Haljas Houses Is Now a Three-Time Red Dot Winner

Haljas Houses, a four-year-old Estonian sauna manufacturer based in Tartu, has won its third Red Dot Design Award. The company’s Hele Nano personal sauna and Tarantula firewood carrier both received 2025 Red Dot recognition, adding to a 2022 win for the original Hele Glass. For a company with roughly five employees, three Red Dots in four years is an uncommon pace.

The timing matters for the US market. The Hele Nano is now available through American retailers, and it arrives with a distinction few prebuilt saunas share: it ships fully assembled, and it is the one Haljas sauna without lifting mounts on the roof: at 1,146 pounds, Haljas says, it can be lifted from beneath with a forklift or hoisted with straps.

Two wins in one year

The Red Dot Design Award, administered from Essen, Germany, evaluates thousands of product submissions annually on criteria including innovation, functionality, durability, and aesthetic quality. Winning once gets attention. Winning three times in four years, with a team small enough to fit around a single sauna bench, suggests something more than luck.

The 2022 win went to the Hele Glass (also marketed as the Hele Single), an octagonal mirror-glass sauna that seats up to seven around a central heater. The 2025 wins recognized two very different products: the Hele Nano, a two-person personal sauna built for portability, and the Tarantula, a sculptural firewood carrier that treats a utilitarian object as a design opportunity. Both 2025 entries were designed by Andre Maisväli.

The Hele Nano up close

On paper, the Hele Nano reads like a conventional small sauna: thermo-aspen interior, CLT (cross-laminated timber) structural panels, glulam posts, double-glazed mirror glass on the exterior. It seats two. It accepts a 3 to 6 kW electric heater. In the US, retailers pair it with a HUUM heater that complements the Nano’s compact interior.

But the real story is what the spec sheet implies rather than what it states. At 1,146 pounds and roughly 5 feet 3 inches long by 3 feet 9 inches wide, the Hele Nano arrives fully assembled. Haljas trucks it to the address; unloading and moving it into place is the buyer’s job, with whatever equipment the site needs, and Haljas lists only leveling and minor finishing work before the electrical hookup.

The SaunaNews team has first-hand experience with the Hele Nano, and the build quality matches the design ambition. The mirror glass exterior gives it a presence that belies its footprint, and the thermo-aspen interior produces a clean, even heat profile. It works indoors or outdoors, and because it ships in one piece, it can move again later: genuine portability for renters, renovators, or anyone who does not want a sauna permanently fixed to a foundation. An electrician is still required for the 240V connection, but that is the only professional trade involved in setup.

The Tarantula: design for the overlooked

The Tarantula firewood carrier is a different kind of design statement. Where most wood carriers are afterthoughts (a canvas bag, a metal rack from the hardware store), the Tarantula is an intentionally crafted object meant to sit beside a wood-burning sauna stove without clashing with the room it serves. It earned its Red Dot on the strength of that ambition: treating a mundane accessory as worthy of genuine design attention.

It is a smaller story than the Nano, but it speaks to the same design-first philosophy that increasingly separates European sauna manufacturers from their competitors. Every touchpoint matters, even the ones that carry firewood.

Estonia’s quiet streak

Haljas is part of a broader pattern in Estonian manufacturing. The country, with a population smaller than Philadelphia’s, has produced an outsized share of the world’s sauna hardware over the past decade. Companies like Thermory, HUUM, Saunum, and Auroom, with its indoor and outdoor saunas, have built global distribution from Estonian production facilities. Haljas, founded in 2021 by CEO Otto Täht alongside CPO Karl Joonas and COO Rauno Palmi, is the newest entrant in that lineage, and three Red Dots in four years puts them on a design trajectory that more established competitors should watch.

The prebuilt and modular sauna segment is growing fast in the US, driven by buyers who want sauna access without the cost and timeline of custom construction. The Hele Nano sits at the intersection of that demand and the kind of design credibility that a Red Dot confers. It is not the cheapest prebuilt option on the market, but it may be the most thoughtfully resolved.