About Us

About Oakland Sauna

Who We Are

Oakland Sauna has been designing and building hot rooms across the East Bay for years, and it is the only thing we do. We started because we were the people driving to a gym or a friend's backyard for a sauna and thinking there had to be a better arrangement. Turning that into a business meant learning the unglamorous half of the trade, which is sealing, ventilation and load calculation, and it is still the half that decides whether a room is any good.

How long we have been at it

We have been building saunas as a dedicated trade for over a decade, and our carpenters brought finish carpentry careers to it before that. In that time we have worked through most of what Oakland housing can throw at a project: knob-and-tube behind a bathroom wall, a basement that turned out to flood every February, a hillside parcel where the only vehicle access was a neighbour's driveway. None of those are in a manual.

The story behind the company

The first room we ever built was a garage bay conversion for one of our own families, and we got the ventilation wrong. It heated beautifully and smelled musty within a year, so we opened it up, found what we had missed, and rebuilt it properly. That mistake is the reason we now spend so much of the first site visit on the parts nobody ever sees. Every sealed vapor barrier we tape and every drying cavity we fur out traces back to that garage.

The team

We are a small crew of finish carpenters and sauna builders trained in both Finnish and American methods. Because the team is small, the same people who measure your space cut the paneling, hang the door and stack the stones. Our lead carpenter came up through cabinetmaking, which is why the benches in our rooms have hidden fasteners and joints that stay tight through twenty years of heat cycling. Most of us use saunas ourselves several times a week, and that shows up in the small decisions: where the ladle sits, how far the reach is to the door, what height the top bench wants to be.

Brands we work with

We are approved installers across the major sauna heater and steam generator manufacturers, including Harvia, Huum, Iki, Narvi and Tylo for stoves, and Mr Steam, Thermasol and Steamist for steam. On the cold side we fit chillers and filtration from the established plunge manufacturers rather than whatever is cheapest that season. We recommend on efficiency, parts availability and serviceability, because a heater you cannot get an element for in eight years is a bad heater whatever it cost. Our sauna installation work covers all of them, and the same crew handles sauna repair on units we did not fit.

Why we love it

There is a specific moment we build for. The first real session, when somebody ladles water onto the stones and the room answers, and you watch them realise this is now something they own rather than somewhere they visit. That is worth the permit queues and the trenching and the hillside carries. What we build across Oakland and the East Bay ranges from a compact indoor sauna in a basement to a full outdoor sauna with a cold plunge install beside it, and every one of them started as somebody standing in an empty space describing what they wanted.

Our mission

To build saunas, cedar tubs and cold plunges good enough that you use them all year, including on the wet grey Tuesdays when going outside sounds like work.

What we value

• We take the time it takes. If a bench needs another day to be right, it gets another day.
• We use real wood and nothing that off-gasses at 190 degrees.
• We tell you when the cheaper option is the better option, including when that means not hiring us.
• You deal with one person from the first measurement to the final walkthrough.