Our Story
The easiest way we explain Balta is this: in Estonia, saunas often do the job a pub does here.
It's where you meet friends, catch up with family, go with people from work, or end up after a game. You might have a beer or two, but drinking isn't really the point. You're there to spend time together.
The idea
That's what we wanted Balta to be. Not a spa, and not somewhere you need to be particularly into wellness to enjoy. Just a social place with good saunas, cold water, a bar and enough time to actually settle in.
Come with friends, come with a group, or come on your own. Get hot, cool down, sit around for a bit, then go back in.
How we got here
We're Rachel and Billy, and we lived in Estonia for a couple of years.
When we first arrived, the whole social-sauna thing felt slightly strange to us. In the UK, if someone suggested meeting up and immediately getting changed into swimwear, you'd probably have a few questions.
But once we started doing it, we completely got it.
You're not sitting around a table in a dark pub, and you're not really looking at your phone. You get hot, go outside, cool down, have something to drink and end up talking for hours. And unlike a lot of ways of socialising, you generally leave feeling better than when you arrived.
When we moved back to the UK, we went looking for the same thing and couldn't really find it.
There are plenty of saunas here, but a lot are built around short sessions, spas, gyms or wellness. Some give you 45 minutes, which never made much sense to us - you've barely settled in by then.
So we built the sort of place we missed!
Balta isn't just for people who do yoga, or cold-water swimmers, or sports teams, or people who already know everything about sauna. It's somewhere to spend a few hours with people you like.
And seeing people start to use it that way has probably been the best bit.
It took a lot of help...
Balta took about six months to build, and we called in pretty much everyone we knew.
Parents, siblings and friends gave up weekends to frame walls, clad saunas, tile floors, wire lights, paint, carry things around and generally work out what we were doing as we went.
A lot of what you see here has somebody we know attached to it.
Tap a photo to take a closer look.
Building Balta Chill
Balta started as an empty farm workshop, and over about six months we turned it into what you see now.
We kept a record as we went - building the saunas, fitting out the bar, sorting the outside space and working through a fairly long list of jobs we'd never done before.
See the build diary
