Lee Keegan on Mayo sauna boom: 'I know a lot of lads use them daily'

John Needham was ahead of the curve when he opened his first commercial sauna nearly four years ago in the picturesque Old Head beach, outside Louisburgh.

He laughs now looking back and says “there was a lot of people looking at me like I had two heads.”

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John got his first taste for saunas nearly 18 years ago when he was playing rugby for the Westport Bulls rugby team. Ahead of big games, recovery involved wheelie bins full of ice and using the Westport Leisure Park centre sauna.

He explains the heat in the sauna “increases blood flow and gets more blood and oxygen to the muscles to recover quicker.”

Upon moving to Dublin, he found himself “sitting there at home in the evenings, desperate to go for a sauna, just to relax or something and there was nothing really close to where I was living so I built one in my garden. It is a getaway and somewhere I can completely reset.”

Fast forward to now and he has a second commercial sauna in the capital and another business building saunas.
“Saunas have ballooned since then and the quality has risen,” he says.

Social event
Both his Old Head sauna and Sandymount saunas proved a hit and have become a lot of people’s social event of the week.
“We’ve got groups of people that go into the Old Head there on a Saturday or Sunday morning, and they’re come the same time every week with the same people just to meet them up for the chat and have kind of made their own community in the sauna.”

His mobile sauna in Sandymount attracted the attention of the New Zealand All Black’s rugby team.
The All Black’s strength and conditioning coach, Nicholas Gill “reached out and wanted ice baths and wanted a sauna at their hotel while they were staying here, playing the Irish team.”

It “snowballed from there” and the Australian, Argentina and Irish rugby teams followed suit in hiring out the saunas.
That created extra demand and it allowed Needham and fellow Louisburgh man Matthew Dempsey and Kilmeena’s Ciaran O’Malley to build the saunas from scratch and set up The Sauna Craft & Co.

Before that building saunas from scratch had been a side business.

Such is the demand that The Sauna Craft & Co is in the process of moving to a bigger yard in Dublin when the Louisburgh native spoke to The Mayo News. This is in addition to a yard he uses in Louisburgh.

“We’re expanding already as we’ve kind of run out of space where we are, so we’ve had to go bigger.”

They have at least twenty people inquiring about a sauna each week. They offer both wood-burning saunas and electric powered ones.

A barrel sauna built by The Sauna Craft & Co

It helps that Needham is a carpenter by trade and Ciaran is an electrician. In fact, he says having the carpentry skills were “key.”

“If I didn’t have the skills that I have, I wouldn’t have been able to do it at all and we would be here now.”

He says that most of the people ordering saunas for their homes do so for the relaxation it provides, with about 20 percent of the demand coming from athletes who use it for recovery.

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‘Absolute dream’
Sport stars like Robbie Henshaw and Lee Keegan are among the people they have built saunas for.

Lee says it’s “absolute dream” to have one overlooking a lake at his home. He jokes he’s as likely to find his family in the sauna as in the house.

With a busy family life and work schedule, “it’s just nice to declutter and decompress after a long day, and I have an ice bath as well so I can have the full works. So it’s nice to just shut down from a long or stressful day and kick back for 25 minutes.

“Everyone’s so busy all the time. It’s a real God sent for me in the house here, and even not to travel, just to have it here at the back of my house. You just pop out, you sit in there for half an hour, and you come back in and it feels like your day has just kind of evaporated. So I found a huge benefit for that alone.”

As well as the mental reset, the sauna helps with recovery between matches and training. This is especially important for players as they get older, says Keegan.

“It’s definitely a big thing for inter-county footballers. I see it across the country and even at the highest club levels. I know a lot of lads use them daily. Our club lads use them all the time. I see the benefits - they’re happier, they’re much calmer coming to training. They’re much more relaxed and then they’re much more focused. I think as a result of it.”

As for what’s next for The Sauna Craft & Co, they are expanding operations in their new bigger yard in Dublin and Needham has applied for the tender for a new sauna at Lough Lannagh in Castlebar.