Effe and Patricia Urquiola Built a Sauna That Thinks Like a Building

Most premium saunas sold to architects in 2026 are transparent. Floor-to-ceiling glass, visible benches, the thermal room as display case. Effe’s new Baluar collection, designed by Patricia Urquiola and presented at Salone del Mobile 2026, goes the other direction: enclosed, opaque, and deliberately heavy. The sauna as fortified room, not fishbowl.

The timing is deliberate. Grand View Research estimates the global sauna market at $954 million in 2025, projected to reach $1.56 billion by 2033, with the U.S. segment alone at $206 million. The Global Wellness Institute values wellness real estate at $584 billion and growing. At those numbers, the design language of the thermal room is no longer an afterthought. It is a specification decision worth real money. Effe is betting that the next wave favors enclosure over exposure.

Baluar is a modular sauna and hammam system that pairs two thermal programs inside a compact architectural volume clad in ribbed, heat-treated linden wood. A single module occupies roughly 52 square feet. A paired sauna-plus-hammam configuration doubles that to about 104 square feet. The modules can stand alone, sit side by side, or integrate into a larger wellness area. The design language draws on the bastion, a fortified medieval structure built to project outward while sheltering what is inside.

Key Facts

Product: Baluar, a modular sauna and hammam collection from Effe.

Designer: Patricia Urquiola / Studio Urquiola.

Debut: Salone del Mobile 2026, S.Project, Hall 22, Stand B11-B15 (April 21 to 26).

Format: Standalone sauna or hammam modules, or a paired sauna-plus-hammam system.

Reported dimensions: Single module approximately 7 feet 3 inches square by 7 feet 7 inches tall. Paired system approximately 14 feet 5 inches by 7 feet 3 inches by 7 feet 7 inches tall.

Materials: Heat-treated linden wood cladding (light and dark variants) with vertical ribbed surface. Hammam interiors in Conchiglia or Nocci mosaic.

The Shift Away from Glass

A lot of contemporary wellness design uses glass to make the thermal room a visible amenity. Glass saunas photograph well, signal investment to guests on a hotel tour, and let operators supervise occupancy. Baluar’s bastion concept points in a different direction: enclosure, surface, and controlled inwardness.

Effe is not reading the market wrong. Across our reporting in the first half of 2026, SaunaNews has tracked a consistent shift in how architects and operators are specifying thermal rooms. The all-glass front that dominated commercial sauna design from roughly 2019 through 2024 is giving way to enclosed, low-stimulus environments built around what designers increasingly describe as meditative experience rather than visual spectacle. We have seen it in this year’s Thermory Design Award entries, where winning projects favored timber enclosure and indirect light over transparency. We have seen it in operator buildouts from New York to Manchester, where new rooms are darker, quieter, and deliberately harder to see into. The direction is not universal, and glass still has a place in supervision-heavy public facilities. But the premium end of the market is moving toward rooms that feel like retreats, not display cases. Baluar lands squarely in that current.

What Effe Introduced at Salone del Mobile

Effe published the Baluar announcement on April 13, 2026, ahead of its Salone del Mobile presentation in Milan. The company described Baluar as a “new modular sauna and hammam system” that integrates both thermal programs within one modular structure. Effe’s own language calls Baluar a protected retreat: a compact volume that extends outward while sheltering an intimate interior.

The collaboration with Studio Urquiola is described as the start of a new partnership, not a one-off licensing deal. Wallpaper reported that Urquiola wanted to redefine the concept of wellness spaces by focusing on the relationship a person has with their own place of regeneration.

Materials carry much of the launch story. The exterior cladding is heat-treated linden wood (sometimes translated as lime wood in European trade press; linden, lime, and basswood are all common English names for the Tilia genus). Effe offers the cladding in light and dark variants with a vertical ribbed or grooved surface. Hammam interiors are offered in two mosaic finishes, Conchiglia and Nocci. Overhead lighting is integrated into the system.

Dimensional reporting from Il Bagno News puts a single sauna or hammam module at about 7 feet 3 inches square by 7 feet 7 inches tall and the combined sauna-plus-hammam system at about 14 feet 5 inches by 7 feet 3 inches by 7 feet 7 inches tall. Note: some trade outlets reported a single module as “220 sq cm,” which appears to be a conversion error rather than a publishable specification.

Why Urquiola Changes the Audience

Patricia Urquiola is not a licensing footnote. Studio Urquiola, founded in 2001 by Urquiola and Alberto Zontone, works across industrial product design, architecture, hospitality, retail, residential projects, exhibitions, and art direction. Urquiola has been Creative Director of Cassina since 2015 and has designed for Agape, B&B Italia, Flos, Kettal, Kvadrat, Louis Vuitton, Moroso, and Mutina. Her architecture and interiors work includes the Il Sereno Hotel on Lake Como, the Four Seasons Hotel Milan spa, and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Barcelona. Her work is held in the collections of MoMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Vitra Design Museum.

That portfolio matters for Effe’s positioning. The company’s typical buyer has historically been a spa planner or a wellness equipment specifier. Urquiola’s network runs through architecture studios, luxury residential developers, and hospitality design firms. If Baluar reaches those channels, it competes less against other sauna catalogs and more against the broader question of what a designed room should look like.

The Thermory Design Awards, which put sauna builders in front of an architecture-press audience for the first time this year, suggest that Effe is not alone in seeing this opportunity. But Effe is the first major sauna manufacturer to put a name of Urquiola’s caliber on a modular thermal-room system.

Where Baluar Fits in Effe’s Lineup

Baluar is not Effe’s first move toward design-led thermal rooms. The company already sells integrated sauna-plus-hammam systems, standalone saunas, hammams, steam generators, and sensory showers for residential and public locations. Effe’s own technical pages note that saunas and hammams have fundamentally different requirements: saunas use dry heat reaching 194 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit and rely mostly on wood construction, while hammams operate at lower temperatures with much higher humidity and require water-repellent materials throughout.

At Salone del Mobile 2025, Effe presented the Petra SH modular system, which combined sauna, hammam, and plunge-bath concepts. Wallpaper described Baluar as a continuation of that direction. Effe also showed its Cabanon outdoor sauna at the 2025 Elle Decor Alchemica exhibition, which Urquiola organized and art-directed. The Baluar collaboration formalizes a relationship that was already visible.

From Showroom to Job Site

The design argument is strong. The market timing is right. What follows is the part that determines whether Baluar ships as a product or remains a showroom concept.

In hospitality, multifamily, and high-end residential projects, the real footprint question is the total room package. A dry hot room and a wet steam room require different materials, different drainage conditions, different ventilation paths, and different service access. Add circulation space, a shower, a changing area, mechanical access, controls, and storage, and the total installed footprint expands well beyond the module dimensions. Baluar may fit inside 52 square feet. The room it lives in will not. The modular commercial sauna conversation in the U.S. has moved toward factory-built rooms precisely because the utility package is easier to standardize when the whole assembly ships as a unit. Whether Effe intends Baluar modules to be factory-built, panelized, or site-assembled has not been disclosed.

A sauna-plus-hammam system combines dry heat and wet steam in adjacent spaces, which means two different material regimes, two different ventilation requirements, two different drainage conditions, and two different inspection logics. In European manufacturing, where Effe builds, those requirements are governed by CE marking and local building codes. In North America, the inspection path for a combined sauna-plus-hammam module is less standardized, and how the local authority having jurisdiction treats a dual-function thermal room is a project-specific question. Effe lists IMQ, CE, SVGW, IEC-IECEE, and CSA among its general product certifications, but whether Baluar specifically carries UL, CSA, or ETL listing for North American installation has not been confirmed. The same gap extends to heater specifications, steam-generator details, electrical requirements, water and drainage conditions, and ventilation paths. Effe does list a North America contact in Brooklyn and says it supports projects from concept through maintenance. For Baluar to work as a spec product, that support infrastructure will need to include North American code compliance, installer training, and service logistics.

A useful comparison: KLAFS’s S1, another premium compact sauna aimed at the design-conscious market, publishes exact dimensions, UL certification status, electrical requirements, app-control details, and U.S. availability on its product page. The two products serve different segments (KLAFS S1 is a retractable single-function sauna; Baluar is a modular sauna-plus-hammam system), but the contrast in documentation is instructive. One launch leads with the details builders need. The other leads with the story designers want. For a trade increasingly focused on standards and certification, the gap between those two approaches is narrowing.

Baluar is the most architecturally ambitious sauna launch of 2026. It arrives at the right moment: the market is shifting toward enclosure, the designer brings an audience the sauna industry has never had direct access to, and the format pairs two thermal programs in a footprint that fits real projects. What separates a beautiful Salone presentation from an installed, operating room has always been the same thing: the documentation. Effe has built the object. The certification, the spec sheet, and the installer network will determine whether anyone outside Milan gets to sit in it.