The community sauna is coming back.

Sweden has had this culture twice and lost it twice. It is being rebuilt now — in Stockholm, in Oslo, in London.

What a community sauna is

In Swedish it is folkbastu, from the same family as folkets hus, folkbibliotek and folkbad. English borrowed nothing and coined "community sauna" instead.

A sauna open to the public, carried by its members, and built around recurring sessions and rituals. It can be run by an association or by a company — the legal form does not decide it. What decides it is that the social part comes first.

Lost twice

1400s Bathhouses in the city blocks. Run by the town, their income often going to charity, and as much a meeting place as a washing place.
1500–1725 Banned piece by piece, and across almost all of Sweden by 1725. The sauna had become a byword for vice.
1900–1949 Around 10 000 public bathhouses are built in Sweden. The Swedish Association for Public Baths forms in 1918 after a parliamentary decision.
Today Stockholm's first municipal sauna opened at Hornstulls strand in June 2026, after 50+ applications to build public saunas on city land.

What we believe

01
Open to more than the already-initiated

A community sauna you can only reach through a membership is a club. The public should be able to book without joining first.

02
Whoever runs it owns it

The money, the member data and the decisions stay with the operation. Payments go to your own account, not through us.

03
Built together with the people using it

The roadmap is public, and suggestions become public issues. Nothing disappears into an inbox.

04
A small operation should afford what a large one has

What separates a community sauna from a spa is rarely the technology. It should not be the price either.

Why Bastu exists

A community sauna is open to the public and has members at the same time, at different prices, in one calendar. That combination is the thing no software handles. Membership systems collect fees but book nothing. Booking systems book but know nothing about membership. Every tool makes you pick one and then run the rest by hand — in a spreadsheet, over text messages, in the treasurer's head.

Bastu exists because the association we were building for needed both. Membership decides what can be booked and what it costs, and everything else in the product follows from that sentence.

Where Bastu comes from

Umeå Kallbadsförening

Parti Design built Bastu for Umeå Kallbadsförening — an ice hole, a woodpile and a booking problem — because nothing that existed understood what a membership is. It is in use there every week, by real members, and every new feature runs for real there before the next one starts.

Do you run a community sauna?

Bastu is the tool we wished existed. You can try it for fourteen days without a card.

Create account See what we are building