Hot, then cold,
then nothing at all.

I did not come to this from the sauna industry. I came to it from about twenty years of trying to fix myself.

I grew up in San Francisco with a familial history of obesity and a relationship with food that was about numbing, not nourishment. My grandfather sat on a couch at 380 pounds, diabetic, barely moving, and even as a kid I could see where that road went. At thirteen I went to fat camp. Lost thirty-five pounds in a month, ran my first mile in 6:30, felt like the man on campus. Over the next four years I put back a hundred and thirty-five, because nobody had touched the reason I was eating in the first place.

The turn came at seventeen. Three weeks before I left for university in Boston my father had three strokes, and the doctors told him he would not survive them. He was my rock, an eccentric antique dealer who raised me on his own in a loft in San Francisco with a view of the skyline, chandeliers and giraffe heads on the wall. I was about to move to the other side of the country, and the only thing I was certain of was that I now had to look after myself, because nobody else was going to. That is where it actually started.

What followed was fifteen years of going properly deep. Plant-based first. Then yoga, five hundred hours of it. New Mexico, teaching, kettlebells. Functional medicine after that, reading blood panels and hormone assays for clients. I got from 260 pounds to 150. More usefully, I worked out why the first attempt had failed.

Here is the conclusion, and it is the reason Norge exists. Almost nobody is uneducated any more. People know what to eat and how to train. What they cannot do is sustain it. Every protocol I ever ran, on myself or on a client, lived or died on how much friction sat between the person and the thing. A sauna is no different. Buy the wrong one and it takes an hour to stabilise, drops ten degrees the moment the door opens, and inside six months it is an expensive shed. That is not a discipline problem. It is a design problem, and design problems can be solved.

So in 2025 I started Norge, in Adelaide, with the crew at Milk Bar and Bureau Booths. Scandinavian standard, Australian reality. Our own people do the install, so nobody gets a flat pack dropped on the nature strip. Every unit carries a five year warranty, and it did from the first month, before a single customer asked us for one. And we build for the Tuesday in July when it is cold and you cannot be bothered, because that is the session that decides whether any of it was worth the money.