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 1. The title Therme created for Maelzer is Chief Entertainment Officer, not Chief Wellness Officer.

Read together, the two appointments show where Therme is going. Backed by a reported one billion euro joint venture with CVC Capital Partners, Therme is building social bathing as attraction-scale family entertainment rather than boutique wellness. Therme is not alone. A Meow Wolf co-founder is building an immersive bathhouse in Austin, Burning Man veterans have opened sauna clubs in Marin County, and a Finnish actor co-built Helsinki’s Löyly. (Therme’s Herbarium festival, which SaunaNews covered in May, was an early example: an invitation-only Aufguss festival that now draws more performers than the world championship.)

Both hires come from theme parks and water parks

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 has spent more than two decades running entertainment destinations, holding senior roles at Merlin Entertainments that included vice president of the Legoland Billund Resort before he managed Merlin’s European and Asia-Pacific theme-park resorts. Merlin operates Legoland parks, Madame Tussauds, Sea Life aquariums, and Alton Towers. Woller now runs Therme Horizon, which Therme says operates five facilities (Therme Bucharest in Romania, and Therme Erding, Therme Sinsheim, Therme Euskirchen and Badeparadies Schwarzwald in Titisee, Germany) and advances destinations in development across Europe.

Therme Group founder Robert Hanea framed Maelzer’s appointment in theme-park terms: “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 money behind Therme Horizon has a leisure track record. 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. That is three guest-throughput leisure businesses in 15 years: family entertainment, fitness, then thermal bathing.

Woller went from Merlin to the CEO office at Therme Horizon. 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. He turned a derelict elevated rail line into one of the most visited public spaces 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.

A Meow Wolf co-founder builds a bathhouse

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’re not building a spa. We’re building a portal,” Brinkerhoff told KXAN. “The bathhouse has always been a place where people go to reset and reconnect. We’re 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

Festival culture, and Burning Man in particular, is a third route into the business.

The Portal, a members-only sauna and biohacking club, opened in Mill Valley, California in May 2024. Co-founded by Tim Chang, a former Mayfield Fund partner who was twice named to the Forbes Midas List of top 100 venture capitalists, The Portal offered memberships starting at $350 a month in 2024, with 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 (a partner at Summit). 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, traces a parallel path. Co-founder and CEO Robbie Bent has spoken openly about the personal path that led him from what he has described on The Failure Factor podcast as a $20 million startup failure and recovery from addiction to founding a company built around communal breathwork, ice baths, and sauna sessions scored to live DJs. “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.”

Remedy Place, the Los Angeles and New York social wellness club, drew a $5 million investment round in 2022 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.

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 löyly. The camp describes it this way: “Here, barriers dissolve, facilitating meaningful conversations, mutual understanding, and personal growth.”

TV producers, models, promoters and performers

Armando Prados, a former executive producer at Tele5, Spain’s major commercial television network, co-founded Aire Ancient Baths, now an upscale bathhouse brand with locations in Seville, Barcelona, New York, Chicago, and London. Lauren Berlingeri, who modeled for years in her 20s, 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 party series hosted inside a Brooklyn bathhouse.

In competitive Aufguss, where sauna masters perform elaborate towel-waving rituals with essential oils, the 2025 Aufguss WM solo champion is Sigrid van Rijswijk, a Dutch performer with more than eight years of theater and acting experience 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.”

Music in the bathhouse is not new. Liquidrom Berlin runs DJ sound sessions with underwater music in a heated saltwater pool beneath its dome. (Waterstruck Wellness in Maine is adding live music to its thermal circuit this summer.) Micky Remann, a media artist who teaches at Bauhaus University Weimar, invented Liquid Sound, the underwater music and light concept that became the signature of the Toskana Therme spas in Germany, including Toskana Therme Bad Sulza. Canadian experimental composer Kara-Lis Coverdale premiered a piece named for Washington Baths, a public sauna in Portland, Maine, at the sauna itself, with smoke sauna accompaniment. SaunaShare’s Washington Baths guide covers the regular neighborhood bathing experience.

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 listed the tradition under three domains: “Social practices, rituals and festive events,” “Knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe,” and “Traditional craftsmanship.”

Jasper Pääkkönen, the Finnish actor best known for his roles in Vikings and Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, co-founded Löyly with MP Antero Vartia. The two were the main investors in the six-million-euro Helsinki waterfront sauna, which Time Magazine named one of the World’s 100 Greatest Places in 2018. He later launched AITO Sauna, a luxury prefabricated outdoor sauna brand.

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, Árdna, holds 80 to 90 people, has a bar, and hosts DJs on weekends. SALT still describes itself as an art project. Therme is doing at industrial scale what SALT and KOK Oslo did at city scale.

Performance is one part of the session

In StarrCast’s International Sauna Congress interviews, Chris Shenkle describes using his acting and opera background in Show Aufguss while also tracking heat, scent and individual guests. Anders Hage describes quieter facilitated sessions focused on reflection. Our sauna-master report covers both approaches and their staffing demands.

Plugin Heat Club’s Copenhagen model gives visitors a choice between quieter DEEP sessions, music-led CLUB sessions and more intense PEAK sessions. It explicitly allows guests to leave any round or skip cold immersion. The physical setting is another part of that choice: Earth Lagoon’s changing-room options and Midjourney’s planned spa and private scan rooms show how architecture can accommodate different reasons for visiting a bathing place.