Sense Of Self Opens in Sydney With Two Saunas and a Room Built for Listening
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The Melbourne bathhouse’s second site fills a former antiques warehouse with two Finnish saunas, a walk-through cold plunge and a dark, amplified room playing a soundscape commissioned for it. Two hours cost A$75, about $53.
In this story6 sections
- 01The listening room plays one commissioned track on a loop
- 02The bigger sauna has two heaters and an Aufguss schedule
- 03The cold plunge is a channel you walk through
- 04The bathing floor is downstairs, with a hoist and a sauna-safe wheelchair
- 05Sydney follows a Melbourne original from 2020
- 06More listening-room programming is due in early 2027
Sense Of Self has opened its second bathhouse, and its first in Sydney, inside the former Sydney Antiques Centre in Surry Hills. The Melbourne company’s new site fills about 12,900 square feet with two Finnish saunas, a walk-through cold plunge, a hammam, hot mineral pools and a dark, heavily amplified room for listening to music. Two hours cost A$75, about $53, on weekdays. The bathhouse opened fully on October 8, Sense Of Self told SaunaNews.
Sense Of Self Surry Hills at a glance
- Where the former Sydney Antiques Centre, 529 South Dowling Street, Surry Hills, Sydney
- Hours Tuesday to Sunday, 7 a.m. to 9:45 p.m.; closed Mondays
- Entry A$75 (about $53 at the October 26 exchange rate) for two hours on weekdays, A$85 (about $60) on weekends and public holidays; robe and towel hire is A$15 (about $11)
- Booking required, through the Sense Of Self Surry Hills page
- House rules phones locked away, swimsuits on, all genders together, ages 12 and up, and no talking from 7 a.m. to noon on weekdays
- Architect RITZ&GHOUGASSIAN
- Follow @sos.senseofself on Instagram
The listening room plays one commissioned track on a loop
The Room of Deep Listening is a drop-in room inside the bathhouse and a first for Sense Of Self. The opening release calls it “heavily amplified, textural and dark.” For now it plays one piece, Aeon, a soundscape that Australian composer and sound artist George Ian Hewitt made for the room. It runs on a loop, built for a listen of 15 to 20 minutes, the company said.
Australian sound engineer and acoustic designer Mickey Levi worked with founder Freya Berwick on the sound across the whole site, the listening room included. Sense Of Self didn’t share speaker or equipment details.
“Music has a powerful ability to move us emotionally, and open us up. At our Surry Hills site, we had an additional space and wanted to use it for something deeply moving, sensory and restful. We asked ourselves how we could invite people to engage with another sense, and that’s how the Room of Deep Listening came about.” Freya Berwick, founder and director, Sense Of Self
The bigger sauna has two heaters and an Aufguss schedule
Surry Hills has two Finnish saunas, and Sense Of Self lists its saunas at 176°F. The larger room holds events and scheduled Aufguss sessions, in which a sauna master pours water on the stones and fans the steam through the room with a towel. The smaller sauna is meant for a quieter, more inward session. In the opening photos, the large sauna has two heaters side by side inside a low brick surround, and the small one has a single heater boxed in brick. Sense Of Self hasn’t said which heaters it uses.
The cold plunge is a channel you walk through
The walk-through cold plunge is a long, narrow, brick-lined channel of water with steps and a handrail, and Sense Of Self lists its cold plunge water at 50 to 54°F. The hot pools are magnesium-based and run at 100 to 104°F. The largest is built around the warehouse’s original concrete columns, with custom plinths in the water for games of chess. A second pool sits near the saunas, and there are two dark pools.
The hammam, Sense Of Self’s version of a steam room, is hand-tiled in honey jasper graphite and runs at about 115°F. A refillable Hammam Kit, A$35 (about $25), opens the Scrub Station for a self-led scrub.
The bathing floor is downstairs, with a hoist and a sauna-safe wheelchair
The bathhouse sits below street level, with an elevator from the ground floor. Sense Of Self lists a mobile hoist for the pools and an aquatic wheelchair that can go into the sauna and steam room, because the metal on a standard chair gets too hot. Its staff don’t operate the hoist, so guests who need it bring two companions of their own, and companions bathe free.
Sydney follows a Melbourne original from 2020
Berwick opened the first Sense Of Self in Collingwood, Melbourne, in 2020. Her company bio says three years living in Norway deepened her interest in communal bathing. “SOS Sydney has been four years in the making,” she said in the opening release. RITZ&GHOUGASSIAN designed the Surry Hills site with more than 90,000 hand-laid bricks set against the warehouse’s original windows, brickwork and concrete pillars. Treatment rooms sit upstairs, with massages and facials from A$190 (about $133).
More listening-room programming is due in early 2027
Hewitt’s piece is the only one in the room so far. Sense Of Self says more programming comes in early 2027 and will be announced on Instagram, and its release says audio journeys curated by artists will rotate through the year. Other operators are building music into the bathhouse too. In Brooklyn, Diplo headlined a sauna rave at Othership on October 23. In Berlin, the new CALMA Saunagarten sauna garden hosts DJ nights in the lounge beside its saunas.
