Bathroom of the Week: Refined Rustic With a Custom Sauna

Photos by Spacecrafting

Bathroom at a Glance
Who lives here: A couple with four grown daughters and two grandchildren
Location: White Bear Lake, Minnesota
Size: 200 square feet (19 square meters)
Designers: Amy Leferink of Interior Impressions (interior design) and TEA2 Architects (architecture)
Builder: Kootenia Homes

The bathroom can be accessed from what Leferink refers to as the “lakeside hallway,” which has a door leading out to a patio and then the lake. This way, family and guests can head straight from swimming to the sauna without traipsing through the main part of the house.

One enters the bathroom through a door into this central washroom. A toilet room is behind a door to the left, and a shower and sauna are through a pocket door on the right. (Scroll to the bottom to see the floor plan.) The separation of spaces allows multiple people to use the bathroom at once, says Leferink, who also worked with the clients on their previous house.

Leferink’s design firm, Interior Impressions, uses Houzz Pro as its business platform. For this room, as well as for the design of the whole house, Leferink used Houzz Pro tools for product selections, proposals, scheduling, project updates, time tracking and invoicing. The firm also encourages clients to gather inspiration photos from Houzz and save them to ideabooks that they can share with their designers.

“It makes it so easy and convenient for our clients and our team,” Leferink says, adding that Houzz Pro also saves her clients money. “[Its tools] help minimize the cost of a client’s investment with the design firm [because] we have such great efficiencies. And it allows us to do so much more because this is such a smooth and easy process.”

Pendant lights: Wythe, Regina Andrew

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The bathroom’s palette and design are harmonious with the home’s coastal New England-style architecture. At the same time, “we wanted it to feel a little bit Scandinavian, [and] we wanted it to feel a little bit ‘Up North,’” Leferink says, referring to the northeastern part of Minnesota, which is known for its pine trees and rustic-cabin-ringed lakes. Pulling in a lot of natural materials helped her achieve an elevated but slightly rustic look.

Leferink designed the vanity with those ideas in mind. It’s made of unstained rift-sawn white oak with a low-sheen polyurethane varnish, and it has a reeded detail on its central false fronts and four flanking small drawers. The countertop is Blue Dunes granite, a natural stone with dynamic movement and a rich mix of earth tones. Leferink paired it with glass pendant lights and a round mirror, both with a rustic rope detail.

The rugged river rock wall behind the vanity is another example of a material that evokes the Minnesota landscape beautifully, although Leferink says adding it proved easier said than done.

“The tile installers wanted to murder me,” she says with a laugh. “[The stone] comes on a mesh-backed sheet, but you have to grout all around the stones and then wipe them all off individually and get all that extra grout off. It’s a lot of work — very labor-intensive. But we love how it turned out.”

Pebble tile: Stack Ocean Blend, Tile X Design

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While natural materials were prioritized in the bathroom’s design, durability was also a big concern when choosing materials, especially given the perils they would face, including water, steam, and wet towels and swimsuits. And from a sustainability standpoint, Leferink was reluctant to install a material that would have to be ripped out in five years because it didn’t hold up. So for the main floor tiles, which flow from the toilet room through to this shower room, she chose hard-wearing porcelain. The tiles look like natural limestone but are easier to clean and maintain and are resistant to mold and bacteria growth.

Leferink also used a porcelain tile for the shower walls, this time one with the look of rustic painted barnwood — “for a bit of that cabin feel,” she says. The small shampoo and shaving ledges are made of Corian (a manmade solid-surface material), and the shower floor tile is flat polished river rock.

Floor tile: EDI Voyage Silver (main) and Pebble Bora FP (shower and sauna), Ceramic Tileworks; wall tile: Mikeno Ash, The Tile Shop

Accessibility was yet another consideration when designing the bathroom. “[The homeowners] are both very healthy and active right now, but they plan to stay here as long as possible, so we definitely wanted to make the home very easy to navigate if they did end up needing some assistance,” Leferink says.

The whole bathroom is curbless and wheelchair-accessible, including the entry to the roughly 3-by-6-foot shower. And across from the shower, Leferink added a white oak bench that’s useful for support. She covered it with the same durable Blue Dunes granite that tops the vanity, then repeated the shower’s wood-look porcelain tile on the wall.

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The tower to the left of the bench is for linen storage, and hooks above the bench are convenient for hanging towels and robes.

A glass swing door separates the shower area from the star of the show: a traditional Finnish sauna.

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A Finnish sauna — the classic type used for millennia to promote relaxation and wellness — has fire- or electric-heated stones onto which users splash water to increase humidity.

Building a custom Finnish sauna is much more complicated and pricey than installing an infrared sauna — which doesn’t involve water — or even a self-contained freestanding Finnish sauna.

“A built-in custom sauna like this is easiest to install when the construction is new,” Leferink says. “There are several requirements that need to be met, such as HVAC capacity, higher electrical load capacity, water-resistant drywall and flooring and outdoor-rated lighting.” The steam and heat also need a way to escape, and a floor drain is necessary to handle the water.

A lot of factors come into play when budgeting for a sauna, but in this area of Minnesota, the costs for the custom route can easily climb into the low-to-mid five figures, Leferink says.

These homeowners were set on an authentic sauna experience. So Leferink worked with her client, contractor and a local company called Sisu that specializes in saunas to design and build this one, which is made of bleached blond teak. The floor is tiled with the same mesh-backed river rock used in the shower.

The sauna’s L-shaped, two-level layout seats up to eight people. The pail and ladle are for water, and a stone-filled container heated by an electric element (not pictured) sits just inside the door on the right. Movable boards can be positioned for comfort while sitting or reclining, and LED strip lighting enhances the relaxing, spa-like atmosphere.

The kids and grandkids were all able to gather at the lake for the first time last summer, and Leferink reports that the sauna was a hit. She’s thrilled with how the whole bathroom turned out, in fact.

“It just feels like you’re walking into a resort,” she says.