Custom saunas for Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban homes

Three climates, three specifications

Cape Town: wet, windy winters with driving rain off the Atlantic. Deep ventilated cavity, charred or thermo-treated cladding, stainless fixings, and drainage under the cabin because water will get everywhere.

The Highveld: dry, high, and hail in summer. Altitude matters — Johannesburg sits at about 1,750 m, so the heater is sized up for thinner air. Roofs and exposed cladding need to survive hail that dents cars.

KZN coast: humid subtropical, salt on the air, nothing dries on its own. Mechanical extract with a run-on timer on every enclosed room, marine-grade fixings, and timber that is thermo-treated rather than hoping.

The Cape winter is the best sales argument in Africa

In most of Africa a hot room has to justify itself against a hot climate. Here, from May to September, the Cape is genuinely cold and wet, and a sauna becomes the room the house revolves around.

It also means contrast therapy works without a chiller for half the year: municipal water in a Cape winter arrives cold enough that a shaded, insulated plunge sits in the low teens with no machine at all.

Sizing

0.85 kW per cubic metre of insulated cabin, plus roughly 0.42 kW per square metre of glazing. On the Highveld we add capacity for altitude; at the coast we do not.

Above 8 kW you want three-phase. South Africa supplies 230 V single phase and 400 V three phase at 50 Hz, and on most suburban properties the three-phase connection already exists or is straightforward.

Built in our factory, installed by our crew

Every custom cabin is drawn to your space, then built in our Istanbul factory — manufacturing saunas since 1987 — dry-assembled, checked, numbered and crated with its fixings and a spares allowance. It lands at Cape Town or Durban, our crew assembles it, and a registered electrician signs off the connection with a Certificate of Compliance.

Indicative bands run from 58 thousand rand for a two-person cabin to 190 thousand for six people with a charred exterior and structural glass; commercial cabins for 10–14 people run 210 to 440 thousand. For ready formats with fixed sizes, see our saunas for sale in Cape Town.

In short

• A different specification for the Cape, the Highveld and the KZN coast — the quote says which
• Johannesburg at 1,750 m gets an altitude correction on the heater
• Cape winter is cold enough that a plunge often needs no chiller from May to September
• 230 V single phase, 400 V three phase above 8 kW