Tuli Lodge Turns a Seattle Sauna Pop-Up Into a Developer’s Waterfront Anchor

Tuli Lodge, the Seattle social sauna founded by Hannah Goldstein, opened its third pop-up location on May 29 at Vulcan Real Estate’s Lake Union Piers, a 60,000-square-foot waterfront property at 901 Fairview Avenue North in South Lake Union. The run is scheduled through August 31. Guests use wood-fired greenhouse-style saunas on the pier and plunge straight into Lake Union.

The move from seasonal pier activation to a developer’s flagship waterfront site is worth reading as more than a wellness story. It is a procurement signal for commercial real estate operators looking for ways to pull foot traffic to mixed-use developments before permanent tenants are fully in place.

What Tuli Lodge Is Running at Lake Union Piers

Tuli Lodge bills itself as “the social sauna garden” and pitches beer-garden energy adapted for fire and ice. For $27 an hour, guests rotate between wood-fired saunas, cold plunges, and lakefront seating. Conversation cards shipped with each session encourage strangers to talk. The concept started as pop-up sessions at Seattle parks in late 2023, inspired by a trip Goldstein took to Norway, where public saunas cost $10 to $30 and drew people of all ages.

The Pier 62 winter residency (November 2025 through April 2026) was Tuli’s proof of concept, run in partnership with Friends of Waterfront Park. A post-mortem Q&A published by the nonprofit noted that the sauna drew visitors to the pier on cold, rainy days when the space would otherwise have been empty. The Lake Union Piers summer run introduces a new format: greenhouse-style saunas positioned directly on the lake, replacing the trailer-mounted units used at Pier 62.

Goldstein told The Seattle Times in May 2026 that she communicates “every step in the process” that Tuli is a social experience, so guests arrive with the mindset that they are open to meeting people. That deliberate opt-in framing is what separates social sauna from a spa amenity.

Why a Developer Is Hosting a Sauna

Lake Union Piers is a five-acre waterfront redevelopment that Vulcan completed in 2024, designed by Miller Hull Partnership and built by Abbott Construction. The property, formerly Chandler’s Cove, comprises four buildings with 40,000 square feet of retail and dining space, 70 boat slips, terraced seating, and a transparent “lantern” restaurant pavilion. Tenants already signed include The Cove wine bar and Pinstripes.

Adding a seasonal sauna pop-up to that tenant mix is a specific real estate strategy: programming short-term experiential activations to draw foot traffic while longer-term leases are still being filled. Tuli’s audience skews young and social (the KING 5 evening coverage described the Pier 62 crowd as a community wellness gathering), which is exactly the demographic a waterfront dining and entertainment complex wants walking past its storefronts at 7 a.m. and again at 5 p.m.

The deal structure between Tuli and Vulcan has not been disclosed. It could be a license, a revenue share, or a below-market short-term lease. What matters for the industry is the template: a developer absorbs the real-estate cost, the operator brings a built-in audience and zero capital expenditure on the space, and both parties get foot traffic data they can use to negotiate permanent tenancy later.

Three Capital Models in One Week

Tuli’s Lake Union Piers opening lands in the same week SaunaNews covered two other approaches to scaling social sauna in North America.

Bathhouse raised $35 million from Imaginary Ventures to build permanent flagships in eight cities, with the Atlantic Avenue location opening in Brooklyn as the country’s largest event sauna. That is the capital-intensive, venture-backed path: big raises, big buildouts, branded destinations.

Portal Thermaculture is building a five-metro chain without outside investors, funding each new location from the cash flow of the last. That is the bootstrap path: slower, leaner, operator-owned.

Tuli is a third model. It trades permanence for close to zero real-estate cost by running short-term residencies on a developer’s land. The developer carries the buildout question. The operator proves the concept, builds a waitlist (Tuli had more than 1,000 names before Pier 62 opened, per The Seattle Times), and uses each pop-up as a proof point for the next location or a future permanent site.