Stepping Into Sanctuary at Saint New York's Private Sauna Studio

As one of the most stereotypical New York corners imaginable, West 29th Street is, to say the very least, chaotic. Steam rises from a street grate. Scaffolding stacks over scaffolding. Dry cleaner hangers clatter in a gust of wind as personal assistants, stylists, or interns half-jog down the block with arms full of garment bags like they’re carrying somebody’s whole reputation (they are). A DoorDasher weaves through it all with 20 rush-order cappuccinos. Then, a door you’d miss if you weren’t looking. Reeded glass. Minimal signage. You slip inside, and you find yourself enveloped in the sanctuary of Saint New York.

 

 

Here, everything drops. The light turns softer, golden. The air is still. Saint was founded by former WeWork colleagues Alex Feldman and Amanda Hensen around a shared observation: as cities grow denser, access to meaningful, intimate spaces quietly disappears.

The receptionist speaks, but her voice is low, like a cue to lower your own. Your shoulders loosen before you even notice it. The noise, the decisions, the push-pull of being alive, of surviving in this city, none of it crosses the threshold with you. Textured glass diffuses the outside world without making the place feel like a bunker. Inside, you’re enveloped by quiet and an almost monastic order.

She leads me down a corridor to my private suite. There are four identical private studios here at the inaugural location tucked into the heart of Chelsea at 242 West 29th Street, each designed for one person (or at most a plus-one) to have entirely to themselves. My suite’s door closes with a soft click, and I’m blissfully alone, Frank Ocean’s “White Ferrari” greeting me in a low, gentle wash of sound. In a city where personal space is the rarest luxury, I suddenly have an hour of it all to myself.

I exhale and take in the layout: a cedar-lined sauna glows to my left, a deep cold plunge tub sits to my right, and a rain shower nearby, towels within arm’s reach. A small shelf holds Frama body wash, shampoo, and conditioner. Nearby, a sleek glass bottle of Protéger Daily Serum catches the light, ready for that tender post-sauna moment when your skin feels newly porous to everything. Under the bench, soft slippers wait, neat as punctuation.

You can follow the ritual if you like. The card on the bench lays it out in clean type: 10–15 minutes sauna, rinse in the shower, 1–6 minutes cold plunge, rest… repeat. It was designed in collaboration with Lauren McCarthy, a New York–based meditation and yoga instructor who leads private sessions here and created a self-guided protocol just for this space. 

You begin in the sauna. The heat rises, gradual but certain, wrapping your limbs in something close to silence. You ease back onto the bench; its warmth seeps into your spine like a sun-heated stone. A bead of sweat gathers, slides down your sternum. Your heartbeat, still calibrated to city tempo, begins to recalibrate.

After about ten minutes, you’re glowing, thoroughly warmed. Time to take the plunge. You push open the sauna door and slip straight into the shower, rinsing off the sweat while the warm water brings you back to neutral. You shut it off, step out, and cross to the cold.

The plunge is a rectangle of crystal-clear water, so cold it raises goosebumps before you even touch it. You lower yourself until the water hits your shoulders. A sharp inhale, involuntary. For a few seconds there’s only sensation: skin sparking, lungs pushing back, every nerve turned up. And then you find your breath. Inhale. Exhale. The shock thins. Your mind goes wonderfully blank. In the silence, you hear only your own breathing and the soft lap of water against the edge. You stay a couple of minutes, which somehow feels like an eternity and an instant, and climb out shivering, bright-eyed, wrapping yourself in a towel that’s cloud-soft.

For the inaugural space, the team partnered with Chelsea-based architectural firm Bond, with a simple brief: design the ideal sanctuary. There is a harmony in how the sauna, plunge, and shower are arranged in a triangle around me, making the experience feel instinctive and flowing. The lighting, too, is its own kind of balm. Created in collaboration with lighting architects Emy After Dark, their guiding question was essentially: how do you make a space feel so calming people forget they’re in the middle of Manhattan? Their solution: “the lighting recedes as you move inward, soothing your nervous system into a state of relaxation.”

The soft overhead light in the sauna dims when I open the door, encouraging me to step out. The plunge tub is right there, enticing in its stillness. A slate floor leads toward the rain shower, convincing my cold-numbed feet to seek its warmth. Every choice Bond made—from the height of the bench to the gentle slope of the shower floor guiding water away—worked together to eliminate friction and, quite frankly, thinking.

 

Beyond the architecture, Saint’s entire identity hums at a lower frequency. The creative direction, led by GerardGerdin, extends the space’s ethos into graphic and sensory details. For Saint’s visual identity, GerardGerdin collaborated with Paris-based design studio Jersey to develop a restrained language. The logo itself greets you modestly at the entrance, each letter of “SAINT” spaced slightly apart, giving the word room to breathe. “It’s a gesture toward the fleeting, serendipitous pockets of solitude that reveal themselves as you move through the world,” designer Thibault Gerard explains.

Inside the suite, the signage and instructions are sparse, written in plain language with gentle verbs. The notes from Lauren McCarthy follow this ethos too: brief prompts rather than verbose lectures. “Wellness has become one of today’s most codified industries…we believe simple solitude and a moment of privacy is one of our time’s most overlooked benefits,” says Johan Gerdin of GerardGerdin, who helped develop the space.

My session comes to an end all too soon. Stepping out through those reeded glass doors, the afternoon light is sharper and the city rushes in. A siren wails somewhere down the block; my phone buzzes impatiently in my pocket. They both feel startlingly loud. But inside, I’m still quiet. For one clean hour, nothing and no one had asked anything of me.

On my way home, I recall something Feldman told me, a sentiment that captures the heart of Saint: “It’s an invitation to strip everything away, even your thoughts, so you can reconnect with the joy that’s already inside you. It’s spiritual in the simplest way. You drift off, and you drift inward.”

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Plan your visit and learn more about Saint’s offerings on their website.