In a dimly lit room in the shadow of the warehouse where De Valera’s gunmen once took a stand for Ireland, a woman from Greece starts beating me with leaves.
There’s a gentle rhythm to the whacking and while it’s not painful, it’s not as gentle as the caress of a summer breeze either. Between all the rustling and the whooshing, I can’t help feeling like a car being run through the wash cycle in my local petrol station.
“Don’t look so miserable,” Maria Stravodimou, the woman wielding the leaves, tells me. “Smile.”
I do as I’m told but she probably doesn’t notice because my face is so obscured by the two little trees she is “whisking” me with.
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Whisking is the term used for what is happening to me by the Hot Box Sauna people who have just opened their flagship, um, branch, on the Bolands Mills site in Dublin 4.
I’ve heard much talk about the popularity of saunas in general and Hot Boxes in particular in recent times – and the folk who have visited this operation’s multiple locations around the country have certainly raved about the experience.
But as I enter the building, I’m not remotely convinced it will float my boat.
Now, I like a fad as much as the next person and have splinters in me arse – as the saying goes – from jumping on bandwagons but saunas have always left me a bit cold.
The first time I tried one was in a weird South Korean resort hotel a stone’s throw from the demilitarised zone that separates that country from its less-than-friendly neighbour to the north. All that I recall about the experience was the wooden beams I sat on left the deepest red welts on the back of my thighs because they were so hot.
[ Nude saunas in Ireland: ‘I realise I will soon be naked among these strangers’Opens in new window ]
Then there was the sauna in the Austrian alps where I committed the mortal sin of entering the little room of heat wearing a pair of swimming shorts.
It was fine while I sat there sweating on my own like an eejit but over 10 minutes or so I was engulfed by a large group of indisputably naked and unaccountably cross Austrian men and women who kept staring at me and my shorts and tutting while they threw their eyes to the heavens.
I left when the tutting and the eye rolling grew too intense.
And then once, when in Finland visiting Santa, I found myself in a hotel room that came with a sauna attached. Delighted by the weirdness of it all, I turned the sauna on immediately and went for dinner and a wander, leaving the door to the little cubicle open.
When I got back hours later, the hotel room and the adjoining sauna had reached an equilibrium and my bed was hotter than 1,000 suns, making sleep impossible.
The gym I go to these days has an excellent sauna and I sit in it occasionally but I struggle to last more than 10 minutes in the heat and always leave it a sweaty, sorry mess, wondering what good it is doing me.
Mind you, there is no doubting that saunas have been good for the Hot Box people – Dan O’Connor, Luke Williams and Liam Irwin.
Having expanded rapidly since opening their first sauna in 2021, they’ve just spent €2 million on a 4,000sq ft development in Dublin 4 that they say sets a new benchmark for sauna culture in Ireland.
It is certainly better than any sauna I have ever been in and has all manner of features and rituals to keep a wandering mind occupied.
First there are the three saunas of varying sizes and temperatures, with the largest one able to accommodate up to 40 people at a sitting.
Then there are three plunge pools ranging from Baltic to balmy.
After my first session in the hottest of the saunas – the one that can fit 40 people, although there were just three other people there with me – I brave the coldest of those pools.
I’m not a cold water person. I don’t like sea swimming in Ireland, even at the height of summer, never mind in the dead of winter, and I can’t abide a cold shower so plunge pools fill me with dread.
Otis Ingle is one of the sauna masters on site and he encourages me to have a go. I figure I will plunge myself in and haul myself out faster than you can say “Oh Jaysus, it’s freezing” but no, that is not enough for Otis.
He wants me to walk from one end of the pool to the other after my initial plunge. I do as I am told after which I am rewarded with the warm pool. It feels heavenly.
From there, I return to the sauna, where Sean Sweeney is leading me and a select band of fellow sweaters in something called aufguss.
I find myself wondering: what is aufguss?
I find out when Sweeney starts throwing snowballs infused with essential oils on to the hot coals and then waving a towel over his head in order to waft the healing fragrances in our direction. It sounds completely bonkers but, surprisingly, it works and is very relaxing, if ever so slightly comical.
His movement and the enhanced breathwork he leads us through while we sit looking at him serve as a welcome distraction from all the heat, and I barely notice that I am melting. Every now and then, when he senses his charges are overheating, he offers us a bucket of ice-cold water which we can splash on our faces.
Never has something so simple been greeted with such sighs of relief.
The towel-waving session is followed by the pirtis, the actual name of the whisking and cleansing with the herbal branches. It is a Baltic tradition and the whisking is used to relax muscles, ease tension and create a sense of wellbeing.
I can’t say it worked but I liked the novelty of it all.
It is far from fancy plunge pools and ginormous saunas and Finnish herbal branch whisking and Bolands Mills the Hot Box was reared. The business was born on the river Boyne in 2021, starting out as a single self-built sauna. There are now 19 saunas across seven locations, with Hot Box employing 75 people.
The owners are betting big that they can copperfasten saunas’ place in Irish society with their latest venture and if my initial – and rather brilliant – experience is anything to go by, they are on to a winner.
It is not, however, cheap and a 75-minute session will set the sweaters of Ireland back €35 although the rituals, which take place at set times throughout the day, can be booked at no extra cost.
As we move from room to room and I ponder the prices, I ask Otis a question that I have wanted answered for years. What is the point of saunas? What good do they actually do?
He is as good an advocate as you could get and he rattles off all the health benefits including improved cardiovascular and mental health. There are also, he notes, social benefits and it offers people an outlet for engaging with each other that isn’t a pub.
As he talks I find myself warming to the notion and certainly feel a whole lot better after the experience than I did beforehand, meaning my place on the bandwagon is assured – at least until the next fad comes along.
