Six friends, four of them architects, took the ground floor of a 1939 warehouse on Commonwealth Street and made the most beautiful bathhouse of the new wave. They kept the old concrete beams and timber joists raw, then carved curved portals into the walls so the space reveals itself slowly, one zone at a time. There is a cedar sauna waterproofed in deep red, terracotta showering nooks with ceramic basins one of the co-founders threw himself, and a magnesium bath at a steady 38 degrees. The circuit is guided and communal, twenty people at most, moving from heat to a two-person ice plunge to a bench of crushed ice for scrubbing. Leif botanicals sit in the showers.
The Local Project put it in print, and you will see why in the first thirty seconds. This is bathing as architecture. Nothing else in Sydney looks quite like it.
