She Designs for Cassina and Louis Vuitton. Effe Asked Her to Rethink the Sauna.

Patricia Urquiola’s latest design project is a sauna.

Urquiola has been Creative Director of Cassina since 2015. She has designed for Louis Vuitton, Flos, Kvadrat, B&B Italia, Moroso, Agape, Kettal, and Mutina. Her architecture and interiors portfolio includes the Il Sereno Hotel on Lake Como, the Four Seasons Hotel Milan spa, and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Barcelona. Her work is in MoMA’s permanent collection and has been exhibited at museums including the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Vitra Design Museum. Studio Urquiola, the Milan practice she founded in 2001 with Alberto Zontone, works across industrial design, architecture, hospitality, retail, residential projects, and exhibitions.

The client is Effe, the 30-year-old Italian sauna and hammam specialist.

The result is Baluar, a modular sauna and hammam collection unveiled at Salone del Mobile 2026. The collaboration is described as an ongoing partnership, not a one-off licensing arrangement. Wallpaper reported that Urquiola wanted to redefine the concept of wellness spaces by focusing on the relationship a person has with their own place of regeneration. Effe’s own language frames Baluar as a protected retreat: a compact volume that extends outward while sheltering an intimate interior.

Grand View Research estimates the global sauna market at $954 million in 2025, projected to $1.56 billion by 2033. The Global Wellness Institute values wellness real estate at $584 billion.

What Effe built

Baluar pairs a dry sauna and a wet hammam inside a compact architectural volume clad in ribbed, heat-treated linden wood. A single module occupies roughly 52 square feet. A paired configuration doubles that to about 104 square feet. The modules can stand alone, sit side by side, or integrate into a larger wellness area.

The design language draws on the bastion, a fortified medieval structure built to project strength outward while sheltering what is inside. The exterior cladding is heat-treated linden wood (sometimes translated as lime wood in European trade press; linden, lime, and basswood are all common English names for the Tilia genus), offered in light and dark variants with a vertical ribbed or grooved surface. Hammam interiors come in two mosaic finishes, Conchiglia and Nocci. Overhead lighting is integrated into the system.

Dimensional reporting from Il Bagno News puts a single module at about 7 feet 3 inches square by 7 feet 7 inches tall. The combined system measures about 14 feet 5 inches by 7 feet 3 inches by 7 feet 7 inches.

The architect rarely designs the sauna

The typical thermal room is specified by a spa planner or a wellness equipment dealer, sourced from a catalog, and installed as a component. The architect who designs the building rarely designs the sauna.

Urquiola’s network runs through architecture studios, high-end residential developers, and hospitality design firms. If Baluar reaches those channels, Effe sells to a different buyer than the sauna catalogs do.

The Thermory Design Awards put sauna builders in front of an architecture-press audience for the first time this year. Few manufacturers have put a name at Urquiola’s level on a modular thermal-room system.

A market moving toward enclosure

Much of the industry still leads with floor-to-ceiling glass, which photographs well and lets operators supervise occupancy. Baluar is enclosed, opaque, and deliberately heavy. The wood surface, the ribbed texture, and the architectural mass are the primary design elements.

Through the first half of 2026, the all-glass front that dominated commercial sauna design from roughly 2019 through 2024 has been giving way to enclosed, low-stimulus rooms that designers increasingly describe as meditative. Winning projects in this year’s Thermory Design Awards favored timber enclosure and indirect light over transparency. New operator rooms in New York and Manchester are darker, quieter, and deliberately harder to see into. Glass still has a place in supervision-heavy public facilities.

Where Effe is coming from

Baluar is not Effe’s first move toward design-led thermal rooms. The company sells integrated sauna-plus-hammam systems, standalone saunas, hammams, steam generators, and sensory showers for residential and public installations. Effe’s technical documentation notes that saunas and hammams have fundamentally different requirements: saunas use dry heat reaching 194 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit and rely mostly on wood construction, while hammams operate at lower temperatures with much higher humidity and require water-repellent materials throughout.

At Salone del Mobile 2025, Effe presented the Petra SH modular system, which combined sauna, hammam, and plunge-bath concepts. Wallpaper described Baluar as a continuation of that direction. Effe also showed its Cabanon outdoor sauna at the 2025 Elle Decor Alchemica exhibition, which Urquiola organized and art-directed.

From Salone to job site

The open question is whether Effe will publish the documentation architects and builders need to permit and install Baluar.

In hospitality, multifamily, and high-end residential projects, the real footprint is the total room package. A dry hot room and a wet steam room need different materials, different drainage, different ventilation, and different service access. Add circulation space, mechanical access, and controls, and the installed footprint expands well beyond the module dimensions. Baluar may fit inside 52 square feet. The room it lives in will not. The modular commercial sauna conversation in the US has moved toward factory-built rooms precisely because the utility package is easier to standardize when the whole assembly ships as a unit. Whether Effe intends Baluar to be factory-built, panelized, or site-assembled has not been disclosed.

In European manufacturing, where Effe builds, dual-climate thermal rooms are governed by CE marking and local codes. In North America, the path is less standardized. Effe lists IMQ, CE, SVGW, IEC-IECEE, and CSA among its general certifications, but whether Baluar carries UL, CSA, or ETL listing for North American projects has not been confirmed. The same gap extends to heater specifications, steam-generator details, electrical requirements, and drainage conditions. Effe does list a North America contact in Brooklyn and says it supports projects from concept through maintenance. For North American projects, that support would need to cover code compliance, installer training, and service logistics.

For comparison, KLAFS’s S1, another premium compact sauna aimed at design-conscious buyers, already publishes exact dimensions, UL certification status, electrical requirements, and US availability on its product page. The two serve different segments (KLAFS S1 is a retractable single-function sauna; Baluar is a modular dual-program system), but the S1’s page carries the documentation that a trade increasingly focused on standards expects to see.