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Kirsi Alm-Siira and her partner bought a sauna cabin in autumn 2024. Successfully planning and buying a sauna cabin requires recognising your own needs, but also insight from those who have experience.
The sauna cabin has brought Kirsi and Antti so much joy that Alm-Siira absolutely wanted to share her experience and the tips gathered along the way with others too. We hope Kirsi's tips will be of use to you if your own dream is only just taking shape or you're wondering where to start.
The interview was recorded at the Helsinki Spring Fair 2025 and this article brings together the best parts of the interview under clear headings. You'll find the interview recording at the end of the article.
As you continue reading, you will find answers to questions such as:
- How can you plan a sauna cabin as well as possible, and where can you get help?
- Is it better to get a sauna cabin, or is a sauna with a changing room enough?
- What are the advantages of a turnkey delivery?
In this article:
How sauna cabin planning began for Kirsi Alm-Siira
Planning the sauna cabin began in earnest inspired by the Helsinki Spring Fair. Kirsi originally took up cabin life through her husband Antti, but now she describes herself as quite the ‘real Finn and real sauna-goer’.
“My husband has had a cabin for a long time – a smallish one – and even before I came into the picture, he'd been thinking that he might take the sauna out of the main cabin, extend the place a bit and put up a completely separate sauna there.”
Impulse buy or planned purchase?
“In a way we made an impulse buy and in a way we didn't – We thought it over together, what would be a smart solution and how we'd go about it.”
”But then when we came here to the fair, we didn't get round to many stands at all, because we found the one that was right for us.”
A suitable cabin and good service from the Ehta stand
“There were lots of people at Ehta's stand and we had to wait a little for our turn. – We pretty much knew what we were after, and when we saw our favourite in real life, it was a pretty clear-cut decision.”
“And we got really, really good service. Hanna was there serving us and answering the questions we were wondering about. And honestly, I had Never Ever Before bought any kind of sauna or sauna cabin, so I had quite a lot of questions. :D”
We sent him videos from the cabin, so the professional could see that their smaller lorry would fit through there just fine and it could be lifted into place, so that was a realisation that was genuinely game-changing!
– Kirsi Alm-Siira
Kirsi Alm-Siira's tips for planning a sauna cabin
- Talk it over with everyone involved: what the sauna cabin means to you and how the new building should serve you.
“It went surprisingly well, considering that at home we sometimes clash over the interior and so on… but we pretty much wanted the same things, since we knew in broad terms that we wanted the sauna out of our main cabin so we'd get more space in there.” - Take into account any other surrounding buildings and how it connects to them.
“We had a rough idea of the shades the sauna could have and what it might look like from the outside. The main cabin is black, so we wanted the sauna cabin to be the same colour too, so that it goes really well, in my opinion, with the log cabin built in the '80s. Even though they're from completely different eras, they have the same shades and somehow the same spirit. Even though this one is modern, this new sauna cabin we now have.”
“In the end my husband somehow came up with the idea that we join the sauna cabin's deck and the main cabin's deck. So it made things more usable in the sense that there's now much more deck and they go well together. And then it maybe tied the two cabins on the same plot together even better.” - Find a provider who can build the building of your dreams.
The best value for money solution is usually a ready-designed building whose details are adapted to your own needs. Kirsi and Antti also chose a ready-designed cabin that could be customised:
“Well, basically it was pretty perfect, but we made changes so that we both wanted to move the fireplace. It was in the corner in front of the window, which I think it is in quite a lot of designs. I think it looks really nice, but we sort of thought we'd maybe like more space for the bed, so we moved it.”
”In the sauna we made the window a bit bigger and since the options were to take it all the way down to the floor or, or a bit smaller, we wanted it, it to sit halfway. – on the back wall we wanted one of these small ventilation windows. But those changes really were quite easy to make, and we got ideas for them too [from the designer]. - Utilise professionals already in the design phase (e.g., Ehta's design service is free)
“I remember thinking that some bigger window on the back wall would be really nice, but then when I listened to the professionals, it wasn't really that sensible after all. So, so they were able to take into account things that I maybe wouldn't have myself.”
”We thought – we'd measured it, as far as we were concerned, and my husband, who understands these things better than I do, was completely convinced – that there was no way the sauna cabin could be brought there in one piece. So we were going to buy it to be assembled on site. But luckily we got professional help with that too.”
”We sent him videos from the cabin, so the professional could see that their smaller lorry would fit through there just fine and it could be lifted into place, so that was a realisation that was genuinely totally game-changing! So the sauna was ready for bathing much sooner than if it had come to be assembled on site.” - Give it a little time: do some googling, go and look at your friends' saunas and why not visit the spring fair!
“Before you go looking for good ideas, I think it's worth thinking about what the sauna and any lounge and changing room are for and what you want. Once you know that, it's maybe worth having a bit of a look online and, if you have friends or acquaintances, – a bit at what theirs look like.”
”And then for us at least it was really good that we were here [at the spring fair] and went into the saunas to have a look inside and got that sort of final confirmation that we ourselves knew what we wanted.”
”What was incredibly good for me was that when it [the sauna cabin] was furnished here, I got straight away the idea, that it's good to have a fold-out sofa there. And even though we didn't buy exactly the same things for it, somehow you could still see that it works like this. And we paid attention to small details like that here too. We looked and thought, okay, a sauna heater like that and benches in that colour and so on…”
Kirsi's top 3 choices for finishing off a dream sauna cabin
- Picture window
“Our window doesn't go all the way down to the floor, but it's pretty big. Now we can see straight out through a single [picture] window, so the view has got better too. - Wide bench
“When you're planning a new sauna – we invested in the width of the benches, especially the top bench. It makes a surprising difference to comfort.” - Natural works
“Inside it looks sort of like untreated wood. Of course it isn't completely untreated, but very natural-looking. – we think the sauna lounge is so lovely, and it smells of lovely fairly fresh wood, so it's nice to spend time there in general too, –”
Sauna cabin or sauna with a changing room? Kirsi's lessons for making the choice
Kirsi recommends deciding on the size of the building by listening to your own needs. But she doesn't advise cutting corners too much:
“When you're thinking about getting your own sauna or sauna cabin, the most important thing is to know what the need is. Sometimes it may be that just a sauna and a changing room really is quite enough. It depends a lot on what the cabin is for:
Do people other than your own family go there? How old are the children? Do the children want their own space? If so, I'd definitely recommend thinking about a lounge section, because I think a lot depends on that.”
”What I'd do is go for a bit more rather than a bit less. I don't think it makes all that much difference to the final cost, and at some point we too toyed with the idea of having no lounge at all – just a changing room – and now it sort of feels like that would have been a silly place to save money, because that lounge is really useful, even though it isn't big.”
A sauna cabin can also be a guest cabin and a workspace at the same time:
“Largely thanks to this sauna cabin, the cabin is now becoming a place where it's genuinely nice to be, with a bit more space. Even though the sauna cabin is fairly small, it provides sleeping space for another two or three people. So that means you can invite a lot more people to stay if you want.”
“Or you can make room for the guests in the main cabin yourself and go and sleep in the sauna cabin. But it's certainly used a lot. Last winter when we were at the cabin, we used it also as a workspace: when one of us was working, they went to the sauna lounge to do it.”
Kirsi recommends a separate changing room in a sauna cabin
In Kirsi and Antti's sauna cabin, between the sauna and the lounge, there is also a small changing room, with a door straight outside for cooling off. This way a sauna steam doesn't drift into the lounge, and there's a proper place for the things you need for dressing and bathing:
“The way it works for us is that we come out of the sauna, open the glass door and come into the changing room, and then open the door to the deck, and then there's a separate way to, to the lounge.”
”On the right there's the sauna, then the changing room, and on the left there's the sauna lounge. And the changing room, there isn't much in there: there's a chest of drawers that holds towels and sauna things, a mirror and a lamp, a bench and coat hooks. And I don't think it even needs anything else.
But the thing is that you have somewhere to put down your clothes or you can keep the essential sauna things there, or washing products or whatever, so, that changing room is sort of more important than its size would suggest.”
A turnkey sauna cabin is not only convenient but also a memorable experience
A finished building lifted from the lorry onto the foundations and installed straight away is nothing short of a magical experience. When the building is completed at the factory, right down to the benches and the sauna heater, you can be in the sauna that very evening:
“I think this is absolutely amazing. Of course the base had been prepared a little earlier, but when the cabin arrived in the morning, it must have been around nine, we were in the sauna before nine that evening.
I'm honestly still somehow amazed, at how well we in Finland somehow manage to plan and do these things. You look at how something looks in a picture or on paper and someone tells you it'll go like this and like this… and then when it's your turn, you suspect everything is going to go completely pear-shaped.
”But this really did go exactly as we'd been promised.. it was a really nice feeling.”
