For many New Yorkers, bathhouses offer a welcome reprieve from busy city living. But as a swell of social bathhouses have taken the city’s wellness landscape by storm, SAINT, a new sauna experience from Alex Feldman and Amanda Hensen, has emerged with a model that highlights the city’s most precious commodity: privacy. The duo, who met as colleagues at WeWork, imagined offering harried New Yorkers an escape from the city with sauna sessions in private suites. To make their vision a reality, they commissioned BOND, one of AN Interior’s Top 50 Architects and Designers last year, to design their Chelsea location, which opened this spring.
From the street, SAINT is mysterious yet inviting. Warm, filtered light spills out, promising respite from behind a fluted glass window. BOND principal Daniel Rauchwerger told AN Interior that the glass motif was drawn from the material vernacular of a past New York: “As spatial designers, we wanted to create something that was almost like artwork that could act as a signifier, so that someone passing by in the street would recognize it from another location without needing a logo.” BOND created an exterior calling card for SAINT, which is already planning to open other New York locations.
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