Sweat, Steam, and Silence: Insights from XtraClubs on the Urban Sauna Revolution.

For centuries, the sauna has functioned as far more than a place to sweat. In Finland, it is a civic constant - a space where bodies are restored, hierarchies dissolve, and time briefly stands still. It is ritual rather than reward, woven into daily life with the quiet regularity of church bells. Heat, in this context, is not indulgence. It is infrastructure.

Australia, for all its fixation on health and the outdoors, has rarely afforded sauna culture the same seriousness. Here, the practice has tended to arrive diluted - folded into gyms as an afterthought, miscast as steam, or reserved for rarefied wellness enclaves whose price tags quietly discourage habit. The result is a paradox: a country primed for physical ritual, yet chronically underserved by spaces capable of supporting it.

Anyone who has sought out a proper sauna locally will recognise the pattern. Tepid temperatures. Crowded rooms. Facilities that gesture toward tradition without understanding its discipline. The physiological benefits of heat therapy are increasingly well established; the environments designed to deliver them have lagged behind. Access, too, has remained uneven, with quality too often synonymous with exclusivity.

And yet, something has begun to shift.

Founded by a group of Sydney locals who believed recovery should be routine rather than aspirational, XtraClubs approaches sauna not as a luxury experience, but as shared urban infrastructure. Their ambition is disarmingly simple: to make sauna, ice, and steam as normal, accessible, and repeatable as a weekly swim or morning coffee.

At their flagship Bondi Junction site, that philosophy is made tangible. The largest Finnish sauna in the Southern Hemisphere anchors the space - a 40-square-metre room engineered with precision, from advanced air circulation to automated water spray that produces proper löyly, not theatrical heat. Five individually controlled ice baths sit nearby, enabling measured contrast therapy rather than performative extremes. A generous steam room, informed by Turkish hamam traditions, offers slower, more meditative restoration, while intimate infrared saunas create space for extended sessions and quiet conversation.

What’s truly impressive is how each XtraClubs site is imbued with the brand’s distinctive DNA while simultaneously embracing and elevating the unique characteristics of its setting. Rather than imposing a uniform template, the design approach thoughtfully responds to the architectural and cultural context, allowing the space to feel both authentically local and unmistakably XtraClubs. This sensitivity ensures that every location becomes more than just a facility - it transforms into a tailored sanctuary where the ethos of ritual, restoration, and communal care is experienced through the lens of its surroundings.

Hot enough to melt your stress, cool enough to freeze your excuses.

What distinguishes XtraClubs, however, is not scale alone, but restraint. The experience is deliberately self-directed and technologically unobtrusive. Entry is autonomous. Bookings are frictionless. The app functions less as a feature than as infrastructure - designed to disappear once it has done its job. In an industry often defined by constant touchpoints and intervention, XtraClubs treats autonomy as a form of care.

Equally significant is the pricing as the model resists the long-standing equation of wellness with exclusivity. In doing so, it gestures toward something more culturally ambitious: the possibility of ritual at scale. A place to return to weekly, even daily. A shared environment where recovery is collective, not curated.

XtraClubs is not attempting to replicate Finnish sauna culture wholesale, nor to aestheticise tradition for effect. Instead, it asks a more contemporary question: what might sauna culture look like if it were designed for the realities of modern urban life - dense, digital, overstimulated - and offered back to the city as something ordinary, reliable, and deeply human?

In the conversation that follows, we speak with James Simonetta about heat as habit, technology as quiet enabler, and why the future of wellness may depend less on optimisation, and more on returning, again and again, to a small set of well-designed rituals.

XtraClubs frames wellness as a daily ritual rather than an aspirational indulgence. What moment or insight convinced you that sauna, ice, and steam could become a public utility of sorts - something closer to a neighbourhood library or swimming pool than a luxury spa?

James Simonetta: For me, it started personally. I was using a sauna a few times a week and noticing very real benefits - better sleep, lower stress, faster recovery. Around the same time, emerging research, particularly from people like Dr Rhonda Patrick, was reinforcing that frequent sauna use could deliver meaningful long-term health outcomes, including reductions in all-cause mortality of up to 40 percent. The disconnect was convenience. Access was fragmented, expensive, or framed as a luxury experience. That gap between proven benefit and everyday accessibility felt like the opportunity.

Your sites - Bondi Junction, Green Square, Marrickville and Manly - form a kind of “wellness constellation” across Sydney’s most future-leaning districts. How do you think urban density, demographic change, and the rise of hybrid lifestyles are reshaping demand for accessible recovery spaces?

James Simonetta: We often look to the trajectory of large gym networks like Anytime Fitness. Our belief is that bathhouse memberships will follow a similar path, becoming a common, almost default membership for people who care about their health. As cities densify and lifestyles become more hybrid and cognitively demanding, recovery spaces stop being optional extras and start becoming infrastructure.

The Bondi Junction club houses the largest Finnish sauna in the Southern Hemisphere, yet your model is self-service and intentionally unadorned. How did you reconcile the desire for architectural gravitas with the discipline of keeping prices democratic?

James Simonetta: Our positioning has always been what we call “affordable luxury”. We invest heavily in the things that matter - large-format communal facilities, best-in-class sauna design, proper engineering - and pair that with deeply integrated technology that allows us to operate with low staffing overhead. That balance lets us create spaces with architectural weight without pushing pricing into exclusivity.

Australia is warming, lifestyles are accelerating, and stress culture is slowly reaching a tipping point. In this context, how do you envision hot-cold therapy evolving from a trend to a civic habit - something as normal as grabbing a morning coffee?

James Simonetta: We see three core reasons people return regularly: relaxation, recovery, and social connection. Together, they make sauna and ice not just a health intervention, but a lifestyle anchor. In busy urban lives, that combination gives people permission to slow down and a reason to come back again and again.

XtraClubs’ tech infrastructure - from autonomous entry to frictionless scheduling - is quietly radical in an industry historically defined by touch-points and staff. What philosophies guided your belief that autonomy could enhance rather than diminish the emotional experience of rest and recovery?

James Simonetta: We rethought the entire experience from first principles. Rather than asking how wellness spaces have traditionally operated, we asked what was required to genuinely deliver affordability, convenience, and quality. Autonomy from entry to booking actually enhances rest. It removes friction, self-consciousness, and unnecessary interaction, letting people arrive, decompress, and leave on their own terms.

Many wellness operators borrow heavily from Nordic or Japanese bathing traditions, often aesthetically but not philosophically. When designing XtraClubs, which elements of global bathing culture did you feel were essential to honour - and which did you intentionally reinterpret for an Australian context?

James Simonetta: We’ve taken deep inspiration from historic sauna culture, but applied a modern Australian lens. A good example is our Finnish sauna design - exceptional löyly, correct airflow, tiered seating - all fundamental principles. At the same time, we’ve intentionally left out practices like sauna whisking, which are culturally meaningful elsewhere but don’t necessarily translate to everyday urban life here.

Your mission speaks to “affordable luxury”, yet affordability in wellness is rarely achieved without compromise. What were the toughest decisions behind the scenes that allowed you to preserve quality while protecting accessibility?

James Simonetta: The hardest decisions were structural rather than aesthetic. By focusing tightly on sauna, ice, and steam, and doing them exceptionally well, and combining large communal formats with integrated technology, we’ve been able to walk that line. It’s less about compromise and more about discipline.

As you prepare for rapid expansion, how do you think about standardising something inherently sensory - heat levels, water purity, acoustics, the way a room breathes? Do you see consistency or local nuance as the greater mark of maturity for XtraClubs?

James Simonetta: Consistency is critical. We achieve that by not franchising, owning our technology, and relentlessly standardising processes and procedures. That control allows us to deliver the same experience every time, which is essential when you’re dealing with something as sensory and trust-based as heat and cold.

XtraClubs sits at an intersection of health, hospitality, architecture, and urban wellbeing. Are there adjacent areas you’re considering as long-term extensions of the brand?

James Simonetta: At this stage, our focus is simply on executing the core experience well. There’s a lot of power in doing fewer things properly, and we’re still very focused on getting the fundamentals right at scale.

And finally, in a city saturated with overstimulation, XtraClubs offers its opposite: simplicity, stillness, and heat. If you imagine Sydney in 2035, what role would you hope XtraClubs has played not just in how people recover, but in how they live?

James Simonetta: If by then sauna and ice have become a normal part of everyday life in Australia - something people integrate weekly without thinking twice - we’ll be very happy. If XtraClubs has played even a small role in helping people feel better, live more calmly, and build healthier routines around themselves, that’s success for us.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of XtraClubs.