There’s a new spa in the Bay Area, and it’s in a kind of unexpected place: a shoreline lot in Richmond, between an abandoned wine processing plant and a shipping container that holds a ceramics studio. Customers move between freestanding saunas, lounge chairs made out of industrial lumber, and the Bay. The project — called Good Hot — was the brainchild of two architecture grads who wanted to avoid 60-hour-week desk jobs. Instead they wanted to experiment, and put their ideas of design for intimate, communal space into practice.
On a chilly Friday morning at the Point San Pablo site, truckers trundle past on Stenmark Drive, wake from the passing Vallejo ferry laps against the rocky beach, and Good Hot’s first customers of the day are slipping into the steamy embrace of portable saunas. There are four saunas in all, cozy cubes of blond wood, perched just above the shore on a patch of scrubby earth. Each is unique — one has bleacher-style seating, another two benches facing each other. Some have skylights, others circular windows on the walls and door. Inside each is the soft scent of douglas fir lumber. Oh, and they’re all built on trailers.
It started in architecture school at UC Berkeley, when two classmates began to get disillusioned with their chosen profession. They didn’t want to graduate straight to the bottom rung of a big firm, like many of their peers, who, according to Good Hot co-founder Cooper Rogers, “often are underpaid, sort of a little bit precarious, have a bunch of student loans, may be not quite certain of what they're getting into.”
Rogers and fellow co-founder Amy Louie wanted to design with purpose — and avoid being exploited. So they started thinking about projects they could tackle on their own. As a student, Louie had the chance to pursue a yearslong interest in bathing cultures and embark on a tour of the world’s bathhouses: “Iceland and Finland, Japan and Korea, Morocco, Turkey,” they recalled. Louie was inspired by the communal quality borne of a bunch of strangers relaxing together:
“You know, you're putting a bunch of half naked or naked people in a space together,” Louie said over coffee in an Oakland café. “There's just a lot of sort of sensitivities and nuance and things to think about in how that sort of space is crafted and designed and cared for.”
Louie says they often felt distant from the big buildings they drew as an architecture student, and thinking about how to design for a vulnerable, physical experience was more interesting. This interest soon turned into a plan to create a bathhouse. Even before they graduated in 2019, the two classmates started scouting Oakland warehouse spaces. But by the time they were reaching out to landlords and banks, COVID-19 had hit.
"Everyone was just sort of laughing at us about wanting to start a bathhouse during a pandemic. And that's when, yeah, we found a listing on Craigslist for outdoor storage. At Point San Pablo."Cooper Rogers
"Everyone was just sort of laughing at us about wanting to start a bathhouse during a pandemic. And that's when, yeah, we found a listing on Craigslist for outdoor storage. At Point San Pablo."
“Everyone was just sort of laughing at us about wanting to start a bathhouse during a pandemic,” Rogers says. “And that's when, yeah, we found a listing on Craigslist for outdoor storage. At Point San Pablo.”
They started imagining what an outdoor sauna could look like. There couldn’t be any brick-and-mortar building, “which was kind of at conflict with some of our initial schemes and ideas for what this bath house can be, which is this very, sort of like warm, protected space,” Louie said.
When they and Rogers visited the plot, they were enchanted with the scenery — the bay, cars sparkling like beetles on the San Rafael Bridge, Mount Tamalpais looming behind. But how could this windswept stretch of shoreline foster the sense of safety and intimacy that they wanted to evoke in a bathhouse?
Well, the duo made do, deciding on trailer-mounted saunas. Instead of tile floors, they built wooden plank ramps leading up to them. Instead of the series of thresholds they’d imagined would create a sense of escape and privacy in their bathhouse, they used wooden barriers to mark the limits of their space. In short, the site really forced them to get creative.
“The design of Good Hot was exciting because it's sort of like a deconstructed bathhouse, sort of like an explosion of all the parts of a bathhouse that now could kind of be arranged in a way that kind of rejected a more… dictated movement through a space,” Louie said.
The co-founders wanted to create a sense of security, and they did that through natural lighting, various seating arrangements, and the placement of the saunas, which Rogers described as “A sort of circling of the wagons.”
Rogers said he and Louie also paid special attention to the orientation of the windows: a circular window looks out on the bay, making it really easy to take a nicely framed photo. Windows on the doors face out toward the other saunas, enhancing the feeling of a tiny village square.
“And then the third component was seating,” Rogers said. “So, how you can arrange up to six people sitting in essentially a seven-by-eight-foot footprint.”
Well, were they successful? What is the effect of the sauna-trailers? Unsurprisingly, the founders didn’t want me bothering their customers, so I brought two friends — Jared Glaser and Will Young — on a brisk January morning to find out. With just three of us in the big sauna, we had plenty of room to stretch out. Jared astutely started doing push-ups to accelerate his perspiration.
After getting good and sweaty, it was time to take the polar plunge, so we ran down the ten steps to the bay and braced ourselves for hypothermic shock. Jared went first.
“How is it?” I called out.
“It’s nice,” Jared called back unconvincingly. His voice sounded like an elephant was stepping on his chest. “You should come in.”
After the plunge, we hit the outdoor showers, where the water was equally cold, and then headed back into the merciful steam. Half an hour later, we were back in our clothes, drinking herbal tea on wooden lounge chairs and debriefing.
Jared has been sweating it out at the gym for years, so I wanted to know how this experience stacked up to his regular post-workout schvitz.
“It’s a real social event that we can plan our whole days around,” he said. “Going to a sauna in a gym, you get sweaty, but I don’t think you’re really put in the same frame of mind.”
For Will, the contrast between the saunas and their industrial surroundings adds to the experience. The scenery on the drive in makes it extra surprising when you arrive and, all of a sudden, “you’re watching a sailboat cross the bay.”
This sudden bliss has made Good Hot a hit. Online reservations first went live in late 2021, and co-founder Cooper Rogers says before long, new faces were showing up.
“We haven't done any marketing. It's only been word of mouth,” Rogers said. “And it started just with friends. And all of a sudden, somebody would show up that we didn't know and we're like, how did you find this?”
Now, Rogers and Amy Louie have their hands full maintaining the saunas, a learning experience in itself. If they build another sauna-on-wheels, Louie says, they’ll make sure to lay the floor boards perpendicular to the entrance, so it’s easier to sweep sand out the door. They’ve also added cubbies for customers’ shoes and bags and the big wooden lounge chairs we sampled.
It’s been just over a year since the scrappy operation opened, and though it started as a pop-up, it’s now a permitted business. For the founders, this allays some of the anxiety that they’ll be forced to hitch their sauna-trailers to trucks and drive them away at a moment’s notice. Now Amy and Cooper are starting to think about putting down roots.
“We're starting to sort of get comfortable with the idea that it might be around for a long time,” Rogers said. “And we were talking about actually planting plants in the ground recently, as opposed to in a planter that could be forklifted onto a truck and driven away.”
Though a certain sense of precarity remains, business has been good. The founders are hopeful that running Good Hot can ultimately serve as the dream job they imagined as students.
Max Harrison-Caldwell is a first-year student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He previously covered San Francisco streets and public spaces at The Frisc, where he is a contributing editor. His writing has also appeared in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and a bunch of skateboarding magazines.
