About Us

Above The Stones is an independent field journal about sauna in the UK. It isn’t a review site, a rankings list, or a how-to guide.

We use it to record what we notice while spending time in saunas, speaking with operators, and working through the realities of designing and building our own.

Much of the writing around sauna tends to drift to one of two extremes. Either broad, indistinct wellness language, or technical theory that doesn’t survive contact with real sites, planning rules, weather, budgets, and people. This sits somewhere in between.

The writing here falls into three loose categories.

Field Notes
Observations from sauna visits and lived experience. What we saw, how it felt, what worked, and what didn’t.

Design Notes
Reflections from the process of designing and building saunas in the UK, particularly where established theory meets real-world constraint.

Operator Notes
Occasional pieces shaped by conversations with sauna operators, builders, and people running businesses on the ground.

We try to describe what we observed before offering an opinion. We separate observation from assumption where we can. If something doesn’t work, we say so. If we’re unsure, we say that too.

We are the founders of a UK sauna project. This website is separate from that business. This is simply a place to think clearly, in public, about what makes a sauna work.