What is the best book for building a sauna yourself?

Start with Lassi A. Liikkanen’s “Finnish Sauna: Steam, Wood, Stone and How to Build Your Own” (2025), which pairs Finnish design principles with worked build examples. Glenn Auerbach’s “Sauna Build, From Start to Finnish” (4th edition, 2025) is the better companion for a North American backyard cabin with a wood stove.

Is Trumpkin’s Notes worth reading?

Yes, if you are planning a build and can tolerate the format. It is free, book-length, compiled from Finnish and European sources between 2017 and 2019, and blunt about American mistakes: low ceilings, low benches, weak ventilation. Read it alongside a structured guide — it is a reference to mine, not a manual to follow.

Is Mikkel Aaland’s Sweat still in print?

“Sweat” (1978) has been out of print for years; used copies and library loans are the realistic routes. Aaland has continued the project through his “Perfect Sweat” documentary work, but the original survey of global bathing cultures — sauna, hammam, temazcal, sento — remains the book to hunt down.

Do you earn commission on these book recommendations?

No. Home Sauna Tips carries no affiliate links on this page and sells nothing. We list publisher and author pages so you can find each book; buy wherever you like, or borrow from a library. Our editorial policy explains how the site funds itself and why recommendations never end at a cart.

The Sauna Bookshelf: Six Honest Reviews

A serious sauna bookshelf is short. Lassi A. Liikkanen’s The Secrets of Finnish Sauna Design (2021) explains why a sauna works. Glenn Auerbach’s Sauna Build, From Start to Finnish (4th edition, 2025) walks an American through building one. Mikkel Aaland’s Sweat (1978) sets the sauna among the world’s bathing traditions. Around those three sit Bernhard Hillila’s The Sauna Is, the publications of Suomen Saunaseura — the Finnish Sauna Society — and Trumpkin’s Notes, a free online document holding the sharpest technical arguments in English. Each earns its place for a different job, and each has one honest limitation, named plainly here. No link on this page earns us a cent.

Which sauna book should you read first?

Match the book to the job in front of you: Liikkanen if you are still designing, Auerbach if you are mid-build, Aaland if you are curious, Hillila if you are gift shopping, Trumpkin if you want the full argument for free.

Book	Read it for	The honest limitation
The Secrets of Finnish Sauna Design — Lassi A. Liikkanen (2021)	Heat, air, and geometry — why a sauna works	Finnish and European building context, not US framing or code
Finnish Sauna: Steam, Wood, Stone and How to Build Your Own — Liikkanen (2025)	The same rigor applied to an actual build	One volume cannot localize to every country’s codes
Sauna Build, From Start to Finnish — Glenn Auerbach (4th ed., 2025)	A North American backyard build, start to finish	Experience-first; the author also sells stoves
Sweat — Mikkel Aaland (1978)	Sauna among the world’s sweat-bathing traditions	Long out of print; history, not how-to
The Sauna Is — Bernhard Hillila (1997)	The warmth and humor of Finnish-American sauna	No technical content at all
Trumpkin’s Notes on Building a Sauna (free online, 2017–2019)	Deep arguments on ventilation, ceilings, and benches	Dense, unillustrated, unmaintained

The shortlist is built the way the rest of this site is: accuracy against Finnish practice first, usefulness to a North American builder second, and an author’s honesty about their own limits valued above both. These are also the writers this library cites most often — follow our sourcing long enough and you arrive at this shelf. If you buy one book, buy Secrets. If you buy two, add Auerbach. Everything else can be borrowed, gifted, or read free online.

What makes The Secrets of Finnish Sauna Design the standard?

No other book in English explains, with sources, why one hot room feels wonderful and another merely hot. Liikkanen holds a design doctorate from Aalto University and has published more than 200 articles at saunologia.fi since 2015. Secrets (Culicidae Press, 2021, 211 pages, now in a second edition with a 2024 Japanese translation) condenses roughly five years of research and interviews with Finnish sauna experts into a calm account of heat quality, air quality, and room geometry — including what makes löyly (the steam that answers water thrown on hot stones; see the glossary) soft rather than punishing. Who it is for: anyone still designing, before a single board is cut. What it does best: replaces folklore with measured argument. The honest limitation: its building context is Finnish and European, so translating bench heights and wall sections into stick framing and North American code falls to you — the work our build library exists to do.

His 2025 follow-up, Finnish Sauna: Steam, Wood, Stone and How to Build Your Own (Greenfinch), carries the same rigor into an actual build, with worked examples of an indoor electric sauna and an outdoor wood-fired cabin. If Secrets is the physics, this is the shop manual. Between the two, Liikkanen is the closest thing English readers have to a technical authority in print.

Is Sauna Build, From Start to Finnish worth buying?

Yes — if the sauna you are planning is a North American backyard build. Auerbach has run SaunaTimes for more than fifteen years, owns three saunas, sits on the boards of the Sauna Research Institute and Minneapolis’s 612 Sauna Society, and has hosted years of backyard sauna evenings. The book runs eleven chapters with about a hundred photos, blueprints, and a materials list; the fourth print edition arrived in 2025. What it does best: momentum and morale — lumberyard reality, cold-climate details, and the culture of the sauna evening, told by someone who plainly loves all of it. The honest limitation: it is experience-first American practice. Where habit collides with Finnish geometry — ceiling height, bench elevation, ventilation — check his numbers against Finnish sources before you cut. And Auerbach sells the wood stove he admires most, openly; read the heater passages with that in mind.

Why is Sweat still the classic?

Because in nearly fifty years nobody has replaced it. Aaland’s 1978 survey treats the Finnish sauna, the Russian bania, the Islamic hammam, the Japanese bath, the Mexican temazcal, and the Native American sweat lodge as branches of one old human habit. It is a travel book, a history, and an argument for respect among traditions; read it and the tribal question of sauna versus steam room softens into cousinhood. Who it is for: readers who want the wide view before the narrow one. The honest limitation: long out of print — expect a library hunt or a used-copy price — and it is a history, not a build manual. One closing detail: decades after Sweat, Aaland lent his endorsement to Liikkanen’s 2021 book. The shelf is small enough that its ends meet.

What kind of book is The Sauna Is?

A slim, affectionate one. Hillila, a Finnish-American academic, wrote the book you hand to whoever keeps asking why you are building a hot wooden room: part explanation, part gentle wordplay and verse, part immigrant memory of Saturday saunas. First published in 1997, it answers what the sauna is for rather than how to build it — the history that carried the habit across the Atlantic runs quietly underneath every page. Who it is for: gifts, guest rooms, the curious in-law. What it does best: tone; it is the rare sauna book that is actually funny, in the dry Finnish-American way. The honest limitation: not one specification in the whole book. As planning material it offers only encouragement — though on some build days encouragement is the material you are short of.

What does the Finnish Sauna Society publish?

Suomen Saunaseura — the Finnish Sauna Society, founded in 1937 and based in Helsinki — publishes the members’ magazine Sauna along with guidance that functions as the tradition’s reference standard, down to a quality specification for the vasta, the birch whisk: silver birch, 50 centimeters give or take five. The name splits along Lake Päijänne — vasta to the east, vihta to the west — a dialect line Kotus, the Institute for the Languages of Finland, has mapped. The society is thorough about the things it considers important. When this site writes “Finnish practice,” Saunaseura is often the receipt behind the sentence, and its work anchors much of our culture library. It also belongs to the living tradition UNESCO inscribed on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2020. The honest limitation: nearly all of it is in Finnish. The sauna.fi site carries some English pages; the magazine does not. For most readers it is less a book to buy than an authority to know exists — and to cite.

Is Trumpkin’s Notes actually a book?

Effectively, yes — a free one. Trumpkin’s Notes on Building a Sauna, hosted at localmile.org, is a book-length document compiled between 2017 and 2019 by a pseudonymous American builder (the name is borrowed from Narnia) working from Finnish, Swedish, and German sources and from direct exchanges with European builders, Liikkanen among them. Its case: most American saunas are built wrong — ceilings too low, benches too low, feet below the stones, ventilation that moves no air. Its author writes that English speakers are “good at building things that we think look like saunas”; the rest of the sentence stings more. Who it is for: builders who want every dimension argued from evidence, free. What it does best: forces you to defend your design choices before the lumber does. The honest limitation: it is a dense, unillustrated wall of text, essentially unmaintained since 2019, and opinionated enough that it should be read as argument, not gospel.

Why are there no affiliate links here?

Because a reading list is only useful if you can trust the order. Home Sauna Tips sells nothing — no heaters, no kits, no books — and no link on this page pays a commission; our editorial policy spells out the arrangement. Buy these anywhere you like, or borrow them; several are library staples across the upper Midwest, where Finnish-American shelves run deep. Mid-2000s sauna sites usually ran a reading list the other way — as a funnel for a house ebook. This shelf points outward instead. Read Liikkanen for the why, Auerbach for the how, Aaland for the world, Hillila for the heart, Saunaseura for the receipts, and Trumpkin for the argument. Then stop reading and go warm the stones.

Hyvät löylyt!