https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/waterside-saunas-bay-area-17762581.php

I found four wood saunas on the Richmond waterfront with unreal Bay Area views
Silas Valentino, SFGATE

Feb. 4, 2023Updated: Feb. 4, 2023 9:22 a.m.

Sauna No. 2 is nicknamed the "picture window."
Silas Valentino/SFGATE

It’s possible to live your entire life in the Bay Area and not once swim in or fully connect with the bay. In fact, I did it for the first time a couple of weeks ago.

The cold plunge was courtesy of Good Hot, a bayside sauna venue on a cove along Point San Pablo in Richmond, where the frigid dip is paired with the comfort of a warmup close at hand. Each dunk into the chilly water swiftly revitalizes the body; then, the sauna relaxes it with melting temperatures. Over a 90-minute visit, this process repeats back and forth like the coastal tides.

But Good Hot was not designed just to be a relaxation haven. Its founders set out to provide the East Bay with a communal bath experience that's welcoming for people of all gender expressions, sexualities, races and backgrounds. Bathhouses have historically been gendered spaces, and they want to challenge that.

Good Hot is in Terminal 4 on Point San Pablo in Richmond, Calif.
Courtesy of Aysia Stieb

“We’re providing a space where people can feel vulnerable,” said Amy Louie, who co-owns Good Hot with Cooper Rogers.
Each Good Hot experience begins with an introduction from Louie, Rogers or an employee who is in their candidacy period to become a worker-owner. A tide chart is on the welcoming table, and they monitor nearby Keller Beach to gauge the bay’s water conditions for your safest dip (they also recommend wearing water shoes). The experience ends with a kettle of freshly cured peppermint tea from Oaktown Spice Shop and an open invitation to rest on one of the several lounges or benches to peer westward. In between, you can rinse off via one of several simple outdoor showers, if you like. 

The venue is feet from the bay and features four wooden saunas built on flatbed trailers. They are intentionally placed for spatial awareness — for the sunlight, for views of the San Pablo Bay into Marin or to create a communal center. 

The views from inside one of the saunas.
Courtesy of Aysia Stieb

Rogers and Louie, with the help of family and friends, built built the four saunas in boatlike shapes using reclaimed Douglas fir wood. Each sauna is unique; one plays with light, while others have windows that frame the bridge, mountain ranges or bay.

There’s also “the big one,” which can host eight people and is wheelchair accessible. The heat within is generated by propane heaters that maintain an average of 175 degrees. 

Sauna sessions are offered on Friday, Saturday and Sunday only. Reservations, which start at $120 for up to six people, are available three weeks in advance and tend to fill up. The first sauna opened in 2021, and a reputation has organically grown, purely from people raving about the private wooden saunas out by the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.

Louie and Rogers met as students at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. Rogers and Louie teach architecture at their alma mater. “I was once a disillusioned student, and now I’m a disillusioned teacher,” Louie quips.

One of the many peaceful areas to look out at the bay and Mount Tamalpais.
Silas Valentino/SFGATE

They found this land on Point San Pablo via Craigslist and were immediately smitten by the location. “People think that every corner of the bay is known, but it’s a tiny spot,” Louie said. 

Remnants of the history of the area, once called Terminal 4, remain. A derelict pier jets into the bay, and a large water tank abuts a hillside. 

An early account of the area is from the missionary Father Ramón Abella of San Francisco, who wrote in his diary in 1811, “This is all the land of the Huchunes.” Though it was surely called something else to the people who lived there, Abella gave the area the Spanish name Point San Pablo in reference to St. Paul. 

In the 20th century, Terminal 4 was a whaling station. When it shut down in 1971, it was one of the last operating stations in the country. 

The four saunas are intentionally placed for spacial awareness — for the sunlight, for views of the San Pablo Bay into Marin or for creating a communal center.
Courtesy of Aysia Stieb

The Terminal 4 peninsula today neighbors the quirky bed-and-breakfast East Brother Light Station and is home to a ceramic manufacturer called Claybirds. A faded sign advertises a private gun club for Chevron employees. The land is zoned for storage — across the gravel road are trucks and a cluster of porta potties — but Good Hot has worked with the city of Richmond for proper permitting. The hodgepodge of industries cohabiting the space adds to the general ethos.

“There are 1-800 Got Junk trucks that drive by here,” Louie said. “It has East Bay vibes.”

Good Hot has gained a strong enough reaction from customers that Louie and Rogers are in the process of expanding. They're looking for a converted warehouse in Oakland to be more centrally located. 

The venue where four saunas built on trailers are located. 
Courtesy of Aysia Stieb

The remoteness of their Point San Pablo location, where no public transportation is available, can make accessibility tricky. For folks who don’t have access to a car or who have financial difficulty paying for a ride, Good Hot offers a ride reimbursement program that covers up to $40 round trip for each party.

“It’s small ways here and there to make sure that anyone who wants to come can come out here,” Louie said. 

Each month, Good Hot offers reduced-rate sessions for low-income QTBIPOC (an acronym describing individuals who identify as queer and/or transgender and are Black, Indigenous or a person of color), and there are occasional special days exclusively for queer and trans customers. 

A new flag program invites artists to the sauna; each artist then designs a site-specific flag to be raffled off. The proceeds are donated to an organization or mutual aid fund that’s chosen by the artist. Chaz Bear, who fronts the band Toro y Moi, designed the first flag. 

The saunas were built with reclaimed wood. The first flag in a new art series; the money raised from raffling this flag will support Women's Audio Mission.
Courtesy of Aysia Stieb/Rich Lomi

When she was a student at the College of Environmental Design, Louie spent a summer traveling abroad to places like Hungary and Finland to study public bathhouses. She was curious to examine how architecture, as understood through the public bathhouse, imposes order upon bodies. Saunas are highly gendered spaces — the experience often begins by dividing men and women into separate rooms.

Speaking at a 2019 event for the College of Environmental Design following her journey, Louie described a moment of analyzing the comfort that she experienced in Helsinki. She was led to a public sauna near the harbor that was made of plywood and two-by-fours with only a wood-fired stove. 

While crammed in the small sauna with strangers, Louie began considering how one person’s comfort could come at the cost of another's.

A sailboat passes by Point San Pablo.
Silas Valentino/SFGATE

“The bathhouse can be a painful place to be,” she said in her talk, referencing the writings of feminist scholar Sara Ahmed. “One that induces the feeling of nonbelonging, of discomfort, of a quiet internalized violence. In order for certain bodies to exist in a place like a bathhouse, they bear the burden of concealing this discomfort. Or alternatively, they never enter the public bathhouse at all.”

On a remote cove in the East Bay, Good Hot and its private wooden saunas are ensuring that the bathhouse door remains open to anyone seeking the comforts inside.