Kuusijärvi Smoke Saunas Win the Finlandia Prize for Architecture

A sauna has won the Finlandia Prize for Architecture for the first time in the prize’s 13 editions. The Finnish Association of Architects (SAFA) announced on October 5 that the 2026 prize goes to the Kuusijärvi smoke saunas in Vantaa, just north of Helsinki. The City of Vantaa built them beside Lake Kuusijärvi and opened them in August 2025. Mer Architects designed them with Talli Architects.

This year’s selector, author and scholar Timo Miettinen, picked the winner from four finalists chosen by SAFA’s pre-selection jury. The others were the Muurarimestari residential building in Helsinki, the Swedish Cultural Foundation’s SKiB campus in Pori and Lost Shtetl, a Jewish history museum in Lithuania. Two saunas had reached the shortlist before without winning: Helsinki’s Löyly in 2016 and the Art Sauna in Mänttä in 2022.

“Kuusijärvi is a public and reasonably priced sauna destination, which means that the experience is widely accessible,” Miettinen wrote in his selection statement, adding a few lines later: “A public developer can also be bold and ambitious.”

What Vantaa built for EUR 3.3 million

The city added four buildings beside the site’s older smoke saunas: Pihka, a 27-seat log smoke sauna; Havu, a 17-seat smoke sauna with two wheelchair spaces, kept as a quiet sauna; Kaarna, a changing and shower building; and a kiosk with public restrooms. Havu gives a softer löyly and Pihka, higher up the slope, a stronger one.

The city tendered the design with quality as the main criterion. Design began in January 2023 and construction in August 2024, and the saunas opened on August 28, 2025. VM Suomalainen was the main contractor. Refrak, which also built the Finnish Sauna Society’s smoke-sauna stoves, designed and built the stoves, and A-Insinöörit engineered the structure.

All four buildings cost EUR 3.3 million (about $3.7 million), according to a city cost breakdown, and each sauna building cost EUR 460,000 (about $515,000), including its basement heating room and a stove of about EUR 50,000. Earthworks took EUR 850,000, nearly as much as the two saunas together. The city lists the reasons: buildings spaced apart for fire safety, a slope that needed retaining walls, long pipe runs from the main building, a larger ground-source heat field and heated concrete terraces.

The city forecasts sauna revenue of EUR 1.6 million in 2026, which it says will cover the cost of running the saunas, including the investment. Ticket sales were about EUR 1.1 million in 2023, the last full year before construction.

Two stories, with the fire downstairs

A smoke sauna has no chimney. Smoke fills the room while the stones heat, then clears before anyone bathes. Kuusijärvi knows the risk. The site’s first smoke sauna, from 2002, burned in 2011, one of the two small saunas that replaced it burned in 2016, and another small sauna was put out of use by a fire in June 2025.

The new buildings are planned around it. The two saunas stand about 26 feet apart, and each hot room has two nested log walls with fire insulation between them. The firebox sits in a heating room on the lower floor, with space for about a week’s firewood, and the sauna room is about 15 feet above it. The two stoves hold about 5,500 pounds of stones between them. Bathers throw löyly through a hatch on top of the stove, below high benches of heat-treated pine.

Smoke escapes through a roof vent and wall vents, which also give the log saunas gravity ventilation once bathing starts. The saunas are pine log, clad in charred recycled timber, and all four buildings run on ground-source heat under meadow roofs. Kaarna is a different kind of building: honeycomb brick with mechanical ventilation, built to the technical standard of a swimming hall. That is the side of a bathhouse build first-time operators tend to underestimate.

Lit at 7 a.m., every day of the year

Stokers light the stoves at 7 a.m. and bathing starts at 2 p.m., every day of the year, according to Sauna-lehti, the Finnish Sauna Society’s magazine. The saunas are hottest at opening and cool through the evening. Vantaa says they are the only public smoke saunas in Finland open every day of the year.

Vantti, a services company the city owns, does the heating. Its stokers had never fired a smoke sauna, so the Finnish Sauna Society’s master stoker trained them. Changing the stones means closing one sauna and letting its stove cool for three days, which the city expects to do once or twice a year.

Kuusijärvi sees 400 to 450 bathers a day, Yle reports, and the city counts more than 150,000 visits a year across its smoke and electric saunas. Before the new buildings opened, the smoke saunas drew about 60,000 bathers a year, and the city expected the additions to bring 50,000 more.

If you go

The saunas are at Kuusijärventie 3 in Vantaa. The larger smoke saunas open from 2 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., and the small one from 1 p.m. You can’t reserve: buy a two-hour wristband at the café. Adults pay EUR 16 (about $18) and reduced tickets cost EUR 8. Bathing is mixed, so wear a swimsuit. The smoke saunas don’t take groups.

Prices may rise. The city has proposed EUR 17 for adults and EUR 11 for reduced tickets, along with online booking, but its culture and wellbeing committee did not take up the increase as scheduled on October 7.

The project also won Vantaa’s Kehäkukka architecture award in November 2025 and is nominated for the 2026 Finnish Wood Award, which will be announced November 12. In the US, our August look at a smoke sauna design that could travel to America found no public savusauna in operation.