Sage Sauna opened just a few weeks ago outside Trailhead Beer Market (1317 Island Home Avenue) offering a completely new concept for our area. A popular idea in Scandinavia and some parts of the northern U.S., Sage represents Knoxville’s first outdoor sauna experience. Completely wood-fired, steam rising from rocks beneath, participants enjoy the experience of a 170° environment inside a beautifully built, massive barrel. Christina, the owner, said the process offers many benefits.
If you haven’t seen something like it, you might be excused for having a hard time understanding the concept. I did. So, I sat down with Christina to learn the ins and outs and how she came to be involved in such an unusual enterprise.
Christina was “born and raised” in south Knoxville along with her sister. Her father was an architect (now retired), working on projects like the Tennessee Theatre, Market Square, and the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. Her mother owns a small office furniture company. Like her father, Christina attended UT, where she studied Materials Engineering and minored in Business and Reliability Engineering. She studied abroad as part of her degree.
“When I graduated, even though all my internships had been in engineering . . . I fell in love with the business side.” She also loved the engineering side and that would return as a theme later, but just after graduation she took a job with Textron Aviation where she was lucky enough to get involved with a development program there and learned about all parts of the business over the course of a year. She worked in sales for the division and loved working with the customers and traveling extensively.
After some years she determined she should pause her career and see if she really wanted to continue the corporate trajectory. She decided she wanted to do something more “immediately helpful, something local.” During this pause, she and her husband traveled extensively, and, in January of this year, they visited a sauna in New Zealand, returning several times while staying nearby. The sauna sat outdoors beside a lake, and she’d never experienced anything like it.
“We kept meeting the coolest people and feeling better every day . . .” She said the idea is that you go through your day, whether working or playing and end your day at the sauna. She realized that beyond the health benefits, which she could feel almost right away, the sauna presented a unique social situation. She met interesting people, had real conversations and felt she learned from others. She said there was a shared wisdom and that would eventually lead to the name of her business.
She loved the concept of an outdoor sauna. The process involves a cycle of heating in the sauna for ten to fifteen minutes. “Then you step outside into the fresh air . . . your heart rate goes back to normal, then repeat . . . your body has gotten to do a refresh that’s very natural for it . . . you feel really nice.” She pointed out that these variations in temperature have been experienced by humans throughout our history until indoor climate control and said, “your body knows what to do.”
The first night at the sauna she noted in her phone ideas of how she could bring this to Knoxville. She knew she wanted to do something that brought people together and had been considering ideas and this one “was the most profound way of bringing strangers together.” As they returned, she realized she was sleeping better and that her mind wasn’t reeling. “You can’t speed up fire. The sauna is going to be what it is going to be. You can’t bring a phone into a sauna . . . and I loved it.”
She looked to see if there were similar businesses in Knoxville and couldn’t find it anywhere within a several-hour radius. “I was finding it in Australia and the U.K., and I started looking at how to bring it here.” She assumed it would be easy to bring it here: She would buy a sauna (about $4,000) and bring it here. As she learned more and evaluated those on the market, her engineering mind was not satisfied with the materials and construction. She ultimately found builders in Minnesota where there is a higher concentration of people from Nordic countries and the demand existed because people had home saunas.
She selected builders and detailed the materials and construction she wanted. She imported a stove from Finland which she said is “the softest heat, and that was critical.” Four hundred pounds of rocks surround the wood stove, and the rocks heat the air, which she says makes the experience what she first felt in New Zealand. The outside of the western red cedar barrel is charred using a Japanese technique that makes it more weather resistant. It was far more expensive than she’d anticipated, but she couldn’t bring herself to compromise.
The whole set up was finished at the end of the summer and Trailhead was selected as the first location. They opened November 8 with the idea of being a ten-day popup and the response has been so good that they reached an agreement to continue indefinitely. It may be closed some during summer months as the heat rises outside. In the meantime, you’ll find the greatest hits of all the saunas Christina has experienced, with special touches like essential oil-infused water poured on the rocks, which happens several times during a “treatment,” which is unique to Sage.
She loves that she’s been able to bring the sauna to her community and thinks it’s a great fit for the active culture that has developed there. She’s had runners literally stop their run, take a shower, and hit the sauna. “Over 50% of the people who came the first week have returned.” She’s had people return up to four times and they’ve brought friends each time they returned.
She continues to make improvements, some of which are driven by her engineering mind. Her father has joined in the journey making her ideas become reality. She’s enjoyed the connections it has opened in her family and in others and the whole idea of slowing down and focusing more on life.
The sessions are 45 minutes during the week and usually include two rotations, while the weekend sessions run 75 minutes and include three to four rotations. Weekday hours are 4:00 pm to 9:00 pm and weekend hours are 1:00 pm to 7:00 on Saturday and 1:00 pm to 8:30 pm on Sunday. Patrons can time their own rotations according to how they feel. Most people wear athletic wear or swimsuits. Towels, showers, and water are provided, and you can join new friends or bring your own. You can learn more about it at the Sage Sauna website and drop in to see it in person and experience it for yourself.