Sauna Is an Entertainment Business Now

Therme Group made two senior hires in one week in late May, and neither came from wellness. Rainer Maelzer, the co-founder of attraction-systems firm wiegand.maelzer and a former president of WhiteWater, was named Chief Entertainment Officer on May 27. Christian Woller, most recently managing director of Merlin Entertainments’ European and Asia-Pacific theme-park resorts and a former vice president of Legoland Billund, was named CEO of Therme Horizon on June 3. The title Therme created for Maelzer tells you more than the press release does: Chief Entertainment Officer. Not Chief Wellness Officer. Not Chief Experience Officer. Entertainment.

Read the two appointments together and a signal comes through that no single hire would carry on its own. Backed by a reported one billion euro joint venture with CVC Capital Partners and a stated goal of serving 100 to 120 million guests over 15 years, Therme is building social bathing as attraction-scale family entertainment, not boutique wellness. And the talent migration into bathing is not limited to Therme. From a Meow Wolf co-founder building an immersive bathhouse in Austin, to Burning Man veterans opening sauna clubs in Marin County, to a Finnish actor who built one of the most photographed saunas on earth, the entertainment industry has found the sauna business. Most of the sauna industry has not noticed. (Therme’s Herbarium festival, which SaunaNews covered in May, was an early signal: an invitation-only Aufguss festival that now draws more performers than the world championship.)

Two Theme-Park Executives Walk Into a Therme

Maelzer is not a wellness hire. He co-founded wiegand.maelzer, the company behind the signature attraction systems already installed across Therme’s entertainment areas, and co-invented the SlideWheel, one of the water park industry’s most recognized ride systems. He served as president of WhiteWater ERA, a water park construction and project management company. His new role, as he told Spa Business: “I look forward to integrating dynamic water-based attractions into the wellbeing landscape across Therme Group’s destinations.”

Woller brings a different piece. He spent more than 15 years at Legoland Billund before rising to manage Merlin Entertainments' theme-park resorts across Europe and Asia-Pacific. Merlin operates Legoland parks, Madame Tussauds, Sea Life aquariums, and Alton Towers. Woller now runs Therme Horizon, the holding company that controls Therme Erding (Germany), Therme Bucharest (Romania), three recently acquired Josef Wund thermal destinations, and the co-investment in Therme Manchester.

Therme Group founder Robert Hanea framed Maelzer’s appointment in language that would be unremarkable at an IAAPA keynote and foreign to most sauna industry conferences: “His expertise in developing world-class attractions and experiential environments will be instrumental as we expand Therme destinations internationally, helping shape engaging, family-oriented spaces that blend innovation, recreation and wellbeing.”

The Private Equity Playbook: Merlin to Virgin Active to Therme

The two hires make more sense when you look at who is writing the checks. CVC Capital Partners acquired a 28 percent stake in Merlin Entertainments in 2010 at a 2.25 billion pound valuation. A year later, CVC took a 51 percent controlling stake in Virgin Active, the international health club operator. In 2025, CVC’s Fund IX (26 billion euros) formed the Therme Horizon joint venture. Three steps in 15 years: family entertainment, fitness, thermal wellness. Each one a scalable, guest-throughput leisure business with strong brand identity. Each one built on the operational knowledge from the last.

Woller’s appointment is the human proof of that pipeline. He walked from Merlin’s org chart to Therme Horizon’s CEO office. Whether CVC facilitated the introduction or Woller found his own way, the path runs through the same investor’s portfolio.

There is a third Therme hire that predates both. Robert Hammond, co-founder and former executive director of the High Line in New York, joined Therme Group US as President and Chief Strategy Officer in April 2022. Hammond is not a theme-park executive, but his background is in experience infrastructure: he turned a derelict elevated rail line into one of the most visited public experiences in the world. He later founded Culture of Bathing, a platform exploring the social dimensions of bathing, and sponsored the first New York City Sauna Festival on the Brooklyn waterfront. When Therme picked its US strategy lead, it picked someone whose career proves that infrastructure becomes culture when you design it that way.

A Meow Wolf Co-Founder Builds a Bathhouse

The corporate-level migration has a mirror at the entrepreneurial level. Corvas Brinkerhoff, one of the seven original founders of Meow Wolf, the immersive art company that grew from a Santa Fe art collective into a major location-based entertainment brand, left his role as SVP of Experience Design in November 2023 to build Submersive: a 20,000 square foot “immersive art bathhouse” in Austin, Texas. It opens summer 2027 at 901 Barton Springs Road with 12 themed environments integrating saunas, steam rooms, cold plunges, and hot baths with projection art, lasers, and biometric monitoring.

“We are not building a spa. We are building a portal,” Brinkerhoff told KXAN. “The bathhouse has always been a place where people go to reset and reconnect. We are taking that ancient impulse and giving it the full power of immersive art and modern neuroscience. Every traditional bathing modality, be it dry sauna, steam room, hot baths, or cold plunge, has been reimagined in how it can be profoundly enhanced with the power of immersive design.”

The inspiration, he has said, came from years visiting Ten Thousand Waves, a Japanese-style bathhouse in Santa Fe, while simultaneously building Meow Wolf’s sensory-overload installations nearby. Submersive targets 200,000 visitors annually with day passes starting around $88 and plans for a worldwide network of locations.

From the Playa to the Steam Room

If Therme represents the corporate pipeline and Submersive the creative one, a third channel runs through festival culture, and specifically through Burning Man.

The Portal, a members-only sauna and biohacking club that opened in Mill Valley, California in May 2024, is the clearest physical proof. Co-founded by Tim Chang, a venture partner at Mayfield Fund who has been twice named to the Forbes Midas List of top 100 venture capitalists, The Portal charges $400 a month for access to sauna, cold plunge, hyperbaric oxygen, a podcast studio, and evening programming that ranges from cacao ceremonies to DJ sets. Its advisory board includes Justin Kan (co-founder of Twitch), Tim Ferriss, James Joaquin (co-founder of Obvious Ventures with Ev Williams of Twitter), and David Denberg (partner at Summit, the tech-leader gathering widely described as the billionaire-tier sibling of Burning Man). The SF Standard reported that during Burning Man week, “with much of The Portal’s membership off at the Playa, the scene was relatively low-key.” Chang’s own framing: “You could have a Burning Man DJ, but instead of table service, you could duck out and do cold plunge.”

Othership, the Toronto and New York sauna company that has raised $20.6 million and served over 160,000 visitors, traces a parallel path. Co-founder and CEO Robbie Bent has spoken openly about the transformation pipeline that led him from a failed $20 million startup and addiction to founding a company built around communal breathwork, ice baths, and sauna sessions scored to live DJs, including Blond:ish, a Burning Man headliner. “Emily and I had done Vipassana meditation together, psychedelic medicines, group therapy, Hoffman Process,” he told Culture of Bathe-ing. “What makes Othership unique is the infusion of this into our classes.” Co-founder Myles Farmer came from Toronto’s restaurant and nightclub scene. The investment memo from Vine Ventures uses the language of “prep and integration,” the same vocabulary as the psychedelic-therapy community.

Remedy Place, the Los Angeles and New York social wellness club, drew a $5 million investment round that included Zedd (the DJ and producer) and Rufus Du Sol (the electronic music trio), both festival-circuit headliners. Sauna is now attracting festival money directly.

The connection is not metaphorical. Finnish architects JKMM partnered with the Helsinki-based Sauna on Fire collective to build a timber sauna pavilion at Burning Man in 2019 that served over 1,000 participants. The Black Rock Sauna Society, a Finnish-led camp of 70 to 80 members, has operated a communal sauna on the playa annually for years, staffed by volunteer “sauna elves” who guide visitors through traditional Finnish loyly. Their statement could come from the marketing copy of any social sauna startup: “Here, barriers dissolve, facilitating meaningful conversations, mutual understanding, and personal growth.”

The Grassroots Signal

The migration is not only top-down. At the grassroots level, entertainment talent is flowing into bathing organically and globally.

Armando Prados, a former executive producer at Tele5, Spain’s major commercial television network, co-founded Aire Ancient Baths, now one of the world’s largest upscale bathhouse brands with locations in Barcelona, Madrid, New York, Chicago, and London. Lauren Berlingeri, a former international fashion model and TV host for UFC and EA Sports, co-founded HigherDOSE, the infrared sauna brand that helped mainstream the category in New York. Reza Merchant, founder of The Collective co-living brand, launched Shoreditch and Soul in London in 2025 with weekly “sauna rave” nights featuring DJs inside a 40-person circular sauna called the Sensorium. Sam Liebling, a New York electronic music promoter, runs Steamroom, a clothing-optional techno rave series hosted inside Brooklyn bathhouses.

In competitive Aufguss, where sauna masters perform elaborate towel-waving rituals with essential oils, the 2025 world champion is Sigrid van Rijswijk, a Dutch performer with eight years of theater and acting training who explicitly traces her craft to the stage: “My journey began in theater.” Therme Bucharest, the company that just hired two theme-park executives, describes its own freestyle Aufguss programming as “inspired by the world of Cirque du Soleil.”

The music-in-sauna lineage runs deeper than most operators realize. Liquidrom Berlin has hosted DJs above a heated saltwater dome with underwater speakers for years, positioned in the press alongside Berghain. (Waterstruck Wellness in Maine is adding live music to its thermal circuit this summer, another sign that sonic programming is becoming standard in the bathing business.) Professor Micky Remann, a media artist from Bauhaus University Weimar, invented the Liquid Sound concept that became the signature experience at Toskanaworld Group’s thermal spas in Germany. Canadian experimental composer Kara-Lis Coverdale, whom The Guardian called “one of the most exciting composers in North America,” has built a deliberate body of work composed specifically for sauna architectures, including a sold-out installation at a public smoke sauna in Portland, Maine.

Finland Already Knew

None of this would surprise a Finn. When UNESCO inscribed Finnish sauna culture on the Intangible Cultural Heritage list in December 2020, it classified the tradition under “Social practices, rituals and festive events.” Not health. Not hygiene. The official determination from the world’s cultural authority positions sauna as entertainment-adjacent by definition.

Jasper Paaakkonen, the Finnish actor best known for his roles in Vikings and Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, put roughly six million euros into co-building Loyly, the Helsinki waterfront sauna that Time Magazine named one of the World’s 100 Greatest Places. He described the goal as building “a sauna version of the Sydney Opera House.” He later launched Aitosauna as a premium eco-sauna brand. This is the entertainment-to-sauna pipeline with Finnish characteristics: the talent is not imported but returning to a tradition it never fully left.

Norway shows the other path. SALT, the nomadic art project turned permanent Oslo installation, won the Oslo City Artist Award in 2021 and the World Sauna Award in 2024. Its main sauna holds 80 people, has a bar, and hosts DJs on weekends. The Guardian called it “more like a club than a sauna.” It is formally classified as an art project by the city. Finland proves sauna was always entertainment. Norway proves it can be designed as entertainment by outsiders. Therme is doing at industrial scale what SALT and KOK Oslo did at city scale.