possible to the sea and the coastal nature around it. The building also works in dialogue with a renovated boathouse, the two structures complementing each other's functions rather than duplicating them.

Views are assigned by function. The sauna room opens towards the horizontal line of the sea and the morning light; the cooling-down area faces smooth, sun-warmed bedrock to the southwest; and in the living area a bay window reaches into the archipelago forest, the view intended for the evening. The bay windows act as extensions of the interior into the landscape, and the largest of them doubles its function as a place to lie down.

The form is deliberately archaic, its extruded bay windows set against a plain timber mass. The 25-square-metre structure was carved by hand in log construction, a craft the studio places within a timber building tradition stretching back thousands of years, and it rests directly on natural boulders found on the site. Long eaves shelter both the bathers and the hand-hewn timber from the weather, part of an intention that the building should last for centuries. The architecture addresses the senses through its natural materials — their textures, scales, scents and sounds — rather than through added finishes.